For the past few weeks, the SF Bay Area news venues have erupted in talk about proposed aerial spraying of a pheromone product over large swaths of our urban communities in order to combat the spread of an agricultural pest, the light brown apple moth. I had never heard of this insect or known anything about previous sprayings in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties until after reading up on the subject. Now it’s time to educate my internet brethren about the facts surrounding this issue and resultant controversy.

After 8 years of Bush’s destruction of America and Congress’s complicity in ripping up the Constitution, what keeps me up at night is not whether a Democrat knows how to compromise. After reading up on the campaign contributions and policy positions of our leading Democratic contenders, I’m losing sleep over the fact that Barack Obama has received the 2nd highest level of contributions from the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, his healthcare coverage plan is receiving pretty low marks, and he has a somewhat mixed history with energy industries. The two biggest fears I have for the world my future child will reside in are 1) that we will have unstoppable global warming, and 2) that we will not have access to decent health care. And on these two fronts, Barack Obama is, so far, not really fighting that hard for us.

Today Al Gore jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize for his tireless work to bring the issue of global warming to skeptical audiences and provide much-needed leadership. Greenpeace has been campaigning to save the polar bear, which is highly threatened by the loss of artic ice caused by global warming:

According to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a study conducted on behalf of the Arctic Council, polar bears “are unlikely to survive as a species if there is an almost complete loss of summer sea-ice cover, which is projected to occur before the end of this century by some climate models.”