George Marshall wrote the following on Thursday about the Live Earth concerts:

Live Earth will undoubtedly create a buzz and interest around climate change. But I do not believe it will produce significant change because it fundamentally misunderstands the challenge. The reason we are not doing enough about climate change is not because we don't know about it, or that it is not hip, or that we don't care. The problem is that we are locked into patterns of collective denial and have adopted a wide range of strategies to avoid accepting personal responsibility. 

While China agreed to broadcast the concerts, check out this disquieting story:

China rejects binding target to cut greenhouse gas emissions

David Adam, environment correspondent
Friday July 6, 2007
The Guardian
China will not agree any form of binding target to reduce its soaring greenhouse gas emissions as part of a new international deal on climate change, a senior official confirmed yesterday.

Lu Xuedu, deputy director of the Chinese government's office of global environmental affairs, said it "was not the time" for China to consider binding commitments, and he criticised developed countries for playing what he called the "games of children" over global warming.But Mr Xuedu said China had not ruled out binding targets in future. "For the time being we don't have that capability to make those commitments. We hope we will have that capability very soon but it depends on the development process," he said in evidence to the UK joint committee on climate change. "When we can take such binding commitments will depend on our capability, our economical development level."

China does have about 700 million of its citizens living in poverty, but it is considered to have passed the United States as the world's biggest total emitter of GHGs (the U.S. still leads China and virtually all other nations on a per-capita basis). Writing earlier this year in the Guardian, columnist and author George Monbiot said the developed world must help China decarbonize its economy and persuade the U.S. to "do what it did in 1941, and turn the economy around on a dime.

"But above all we need to show that we remain serious about fighting climate change, by setting the targets the science demands."

If China and the U.S. don't take the problem seriously, then this planet -- and everyone on it -- faces a major problem, if not a catastrophe.