The world of credit might not be dead just yet but it has certainly become less appealing.

Credit card companies like Citibank, Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and American Express Co. have recently sent letters to their customers, notifying them that interest rates are going up, in some cases to 30% if a single payment is missed. (LA Times).

It’s one way for banks to try and deal with their insolvency issues given the current economic conditions.

The recession might be a great time to redesign your purchasing habits and buy only what you can with cold hard cash. Old school discipline tells you that if you don’t have the cash in the bank, that you don’t have the money to spend. It is perhaps a difficult notion to accept given a culture that swears by credit. But looking at it positively, changing your behavior now might mean that when paychecks fatten up again post the recession, you might just find that you have developed a propensity to save your new earnings rather than to spend them!

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Environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Council, are staging a coal plant-by-coal plant attack on any proposed new coal-fired power plant in the United States. Using bureaucratic or legal means, such as zoning or water use, environmental groups have stopped 65 coal plants in the last three years. The LA Times explains its really a war about climate change, “Coal puts twice as much temperature-raising carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as natural gas, second to coal as the most common power plant fuel.”

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