As Winter threatens its us all with its final three weeks, Spring looms and promises that warm, fuzzy feeling, the snow thaw, and (most eagerly anticipated around the Peeled Snacks World Headquarters), this year's crop.  But talk lately by qualified scientists and unqualified politicians alike focuses on global warming and all its dangers and treacheries.  I ask you, though- is Global Warming ALL bad?

Well, yes.  But some things might confuse the issue a bit...

Take for example the once mythical but now nearly-real "NorthWest Passage", the shipping route North of Canada.  For 500 years now, if you wanted to get something from Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific, you really had to go around South America, which burns a LOT of fuel and/or time.  For a century we've been treated to the Panama canal, but today's super-tankers are too wide for that relic.

Well, thanks to modern science and 200 years of rampant air pollution, the Artic ice-cap is melting, making available, perhaps in the next couple of years, a passage long sought for by explorers from Magellan to Drake, but always a myth like El Dorado or the Yeti.  That could save OODLES of money for companies that can now cris-cross across an enormous water-way that's just waiting to be exploited.

With the cost of oil going up, up, and away, all sorts of companies stand to benefit from this new oceanic super-highway, Peeled Snacks included- now we can get Philipine rambutans delivered to a port in Hudson Bay, cutting heaps of cross-country shipping, saving who knows how much money per rambutan order.  SO much money, in fact, that I've been considering buying a bunch of styrofoam and stomping on it just to usher things along.

Let me underline this- Global Warming might be GOOD for economies, particularly free-trade based economies that like to buy their apples in China.  There may be corporate forces out there that try to interfere with green movements with an eye to their bottom line, and said corporations might act in subtle ways to accomplish these goals.  This is NOT PARANOIA.  This is BUSINESS.

And this is frighteningly short-sighted.  But more on that later.  I've got to go by me some styrofoam....