Last Word on Live Earth

A version of my post below on the Live Earth concerts was courageously "rescued" on Daily Kos despite not a singe comment or rec, but did get some interesting comments on the European Tribune. I notice that this climate crisis "issue" still gets fairly relentless negativism wherever and whenever anything is said about it. But one borderline commenter at ET did lead me to look at the broader coverage of Live Earth, and I admit I was surprised by how negative it was. There was a fair amount of controversy (especially in England) within the entertainment community on the events' efficacy, and certainly in the press. But most of the negativism centered on the "hypocrisy" of the "carbon footprint" of the event and the participants.

Which is how I found this article published in that radical rag, TIME magazine, with this conclusion, which I endorse and therefore quote at length:

But would the Earth have been better off if we all stayed home and did nothing, literally? "That's a fair thought," Linkin Park guitarist Brad Delson told TIME before his band's Tokyo show. "It's also a cynical one." He's right. It's time to get past the obsession over carbon footprint size and offsets, over who's an eco-hypocrite and who is truly green. We need to use energy far more wisely, both individually and internationally, but with hundreds of millions in the developing world getting richer and producing more carbon every day, the threat of climate change is far, far bigger than our personal conservation habits. It will require technological change and painful political choices such as carbon taxes, gas taxes and mandatory greenhouse gas emissions caps. That means, especially for the young, the un-rock star act of voting.
Live Earth's success will be measured not by the number of trees the initiative plants or the number of energy-efficient light-bulbs sold as a result, but by whether it motivates concertgoers to make climate-change their generation's political priority, and press their leaders to act on it.

Al Gore and company deserve credit for putting forth a 7-point pledge for concertgoers that includes a demand that countries join an international treaty mandating a 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. That will only happen if voters reward politicians who fight to cut carbon gas emissions, and punish those who don't. "It's not what we do today that matters," says Live Earth Tokyo's Nakajima. "It's what we all do tomorrow, and all the next days after. That's how we'll know how successful Live Earth really is."