Give Arnold a Break

The Associated Press is moving a story critical of Arnold's big greenhouse gas emissions conference. I'm not a big fan of conferences, per se, but on its face, this one doesn't seem to friviolous. Yet, the AP has a snarky analysis of the potential carbon footprint of the conference itself:

The AP obtained a list of the more than 1,400 invitees through a California Public Records Act request. If all of them made the trip, their round-trip air travel alone would discharge more than 2,554 metric tons of carbon dioxide - a so-called carbon footprint equivalent to that produced from 424 cars driven for a year.

How is that productive? It's not even ironic. I mean, come on.

I've had fun making fun of the rock star Sheryl Crow's in-your-face environmentalism which flies in the face of the massive carbon footprint of her concert tours, but that's a capitalist enterprise, not a policy conference.

Give Arnold a break on this one. I'm not sure anything will come out of this, but these meetings do have a purpose.

Schwarzenegger to convene global summit on greenhouse-gas emissions [AP via Los Angeles Daily News]