Al Gore’s political intuition has proven to be right. The message that Live Earth conveyed last weekend was undoubtedly more political than the those sent out by Live AID and Live Eight.Events concerning the environment which generate challenges and opportunities for policy makers and companies can now be seen everywhere.

I recently attended a conference dedicated to climate change in Prague, where a group of 40 young leaders from Asia and Europe met and focused on a problem solving setting for environmental challenges.

The sensation is similar. In Wembley as well as Prague, something special is going on about climate change. It is not just a fashionable issue anymore. The feeling is that for the first time in decades, we have the opportunity to change or even to save the world. Not only that, for the first time we probably have the possibility to give a better, more convincing name to globalization. A more concrete name to a set of problems that once were too abstract for the public opinion to understand.

Climate change is, after all, globalization. And globalization is, now, climate change.

The IPCC forecasts may still justify some ground for doubts and yet the argument is a very powerful one.

For the first time we have a problem that – in a very compelling way - leaves no alternative but to work out some global solutions. For the first time we are dealing with a problem that impacts not only each country but also neighbouring countries, and it is becoming as clear as the air through which green house gases travel.

Climate change is also a global, radical moral and intellectual challenge. Here we have one strong reason for reminding us that we are, and we have always been part of a much larger constituency. A constituency that goes beyond our individual domain, both in space (both the impacts we create and are subject to take place beyond our personal reach) and in time (what we do today will affect the future of future generations and likewise we must handle problems that have been initiated and made cumulatively worse by the generations that have preceded ours).

And it is also the first time that globalization has an immediate impact not just on our economies (which still refer to a rather abstract concept) but also our day to day lives, our most immediate concerns, such as the weather. The popularity of weather forecasts demonstrates how effective broadcast can be for raising public awareness about climate change.

And yet climate change is also – because of its vast popularity – the most evident case of the failure of the mainstream, traditional instruments we try to use to read and govern complex questions. Kyoto appears to nothing more than a timid step forward caught up in the intrinsic, structural limits of UN style, Nation States centred multi lateral agreements. Unfortunately, these structural challenges resurface each time we tackle global-scale issues.

And for all these reasons, the environmental issues can become the first, real opportunity to develop and test an international political arena, truly international citizen (or consumer) led initiatives: this is probably the intuition upon which the idea of the Live Earth was developed.

Vision’s project on “energy and democracy” will continue to work on this, as it will be providing some concrete ideas upon which to develop the political agenda of an international group made of think tanks, companies and institutions.

What are the concrete alternatives to Kyoto? What can be done to get citizens involved in addressing such global challenges? What can other actors (such as local institutions and communities, individual consumers, corporations) do in the near future?

These are some of the questions to Vision’s project and position paper in progress are focusing on to provide effective solutions.

* Francesco Grillo is the President and cofounder of Vision. Together with Vision he has lead managed number of projects on the impact of the Internet on Society. He is author of Il Ritorno della Rete, 2001, ed. Fazi, on the impact of ICT on health care systems, La Macchina che cambiò il Mondo, 2002, ed. Fazi, on the impact of ICT on the car and the transportation system, and Il Sonno della Ragione, 2003, ed. Marsilioon the crisis of rationality.He is currently working at a PhD research at The London School of Economics.