Live Earth: “Private Jets For Climate Change”
Live Earth may have been an important event and a great bunch of music; but wasn’t there a certain hypocrisy in the energy used to create the events? Matt Bellamy of the band Muse dubbed it "private jets for climate change".
It’s easy sport to take the musicians who participated to task for arriving in energy guzzling private jets, mounting massively polluting mega-tours and living excessively consuming lifestyles.
And one does wonder how many new people where actually convinced by these mega-concerts to now help save the earth from this obvious threat? Certainly no titans of industry or reigning politicians were left shaking in their boots after watching the sweaty hordes pump their fist in the air to Madonna.
Isn’t the real culprit this time actually Al Gore? For all the incredible good he’s done on global warning, it seems that he drank a bit too much of producer Kevin Wall’s kool-aide this time. Or was it a need to feel the glow of the global media spotlight again?
Gore’s cause and the earth would have been better served by a massive worldwide telethon/radiothon centered around education and fund-raising with music as the draw? Taking the cameras to existing concerts and even intimate events could have sent a more powerful message than massively polluting throngs traveling in gas guzzlers to mega-stadiums.
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I believe that Gore and the other organizers probably believed that the publicity and awareness raising was worth the environmental costs of holding it. The people, not just the performers make events “big.” Telethons and the like lack scale. Surely, people will be watching and listening to these concerts for years because of the magnitude of the event(s).
Good points. But does watching the concerts really lead to change or action?
NPR’s All Songs Considered has an interview with Kevin Wall and he takes on some of these criticisms.
http://www.npr.org/programs/asc/
The concerts were for the average Joe – to use entertainment to open them up and give them a few suggestions. Phil Collins said it best “This Is The World We Live In”. LEts make global warming and concern for the environment fashionable – this was a great start toward those ends. In the smallest ways it let me know that I CAN help and itt is not all the responsibility of the big corporations .