Green Daily

First, lets start with the bad news; the Kyoto Protocol runs out at the end of 2012. Now, even worse news -- the current financial meltdown is making climate-change pretty low on the political priority list.

A summit scheduled in Copenhagen by the end of 2009 is supposed to finalize what will succeed the Kyoto Protocol, and there are concerns that getting the world community to agree on something in this economic period is not going to be fun.

The German Foreign Minister said in a recent conference on climate and energy, that the already super-difficult situation of fixing global warming has just gotten a heck of a lot harder.

While a lot of us hear about the dangers of global warming, the dire predictions still sound a bit abstract. Many right now see this as hitting polar bears much more than our daily lives. When a bank collapses, however, it's a pretty immediate big deal to anyone involved in the economy.

In the coming months, the media will also be placing much more emphasis on the economy -- pictures of freaked-out stock traders are way more dramatic than a bunch of suits meeting in Copenhagen to discuss a follow-up to an agreement that the US never signed.

Then again, who knows? Maybe the world could get calmer and figure out how to make climate-change a market-saving endeavor and greenify our way to a stronger economy.