The Windsor Hotel Toya in Japan, host of the G8 summit, has reportedly spent $1.4 million on a monument commemorating global warming. The hotel says it “should act as a message for future generations to take care of the Earth.”
It would, in my humble opinion, have been much more useful to do something with that $1.4M that would make it unnecessary for future generations to worry about global warming.
Donating the money to Friends of the Earth or to one of the many universities engaged in sustainability research would have been a proactive means of achieving practical progress. Researchers can do a lot with a million here and there. (Not to mention avoiding the carbon cost that manufacturing, installing and promoting the monument entails.)
Needless to say, in the typically brutal entrepreneurial fashion (the one that is responsible for much of the muck we’re in at the moment) it’s much ‘cooler’ to look like you’re doing something about it, than to actually help cool the climate down.
It would also have been much simpler.
Richard Muscat 
It’s amazing