So, 7/7/07 has arrived and, as part of it, the 24-hour “Concerts for a Climate in Crisis” called Live Earth has started. It was kicked off in Australia and will proceed on to Shanghai, Hamburg, London, Johannesburg, New York, Tokyo, and finally Rio De Janeiro.

Interestingly, they just added a show in Washington, D.C. Anyone who was following this concert might know that Gore was alwas hoping to have a venue in D.C., but was blocked at every turn by Republicans in Congress who wouldn’t let him do it.  It looks like Gore got the last laugh and pulled off a bit of a coup here, surprising people with this last minute announcement.

For those looking to watch or listen to parts of the concert, you can find the programming schedule online.   It looks like the main program in the U.S. will be on NBC from 8 pm - 11 pm EST and MSNBC will have programming on pretty much all day from 8 am - 4 pm.   It also looks like XM Radio will be broadcasting from many of the venues.  Their “main” station will be channel 40, but they will also provide complete coverage from each venue on channels 41-46.

One item that seems to have come in vogue recently is to criticize the concerts as being harmful to the environment because of all of the artists and people traveling to the venues.

It seems to me that this is such a strawman article.  No sane environmentalist is telling people that they can’t travel, they can’t hold concerts, they can’t go to entertainment events, etc.  All they are suggesting is that when you do any of these things you do them in environmentally conscious ways.

To that end, Gore’s team worked with many environmental groups to invent a brand new set of guidelines for hosting green events.   If other people would simply follow these rules that Gore’s team helped create (and of course are following themselves), that is all people are asking.

I really get sick of the folks taking potshots at folks like this who are trying to make a difference and are probably doing much, much more than your average person to try to be green.  But, because they aren’t perfect or because they aren’t living a zero-energy lifestyle people feel like they can criticize them,

I think that four-time Grammy nominee Angelique Kidjo probably had the best response to this whole attitude saying, “Criticism is easy. … What the hell are you doing to change the world? Get your butt out there. Do something.”

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what sort of coverage the event gets over the  next 24 hours.  I have heard that they expect to have an audience as large as 2 billion people.  That’s a whole lot of people!