There was a good article in the Washington Post yesterday about Global Warming.  I fear that while Al Gore's work did a great job to raise awareness and education on the issue, eventually the issue will fade to the background as the national debate moves on to other things (like what we should do about the housing crash).

The article was a good reminder that the problem of global warming has been with us for at least two decades, and it still isn't solved.  It hasn't gone away, and it isn't going to just vanish by itself.  Instead, it's going to continue getting worse until we have no choice but to confront it, but by then it might be too late (or the cost may be insanely high to deal with it).

I wish we knew how to better solve problems like this.  Individual retirement planning seems like a similar example: easy to put off and keep putting off as there's no persistent thing bugging you about it on a daily basis.  There's always something else more important that day.  But wait too long, and the cost of dealing with the problem is insanely high (and maybe even out of reach).

At work, we sometimes call these types of problems "important but not urgent", and the difficult part is that it's easy to work on things that are urgent but not as important as longer-term things.  Easy to focus on answering the e-mail that just came in, hard to ignore that mail and work on the longer-term projects that are more important.