I picked this up on the Bloomberg wire this morning:

“Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, Jr., co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, urged the world to fight on against global warming at the conclusion of UN climate talks instead of focusing on celebrity news like the legal woes of O.J. Simpson and Paris Hilton’s latest shopping escapade.

“Gore told a packed auditorium of UN envoys today in Poznan, Poland, that a new U.S. administration under Barack Obama, as well as efforts by China, South Africa and developing nations to cut carbon output, are reasons for optimism that a deal to slow CO2 emissions can be reached at talks in Copenhagen next year.

Does it really take a Nobel Peace Prize Winner to educate the global media on how to prioritize their news coverage — hmmm, Paris Hilton at a club or melting ice bergs on top of our planet? I wonder why journalism is viewed so cynically by this generation of news avoiders.

Darren Shuster

While people are debating the rise (or even the existence) of the new Green Collar demographic in America, Consumer Reports came down on the side of — not really sure.

“There is no official ‘green-collar’ worker definition just as there isn’t for other commonly cited terms, such as white collar and ‘blue collar,” says Bureau of Labor Statistics spokesman Gary Steinberg. “One sees green collar and green jobs increasingly used in public discourse, but because of the criteria limitations discussed above, we cannot at this time make any official assessments about the extent of such employment or its impacts on the overall economy.”

http://blogs.consumerreports.org/home/2008/08/green-collar.html