I’ve just quoted you while mocking someone promoting carbon offsets to make up for their international travel which they can’t possibly give up. Tokenism!

Did Woodstock work?

Live Earth was never meant to work–only raise “awareness” which means money for a further PR campaign, just like breast cancer awareness events only served to raise money for more breast cancer awareness events. Walk-a-thons, marathons, and dinners won’t end breast cancer, no matter how much awareness or money is raised.

If we’re not aware of breast cancer by now, we’re all in trouble–the same for global warming. Besides, where Big Pharma sees an opportunity for treatment profit rather than cure, they’ll take it.

Change will only come about by politics and social activity, not by gratuitous rock concerts that serve to do nothing but draw crowds of non-consumers who get high and listen to music all day. By paying upwards of $350/ticket (and some concerts WEREN’T free, BTW), nobody has changed anything except the bank balance.

Remember Woodstock II? What did it change? Nothing. If anything it showed us exactly how egotistical and consuming we have all become, from burning down beverage stands because the price was too high to leaving complete campsites behind in the mud because people were too lazy to take it all home and wash it out.

Because of all this, there will never be a Woodstock III. The land has even been sold off to a condo developer.

Change happens at the polls. It’s where it’ll always take place.

Your point about Terence Stamp is very telling; the media cannot resist wheeling out people who they think people ‘know’, rather than inviting people to speak who DO know about these things.

If the broadcast time had been spent giving 2 billion people an insight into ways in which real people are actually living low carbon lives, it would have been airtime well invested. We could have filled those depressing hours with inspiration from real people from every corner of the globe, people we don’t and won’t ever know, but who are individually pressing down on the brake pedal of environmental meltdown.

I also suspect that the audience of 2 billion was actually part of the problem. The concert was ‘consumed’ like everything else, allowing people to move on to their next fix. I can’t see that we can break down the denial barrier by such mass action; you need to sit with people, discuss, debate, argue and persuade, while you can see the whites of their eyes, to firstly open then change minds.

And apart from anything else, not everyone is interested in rock concerts, in the same way a huge number of people aren’t the slightest bit interested in cricket or other sports.

What did Al Gore et al have to offer them?

I haven’t seen figures for anywhere else, but in the UK the audience was under a million in the afternoon – by my reckoning, that’s less than 2% of people with TVs. The peak audience was 4.5 million – less than a third of the number tuning in for the Diana memorial concert the previous weekend.

Al Gore is reportedly worth 100 million. When will he start dispensing some of that for more than airplane flights across the country and around the world, paid for by caron offsets, of course.

To the extent that you are right or at least persuasive, no one will be committing this folly anytime soon. Apparently, there is not a very symbiotic connection between hedonism, bling, and saving the planet. Quite the opposite, I would think.

On the other hand, your next piece needs to address what would actually work. Those of us here in the hinterlands are trying to make changes one step at a time. And I am not just talking about little personal changes like installing light bulbs, which many of us did at least a decade ago. The actions that have the power to begin to make a difference are engaging your local political leaders to actually do things to facilitate renewable energy, for example.

Unfortunately, it takes heroic efforts to make small differences. We’ve got a pretty good idea of what doesn’t work. We need to know what will work.

Live Earth was a brilliant way of avoiding the realities of the issue because it required nothing of anyone – stars or audience. No-one had to engage with the painful realities of what they will have to do in their own lives to make any kind of difference. It encouraged people to continue to ignore their own role and talk up somebody else’s.

Plus it had Coldplay in it. ‘Nuff said.