It's hard to point to a lamp in the den with a light bulb which is one errant elbow away from creating a toxic waste site from mercury poisoning and thinking "I've done my bit for the planet." And, what would I do next year; point to two lamps in my house?

Not only that, but next year the lamps will be the same size as they were this year. All those trees - or at least a huge percentage of them - will be bigger next year and the year after that bigger still.

Some of the coverage of Live Earth was unintentionally amusing. One report from the NY Times told of the point during the concert at Giants Stadium in New Jersey "when Al Gore bounded onto the stage wearing jeans and a black shirt."

Gore in a black shirt: A human eclipse of the sun.

Another bit of unintentional irony was when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. exhorted the same crowd to "get rid of all those rotten politicians we have in Washington, D.C."

First, one assumes he was tacitly exempting his Uncle Ted. Second, holding an eco-friendly concert in New Jersey is an amusing concept on its face.

So, on this Live Earth weekend, I was in Seward, Alaska where I made my way to the local glacier, hiked up the side of the mountain (down which it still flows) and, like Clark Griswold at the Grand Canyon, looked at it.

No beer, though.