Al Gore’s environmental activism is designed never to threaten the supremacy of the market. According to Vanity Fair magazine’s second Green Issue, he is “the man of the hour” — photographed by Annie Leibovitz at Iceland’s Jokulsarlon glacier, and pictured on the cover next to a Photoshopped-in polar bear cub named Knut. His cherubic features etched with a half-beard and hardened into an expression of concern, Leonardo DiCaprio is the Upper West Side’s new green poster-boy, and in the ensuing pictorial portfolio his fellow “global citizens” line up behind him: ex-Seinfeld star Julia Louis-Dreyfus, musicians such as Alanis Morissette and Jack Johnson, and a motley assortment of scientists, activists and entrepreneurs. Elsewhere, there is a fawning feature about Prince Charles — “a prince whose time has come”, transformed “from eco-scold to green hero”.

Recent headlines about the greening of US politics still look distinctly premature, but in the last two years or so the country’s news stands have undergone a real transformation. With the US’s collective weather-eye opening ever wider, that great climate-change denier George Bush falling fast and US celebrities noisily expressing interest in the issue, its media class now at least know what time it is. Given its symbiotic bond with the metropolitan liberati, Vanity Fair can perhaps be discounted, but the kind of publications that sit much closer to the mainstream now run environmental splashes on what seems like a weekly basis.

But what kind of awakening is this? At the most crass extreme, there lies the latest international edition of Newsweek, acknowledging the onset of climate change, but brazenly making the case for its upside, as in the claim that as polar ice melts, “for the foresighted, the Arctic is a new Klondike, ripe for exploitation”. Almost as comical was a recent Time cover feature dedicated to the “51 things we can do”, ranging from adjusting countries’ airspace “so that planes can fly in as straight a line as possible”, to the incisive advice of tip number 47: “If you must burn coal, do it right.”

The same eco-boosterism is the chosen credo of the saintly Al Gore, currently readying this July’s Live Earth, the star-studded event aimed not just at capitalising on the media’s new green appetites and pushing climate change into the American foreground, but also confirming that his leadership holds the key to keeping it there.

Not to be left behind, Tony Blair recently recalled watching Bono address a crowd of G8 officials and marvelling at how agreeable this new kind of activism-cum-philanthropy seemed: “He didn’t fall into the trap of haranguing them. He simply asked them to think of this as the most important moment of their lives.” That moment, you may recall, swiftly passed, and the few advances enshrined in the Gleneagles accords are unravelling at speed. So, here’s the likely scenario: for Live 8, read Live Earth — and an agenda rendered so washed-out that we’ll hardly be able to recognise it. — The Guardian