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Judging from some recent polls in the US and UK, there’s awareness of the environmental issue, but very little consumer action.

According to Yankelovich,  37% of American consumers feel "highly concerned" about environmental issues, but only 25% feel highly knowledgeable about. And only 22% feel they can make a difference when it comes to the environment.

Some of the first-stage heavy lifting has been done, but there is little to push the individual to action- few incentives and rewards for the hard work and effort involved.

The economic trade-offs don’t make a great deal of sense; no individual is really being penalized for excess or excessive energy, gas or packaging consumption.

The thrifty might save a little, but for most people, it isn’t worth it.

Despite what many of them say, do energy companies really want to penalize people for using more?

Does the government want to tax energy and gas?

There’s little incentive for anyone to take action with the exception of big business, where being "Green" has the scale to impact the bottom line.

So for the moment, expect being "Green” to remain the calling card of the educated young and the wealthy. They recognize that it has social currency.

The biggest issue is communication, people need to not just be aware, but to understand and this requires some imagination to break-through.

French game developer, Midori are attempting to do that with its global warming game and photographer Chris Jordan have already created quite a stir with his images.

“Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books.”

However, efforts are needed that are bigger than this and simply gathering a group of old musicians to perform in concerts in different corners of the world, isn’t going to cut it.

How about the most creative minds in the ad business donating their time to create something incredible?

You can, just visit Current TV and enter the Climate Change ad contest

Posted by Ed Cotton