Welcome to Issue #4 of the Max Gladwell newsletter, a bi-weekly overview of stories that affect and shape our quality of life.

In the last issue, our lead story was the defeat of the climate-change bill in the U.S. Senate. Two weeks later, one of the pioneers on global warming, Britain's Lord Stern, doubles his estimates on the costs of combating climate change, and the State of California passes new emissions-reductions legislation. Now it's looking as though the North Pole ice cap will melt completely be summer's end. Scientists give it 50/50 odds.

In the last issue, we also linked a story about the White House acknowledging human-induced global warming. Since then, the EPA sent its recommendation to the White House, which refused to open the email citing executive privilege.

What skeptics of climate change fail to realize is that reducing CO2 by putting a price on it will reduce a long list of even more harmful toxins and compromising effects. It will reduce our dependence on a finite resource that is becoming more scarce, thereby preserving through conservation, and make us less dependent on hostile and increasingly more wealthy and powerful foreign governments. In many ways, global warming is the least of the reasons we should reduce CO2 emissions and our dependence on fossil fuels. Do it for your personal health and the security of our country. Do it for the next generation and the one after that. Factor all of the costs of this addiction, and clean renewables, as well as nuclear, all of sudden will make a ton of sense and plenty more dollars for those investors, innovators, and entrepreneurs who back them.

Have a great Fourth of July celebration. Let's start thinking about declaring our independence from fossil fuels and foreign governments.

All the best,

Max Gladwell