Missing the point ACCORDING to the organizers, the Live Earth concerts on the weekend were watched by about two billion people around the world. Since most of them would have had to watch it on television, or listen to it on radio, that amounts to an astonishing and extravagant use of electricity, the conservation of which was one of the causes Live Earth was supposed to promote. That's just one of the many ironies surrounding this bizarre exercise.
Those ironies were not lost on the performers themselves. At one concert, a singer asked everyone in the crowd who had not flown in on a private jet to raise their hands. Everyone but the band did.
Most of the performers who appeared in the nine huge concerts held on all seven continents would have arrived by jet. Lenny Kravitz did not paddle his canoe to Rio de Janeiro. Madonna, who was the headliner of the London concert, has been called "a climate-change catastrophe" by the British News of the World tabloid -- she owns nine houses, more cars than some cab companies and a private jet that she uses to tour.
Few of the fans who attended in their hundreds of thousands walked or rode bicycles to the venues and pretty well every other mode of transportation they could have used contributes to global warming. That is perhaps the ultimate irony of Live Earth -- the nine concerts and the thousands of smaller ones that were held simultaneously around the world were intended to rally the world against global warming. Al Gore, the current darling of citizens concerned about climate-change since his role as starlet of the popular film , was one of the spokesmen for and promoters of the concerts.
Gore asked people to sign up for a seven-step program to combat global warming, including a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, the same kind of plants that produce much of the electricity that was used by Live Earth's two-billion- strong audience to listen to his message. It is tempting to condemn all this as pious hypocrisy -- producing tonnes of carbon dioxide in an effort to persuade people to reduce their emission of carbon dioxide. But it is, perhaps, more truly an exercise in pious futility.
There can hardly be anyone in the world who could have had access to Live Earth's performances who does not already know that climate change, global warming and greenhouse gas emissions are subjects of serious concern. So what was the point of all this? American comedian Chris Rock was also one of the performers fighting against climate change.
Global warming is getting so serious, he said, that babies in Jamaica are bursting into flames. That, one assumes, was supposed to be a joke, but it was no more funny than it was factual -- there is no recorded case in human history of the spontaneous combustion of babies, even back in those times when the world was much warmer than it is today. Rock, however, did, in a peculiar way, help to make a point.
Babies do die in Jamaica, in Africa, in Asia, even in Canada, from starvation, disease and neglect that could be prevented. Live Earth could have done a lot more for those who are living on Earth if all that talent, all that effort, all that money had gone to making the world better for those babies, to preventing AIDS in Africa, to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Then those concerts would have had a point.
News RSS