We can save our planet, or we can destroy it. In either scenario, this century is it, says Adrian Glamorgan

You can google Earth now. Depending on where you live, you can vicariously swoop down from geostationary orbit to your backyard and almost see the shadow of your hills hoist. Once you've got over the pleasure of your own backyard from space, there's a whole planet to explore. Mouse-clickers are scanning the Earth, rediscovering the innocent pleasures of geography, identifying how close and far away we are all are from each other, and getting into 3D thrills and interpretive overlays. Point and zoom. Now you can see where Ancient Rome once stood, and its famous sites. Switch overlay. Trace with high resolution satellite imagery the genocidal destruction of 1,000 villages in the Darfur region, western Sudan. Click on placemarks, and trail detailed stories about the villages that have been destroyed while the world looks on. One world. There is no escape from the truth, unless you're really, really trying.

That is the wonder of technology: it is bringing us together. It also threatens our survival. With overlay software on Google Earth, you can animate climate change. Using the time slider, you can see whether your house or suburb will be submerged as the planet's oceans rise, a handy gadget if you're living in Frankston, Victoria; Caboolture, Queensland; Dee Why, Sydney; Kingston, Tasmania or Fremantle WA. If you're feet are still dry, apply the software to half a dozen South Pacific countries, or perhaps try Bangladesh. Do the maths on our detention prisons in Christmas Island and Villawood. We might deter the first few thousand environmental refugees, but all up we are about 60 million prison cells short. There is no Pacific solution. We are one world. We escape from this climate change future together only if we are really, really trying. Together.

You know the world's changing in an amazing way, not only because the Dalai Lama can appear at major convention centre venues in a number of Australian cities and draw appreciative crowds, but also because he can be preceded at the podium by the CEO of Virgin Blue with a parallel message about global sustainability. In Perth, CEO Brett Godfrey urged us to think and act sustainably, and he's about walking - or is that flying? - his own talk. The airline he leads is carbon neutral, and if his greenhouse polluting industry can take action, then by implication, so might many others.

Welcome to the 21st century: the defining moment for our planet, with a new kind of leadership meeting an unprecedented problem. It's a time when spiritual leaders and CEOs, young activists and suburban mums and dads, scorched land farmers and triple bottom line multinationals, get to play a pivotal part in our survival.

A drift towards global consciousness has been coming almost offhandedly in the last few decades. It's not just Australians travelling around the world, or watching the news on telly, or even that much of the world is online. Our greater awareness had a picture of itself when Apollo 8 sent pictures back of our blue planet. Alone. Alive. Since then it's been a matter of becoming habituated to the realities of globalisation, more recently recognising the riches and environmental perils that come with the China boom, then there's Tim Flannery's book The Weathermakers, and then, last and powerfully, Al Gore's award-winning documentary making climate change our daily fare.

If none of this has touched you, (and on island Australia we can often ignore a lot), along comes a once in a thousand year drought, and the Darling River's hardly flowing, the locusts on the paddock make the annual show impossible, our metropolitan dams are so empty, and the price of petrol is rising. All of a sudden, a future based on global warming, water shortages, and peaked oil can't be shrugged off quite so easily. Earth, you have our attention.

Well, many more of us. While the American and Australian national governments have played down global concerns for more than a decade, often in the name of protecting business, many multinational corporations, with their fingers on the planetary pulse, are taking global warming, and its threat to profits, very seriously. Rupert Posner is the Australian representative of The Climate Group, an independent "leadership coalition" dedicated to advancing business and government leadership on climate change, with offices in London, New York, and Melbourne, with new chambers just opened in China and California. The Climate Group website boasts participating companies such as JP Morgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, Allianz, BP, British Telecom, Barclays, Alcan and News Corporation. The Group works with these companies and also joins with cities, provinces and states such as New York City, Ontario, our own state of Victoria and the state of California. The Climate Group looks at the business case for taking early and strong action to effect practical change.

Posner, a onetime Greenpeace activist, explains: "In UK, in particular, the national government is taking a very strong leadership role and working with business whereas in Australia and the US, the national governments haven't, up until now, been taking very much of a leadership role at all. What we've found is that state governments in the absence of national leadership have been taking strong action, and that's the area we have been working." A recent initiative involved bringing Victorian Premier Steve Bracks and Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger together. Posner says these are "two states very committed to taking action on climate change, and we thought by bringing them together they could share information, work together and take more action to address the issue."

He speaks as an inherent optimist, but a determined one, not unaware of the risks. "I've been working on climate change heavily since I was at Greenpeace back in the 1990s,"he says, but it sounds as if the sensitivities began long before that. "From when I was a kid, looking at Harry Butler's books, I've been interested in the natural environment."

The Climate Group provides an online weekly greenhouse calculator for Victoria. Look at the weekly numbers, and you can see why Earth has got a problem. For example, for the first week in June 2007, the net greenhouse gases emitted by the Garden State included 2,104 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. The bulk of Victoria's electricity production came from coal (55 per cent) and petroleum (25 per cent). That particular week's indicator was 36.8 per cent above the 1990 weekly average for energy, well above Kyoto's envisioned and generous provisions for Australia. Sobering stuff.

The news from The Climate Group is mostly upbeat, though. The New York City Mayor wants to turn the city green, providing a park within a 10 minute walk for all residents, and a million new trees to shade streets and filter out CO2, with new subways and buses; Japan promises $100 million for the Asian Development Bank to take on global warming; Bangkok turned off the lights for 15 minutes to raise awareness about saving energy. Even if the oil president George W won't sign Kyoto, 31 states led by California and New England, representing more than 70 per cent of the American population, have signed up to jointly tracking greenhouse gas emissions by major industries. The United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is giving global warming top priority, holding a high level UN meeting on climate change in September. Australia might officially complain that greenhouse gas reduction targets will only hurt jobs, but Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, leader of the world's 19th largest economy, wants to terminate CO2 and stimulate jobs through targets and regulating standards. The Governor has acclaimed a study showing that petrol prices can be reduced, and the economy stimulated, by regulating greenhouse gas emissions in fuels, confirming British findings in last year's Stern economics report that early action will have a beneficial economic effect; inaction: disastrous consequences.

There's a British "solutions" program, entitled "We're in this together," supported by corporate partners working with The Climate Group, offering everyday products and services to combat climate change. This will be starting up in Australia in a little while, but for the moment, there's British supermarket Tesco offering cheaper energy saving light bulbs, there's details of discounts for green cars, and some encouragement not to upgrade to the latest handset, thereby avoiding the environmental cost of every new mobile. I suppose it's Cool Britannia, literally, with the Mayor of London offering a free climate change toolkit for Londoners, and Marks and Sparks encouraging its customers to lower their washing temperature to 30degreesC to save around 40 per cent energy per wash. Is that greenwash in the washing powder? Are corporates like Barclaycard and British Gas joining together to sound trendy? Green consumers might be wary, but that's the point.

One of the eight corporate partners in "We're in this together" is BSkyB, headed by James Murdoch (yes, that James Murdoch). In a website interview, he responds to doubts by saying, "Being in tune with customer choice is critical. The Co-Operative Bank's Ethical Consumerism Report, which tracks the rise of consumer consciousness, found that one third of UK consumers boycotted at least one product last year for ethical reasons. That should be enough to concentrate the mind of any chief executive who thinks they need not bother with their company's strategy around climate change." A click away and there's an interview with Roberta Myers, editor-in-chief of Elle, fresh from having produced her first ever "green" issue. Was it pressure from readers? No, she writes, "I would call it enthusiasm." In fact, she expects major consumer brands to drive action on climate change. Business is second-guessing consumer distaste for waste, and pre-empting a boycott by leading the way.

To avoid greenwash, Posner says: "Senior members of companies and governments really need to believe in the issue, they have to have a good understanding of the science and the consequences of us not taking action. Once they've done that, most understand then they have a responsibility to do something about it. We've got some really great leaders out there taking a leadership role....Rupert Murdoch...Richard Branson, ... other business people respect these guys, and want to understand why they're doing it."

What about nuclear? "I think nuclear is unlikely to be the solution, certainly in Australia, because the costs mean it doesn't stack up. There are other issues to do with safety, there's also public acceptance, and also the issue that nuclear isn't emissions-free, there are a significant number of emissions that are involved in the whole process. ...The idea of providing huge government subsidies for nuclear really doesn't make sense. If nuclear really was emission- free, if it were safe and the public accepted it, it would be fine, but the reality is that it doesn't tick those boxes, the community isn't happy with it, there are a whole lot of environmental concerns, and even things like getting insurance are impossible for a company that wants to build a nuclear power station.

"So I think it's unlikely to be part of Australia's energy mix in the future, and it certainly doesn't need to be because there's a whole range of other alternatives that are cost effective, proven and safe and available now." Leadership is happening, sometimes in surprising places. But then, our beautiful planet keeps turning round that gorgeous sun. We're getting hotter. The Earth Century might be remembered for what was achieved, or what was not done. Together.