When US Senator Gaylord Nelson created and promoted the concept of Earth Day back in 1970 he had no idea of the controversy the world would attach to his simple platform some 40 years later. While Nelson did hope to increase the public’s awareness of the overall effects of the industrial age upon the Earth, he had little idea that two such diametrically opposed sides would develop. Nelson simply thought that we needed to clean up the Earth.
He managed to draw attention to his cause by organizing protest style youthful assemblies that resulted in enough political pressure so as to get behind the entire Earth Day concept.

But bear in mind that in those times there was very little counterforce to the idea of Bans on pesticides and a Green Jobs Corp for young adults.
These ideas hardly flew in the face of industrial and totalitarian countries such as China proposing huge carbon emissions cut backs while expanding their carbon footprint ten-fold in ten years. The issue at hand today for Earth Day is the correlation of carbon emissions with energy savings. The largest polluting force on the Earth is the combined energy use of the world’s population of electricity.
With this in mind US President Barack Obama suggests that as an Earth Day and beyond means of protection of long term health we take a few steps such as turning off lights not in use, recycling, using public transportation and conserving tap water.