The Global Cool kids

What’s Global Cool, you ask? It happens to be the latest, splashiest, star-studded global do-gooder campaign. It aims to persuade one billion people around the world to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions every year for the next ten years in order to combat global warming.

And this really is a campaign for the kids. They’ve enlisted some of the “biggest names in entertainment,” like Sienna Miller, Orlando Bloom, and the Scissor Sisters. (Note: If that last sentence confuses you at all, I’m afraid Global Cool might not resonate.) Global Cool is taking the Live 8 route, planning five simultaneous concerts this summer to raise awareness and inspire the kids to really, you know, care about global warming, especially since Live 8 did so much to eradicate global poverty in 2005.

They do have plenty of useful (albeit recycled) suggestions on how to reduce one’s personal carbon dioxide emissions: Turn out the lights, turn the heating down, put the computer on standby (good one)—all things that require little effort, but can have a huge impact when done by millions.

The campaign is a bit corny, but Global Cool is trying hard to make sure that they’re taken seriously as an environmental player, and not just seen as padding for some starlet’s resume. They’re aware that a skeptical public might just tune them out, and they recognize how “tiresome a bunch of rock stars and movie actors can appear when trying to tell the public how to run their lives.” And so far, it doesn’t appear the campaign has gotten quite the media splash it was designed to receive. I have to say, as much as Global Cool hopes to be a influence leader on global warming, I’m just not sure any strategy involving, as theirs does, the use of the term “ecosexual” is one that is going to get a lot of traction.