I’ve seen the Amazon pricing via our website’s affiliate links below. Someone is making a huge profit.

Here are the facts — based on monthly research affirmed by the Earth Systems Research Laboratory (ESRL), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, we should all prefer a carbon dioxide (CO2) ppm (parts per million) of 350! Presently, we are at 385 ppm and RISING…

“The Earth is not going anywhere, but we are.”

The last oil spike was blamed on speculators, e.g., investment banks, which somehow hoarded such a large percentage of the world’s oil production that they affected the oil market’s fundamentals.

While supply and demand are too close for comfort in this inelastic commodity, the real issue might be that the world no longer operates its financial systems on a gold standard (obviously!) but rather an oil standard.

That is why so many countries are discussing other currencies for use to denominate oil pricing – because the highly expanded dollar supply is eroding the dollar’s value and driving up the price of oil.

The frightening thing about changing to another currency to price oil is that the “dollar” as become one of the United States’ largest exports, with few manufactured goods to sell overseas. Actual worldwide demand for the dollar would COLLAPSE if oil was price with an alternate currency.

Then you see (our U.S.) price for oil, and other imported goods (i.e., almost everything except for McDonald’s hamburgers and some domestic services) spike in terms of dollars. On the other hand, European and Asian customers might start paying less for oil.

Doom and gloom? Or reality?

It remains to be seen…

There is still time to join and compete in this contest. Our latest (as of this posting) top contestants joined weeks after the middle-runners.

The winner of this contest just might be someone who joins a week before the end of the contest, but I like to think that slow and steady wins the race.

Best bet is to periodically re-post one of the many links offered on the contest sign up page and rotate them on your Twitter and Facebook accounts, adding a new link every so often, and then re-starting from the top of the list again after a couple of weeks.

Also, keep checking for new links.

You can find your links by clicking “join contest page” and entering your Twitter or Facebook name in the “get links” box near the bottom of the page at the following link:

http://www.marylandgreenpower.com/greenpower/greencontest/

Give the page some time to display your links, since the site gets very busy.

Finally, the easiest way to get points in the contest is to Tweet:

http://www.marylandgreenpower.com/greenpower/greencontest/twittername/

where “twittername” is your own Twitter account name.

Our software will find your Tweets and Blog Posts and give you points for every unique visitor we get from those links.

The top three contestants will have their Twitter accounts mentioned and re-mentioned, gaining you more followers.

Hope this helps!