One of the issues I've been exploring through this whole political process is the environment. On the one hand, it's a very scary issue, because there are some very serious consequences we face if we don't make some large and immediate changes, but there are also some great opportunities here.

There's no denying that fact that our economy as it exists today is basically dying. But this new green movement could mean a rebirth. One thing that will happen as part of this greening process is that it will create a LOT of jobs and a lot of investment opportunities that can totally revitalize our economy while at the same time we'll be reducing our dependence on foreign oil and keeping more of our money right here in the US. This sounds like such a win-win-win situation, I can't imagine why either political party wouldn't want to get on board with this immediately.

One plan that I think is fabulous is the T. Boone Pickens Plan. His idea is that we take all the cross-country trucks and immediately convert them to clean burning natural gas. These trucks use a big portion of gas that we buy from other countries - mostly using borrowed money from China and other countries that aren't too friendly to us. If we eliminate this dependence, then we can use our own US-produced gas to power our own cars until the technology can catch up to build new hybrid and electric cars and eliminate the combusion engine once and for all. To learn more about his plan - go here.

That's only a small portion of the plan. We also need wind farms, geothermal plants, and solar panels on every building. In order to accomplish this, we need to revamp our entire energy grid to be able to handle the extra load. This will create a boatload of new jobs - jobs that can't ever be outsourced to China or India. Can you see where this could be a huge boost to our economy? And these are jobs all over the board, at every income level. We need scientists, designers, manufacturers, installers.

If you want to learn more about this, go to Amazon.com and pick up The Green Collar Economy. It's a great book and very interesting.

There's another article I read recently about a new innovator and inventor who has come up with a new type of electric car. It's an inexpensive smart-car type model with a removable/rechargeable battery. If you're just driving to work, you charge it up at home and then park it at a charging station at work. If you're going on a long trip, you stop at a battery replacement station, drive over a replacement bay and your battery is popped out and replaced with a fully charged one in like 5 minutes. The whole country of Israel is converting to these cars next year and several European countries are trying them out as well. They want to get them into the US, but it would be nearly impossible with all our laws, regulations and the lobbyists who are protecting the gas and oil companies. It's kind of sad that these huge companies are protecting themselves at the expense of the American people. We could have had electric car technology decades ago if it weren't for these roadblocks.

Things like this give me hope. There are solutions out there and smart people like Al Gore and T. Boone Pickens who are going to help us connect with them. And we all need to get on board with them as well. This is good stuff and I think it's going to be really good for America too.