If you haven't heard a word about this week's monumental "once-in-a-generation" global conference on sustainability you're not alone. Rio +20 marks the 20th anniversary of the original 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil where for the first time, the world's most powerful and influential leaders met with thousands of activists and participants from public, private and non-profit groups to begin collaborating on solving the planet's most urgent environmental issues.
It was heralded as a game changer with regard to pollution, overpopulation, global warming, species extinction, deforestation and more. But unfortunately our collective global will to solve these problems has since waned and little action resulted from the 1992 summit or the many other successive meetings.
On the bright side, over 100 presidents and prime ministers will be represented at this year's summit today through Friday, however President Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel, and dozens of the other major global leaders have snubbed the talks. Environmental activists are looking for ways to help salvage things.
Vermonter, Bill McKibbon ("probably the nation's leading environmentalist" per the Boston Globe) has organized a Twitterstorm as a way for people all around the world to lend their support to the conference. Bill's signature issue is climate change and pollution from fossil fuels so he's asking everyone to tweet this message today: "Want to stop climate change? Stop funding it. Pls RT! http://endfossilfuelsubsidies.org/twitterstorm/ #EndFossilFuelSubsidies"
Logged in to your Twitter account now? How about lending Bill a hand? The world record for tweets in a day was set earlier this year, with birthday greetings for Justin Bieber. It would be a sad state of affairs if we couldn't beat that.
