Discuss to battle global warming

willyoujoinus.com, a website I tumbled on today, is sponsored by Chevron Corporation and focuses on debating on global environmental and energy issues.

The website runs basically like this: once a month or so, a topic is raised and the members of the site can write their entries under the topic while everyone can comment on everyone’s post. The discussion is moderated from the beginning. When the topic is closed in about one month, the discussion will be analysed by experts in related areas. Apparently such discussion can help Chevron to some extent in their R&D and corporation policy making processes.

Is this grassroot power in action? I am not sure. Discussions by lay people'' may provide some useful insights given adequate analysis. However, they are prone to lose focus if there are no experts giving them guidelines and clues to discuss. The idea ofone topic per month” may be based on the same concern. If people have a better perception of their circumstances they will be better prepared in the discussion and can be more constructive. However, the brief summary on our environment provided on the website seems not to be more useful than Lester Brown and Al Gore. Surely some ideas can be extracted and contribute to decision-making, but I doubt how much weight such ideas have compared to expert opinions.

Another interest aspect is the composition of the members of the site. I guess most would be U. S. citizens. If they can post the composition in nationality, gender, age groups etc., it would be interest to see how these factors affect people’s opinion on climate change and other hot questions.

I have registered on this site and it will be approved in 24—48 hours. Perhaps you can find me in some of the discussions :).