President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron were both big no-shows during the Rio Earth Summit this week, but in the surest sign that this party was a bust, even former Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger decided not to come. This is a bit surprising, because he's no stranger to the allure of the Marvelous City -- and now that he's on his way to being single again, this could've been the perfect opportunity to pick up where he left off:

Schwarzenegger was scheduled to help hand out the Sustainia awards Wednesday evening, but reportedly got tied up with a movie shoot. Mmm hmmm. If not even the language of love could lure him to Rio this week, we must assume he had more important affairs to deal with. Ahem.

But really, who could blame him for staying home? The Earth Summit wraps up today with an endless stream of near-identical speeches from world leaders and their surrogates. (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke for the U.S.: “Good morning” blah blah blah, “Brazil’s deft and effective leadership” blah blah blah, “a real advance for sustainable development” blah blah blah, etc.) Later today, bigwigs will sign a final “outcome document,” widely panned as a watered-down and insufficient plan that provides exactly zero help in meeting the challenges of creating a green economy for the globe. Afterwards, they’ll all probably go out for a show and a couple of caipirinhas.

All of which means we may have to wait until Rio+40 before we see Arnold reprise his carnival debauchery. Consider me and the internet crushed.

Catadores, or trash pickers, fight for their rights. (Photo by Paulo Teixeira.)

“I am the son of a catadora,” begins João Paolo de Jesus, sounding like someone who has told his life story a few times before. “I lived around the open pit dump from the time I was 7 until I was 11 or 12.”

João Paolo’s mother was a trash picker, one of thousands of people in Brazil who subsist by sifting through society’s castoffs, gleaning copper, aluminum, plastics, and paper for sale to scrap dealers and recycling companies. The two of them lived near an open dump in Salvador, Brazil’s third-largest city. At 26, João Paolo has taken up the trade as well, and he is working to build pride and legitimacy for catadores locally and across the country.

The effort has brought João Paolo and several dozen other catadores to Rio this week under the banner of the National Movement of Collectors of Recyclable Materials -- the Movimento -- for the People’s Summit, a grassroots alternative to the Rio+20 Earth Summit.

The first official day of the Rio+20 Earth Summit brought clouds, light rain, and a whole lot of sad-face among those who have worked for months to make the meeting a success. The overwhelming feeling here, even as world leaders and celebrities rolled in for the official pomp and circumstance, was that the summit was over even before it began. Still, not everyone was despondent.

The final “outcome document,” to be signed by heads of state at the end of the week, was “closed” to changes Tuesday night, and while there is a chance that it could be opened for further discussion, Brazilian leaders, who are shepherding the document to completion, have stated that they don’t intend to let that happen. By most accounts, the agreement is a great disappointment.

Twenty years ago, a 12-year-old rocked the Earth Summit in Rio with a plea to world leaders to get serious about saving the planet. Her name was Severn Suzuki, and today, she hands the torch to another young'un, Brittany Trilford, 17, who will address the leaders of 140 nations as the Rio+20 Earth Summit finally gets off to its official start.

Trilford hails from Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. Last winter, she entered the Date With History contest that invited young people to record themselves giving a speech to the leaders of the world about the future they wanted. She won the grand prize, a trip to Rio for the Earth Summit. She didn’t learn until later that she would actually have a chance to speak to at the summit in person.

Trilford’s date with history is at 9 a.m. Eastern time (that’s 6 a.m. on the West Coast). It should be webcast live here. Watch Grist for highlights later in the day, and a link to the video when it’s up. (See update at bottom of post.) Meantime, I caught up with Trilford yesterday with some questions about her speech, her prognosis for the planet, and how she got to be so freaking opinionated.

Youth activists staged a "flash mob" at the Earth Summit talks yesterday, part of a broader effort to roll back subsidies for fossil fuels. (Photo courtesy of Human Impacts Institute.)

The Crazy Twitter Kids got a lesson in international diplomacy yesterday during a panel before the Rio+20 Earth Conference in Rio de Janeiro.

The panel was part of a broader push to end an estimated $1 trillion in government subsidies that go to fossil fuel companies around the world each year. At an event that has brought an incredible diversity of people to Rio, this was a largely white, Western bunch, with three Americans and a Scot (who currently resides in New York), no women (with the exception of Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke, who introduced the event and then left), and a single researcher from India. Representatives of three environmental groups took turns arguing that it was time to stop pouring our tax money into oil, gas, and coal companies, and instead invest in clean energy like solar and wind.

“We’re handing a $1 trillion bill each year to the most profitable companies the world has ever seen,” said Iain Keith, a campaigner with Avaaz. “The measure of success this week will be whether or not we’re still paying $1 trillion to polluters after Rio.”

It was a clean, simple message at an event that has been characterized by cacophony and chaos, and even as the panelists spoke, it was going bananas on the Interwebs. Jamie Henn, communications director for the climate action group 350.org, beamed that, thanks to a “Twitterstorm” orchestrated by his group and others, the hashtag #EndFossilFuelSubsidies” had hit No. 2 on the list of top trending topics on Twitter worldwide. (No. 1 was “20FactsAboutMe.”) He rattled off the names of celebrities (Stephen Fry, Mark Ruffalo) and politicians (Nancy Pelosi, Mike Lee) who had added their voices to the storm. “We’re looking to see if that message can break through here in Rio,” he said.

If the conference room was any indication, it didn’t.

Friends, Americans, countrymen: WHERE IS YOUR PRIDE?

There was a day when the United States was a noble nation, a regular presence atop the podium, always leading the medal count. Now, the Canadians are eating our lunch -- and they’re not being nice about it. “Yeah, you guys used to win all these awards,” one Canuck told me last night. “I guess we’re on top of the heap now.”

He was talking about all the Fossil of the Day awards, of course -- the honor bestowed on the countries that are the biggest boneheads when it comes to working with the world to safeguard the planet. These dubious honors are being doled out here at the Earth Summit in Rio -- organized by the Climate Action Network and picked by popular vote -- and I can tell you, Americans, unless we get our act together, we’re not going to bring many of them home.

Naomi Devine. (Photo by Zoma Fotografia.)

Thousands of people from around the world have converged on Rio de Janeiro this week for the Earth Summit, a mammoth conference aimed at creating a green economy for the globe. But I can count on one hand the people who got here by bicycle. One finger, actually.

Naomi Devine, a 33-year-old Canadian sustainability planner, rode her bike here from Vancouver, British Columbia. Well, she rode a lot of it, anyway -- and the rest of the time, she rode mass transit. She says she caught a train from Eugene, Ore., to San Francisco “because it was winter at the time,” and bused from Mexico on. Nonetheless, she estimates she rode about 1,000 miles. It was an incredible, crowd-funded journey, done the hard way (in contrast to this writer, who flew from Seattle to Dallas to Rio, and thought that was a long day).

We all should cut Devine a little slack, because here in Rio, she rides her bike to the summit meetings every day -- a 17-mile round-trip. From experience, I can report that that's freaking BURLY. The traffic here is insane. The bus drivers are suicidal. For once in my life, I’m actually happy that I’m not riding my bike.

Devine was kind enough to answer a few questions after her harrowing morning commute today.

Q. What in the world were you thinking? It's a long freaking way from Canada to Rio.

A. Yeah. Geography was never my strongest subject in school ... These ideas come from the big crazy part of my brain that says things like "Hey, you know what would be awesome? Take your bike and see if you can ride it to the Earth Summit!” and, “You have a month to plan everything! Yeah!" Where most people laugh to themselves and say, “Isn't that a crazy idea,” I go “YES, this is what I need to be doing with my life.” Sometimes you need to just jump in and follow your heart.

In the lead-up to the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen, boosters branded the event “Hopenhagen.” Along those lines, the Earth Summit this week in Rio de Janeiro might be called “Rio-ality Check.” With just days to go, chaos and disagreement reign: It's a far cry from the master plan for a global green economy that world leaders promised to roll out. Nonetheless, on the fringes we’re seeing some interesting signs that the gathering here won’t be a complete waste of time.

Despite months of talks at the United Nations HQ in New York City and last-minute jockeying here in Rio, the delegates seem unable to agree on anything of any substance. Hell, they haven’t even been able to provide a consistent wifi connection here at RioCentro, a sprawling, heavily guarded conference center on the far edge of the city where the high-level talks are taking place.

Image by Mark Rain.

It was 1972, and to anyone who was paying attention, it was obvious that we humans were making a real mess of things. Tropical forests were falling at an alarming rate. Whale populations were in a death spiral. Our cities were choked with smog, our rivers had turned into fire traps, and we were getting the first inklings that all of our industrial activity might actually be warming the globe.

To right the course, representatives from 114 countries met in Stockholm, Sweden, at the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment -- the first major global effort to clean up our collective act -- and an era of environmental diplomacy was born.

Four decades later, what do we have to show for it?

First, the bad news:

World leaders gather next week at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to talk about creating a green economy for the planet. But don’t go thinking this is the first international eco-bash. Bigwigs from the far corners of the globe have been talking about Saving the World for four decades now. Here’s a quick romp through 40 years of international environmental diplomacy, interspersed with Important Cultural Landmarks, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and, just for fun, some notes on what I was doing at the time.

1972

Leaders of the world gather in Stockholm, Sweden, to talk about what a mess we’ve made of the planet. The meetings spawn the United Nations Environment Programme (which is like a program, only fancier) and kick off a generation of environmental treaties and agreements on ozone depletion, protecting biological diversity, hazardous waste, endangered species, and climate change.

Al Green’s song “Let’s Stay Together” hits No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100.

Atmospheric CO2, the main driver of global warming, hovers just under 330 parts per million.

I am born, on Oct. 24, in a Salt Lake City hospital.