Live Earth thoughts

Was it “carbon-neutral”? No, but it wasn’t promised to be.

(That said, how non carbon-neutral was it? The different venues, in total, went through more carbon than 3,000 Britons in a year.

Its total carbon footprint, including the artists and spectators’ travel and energy consumption, was likely to have been at least 31,500 tonnes, according to John Buckley of Carbonfootprint.com _ more than 3,000 times the average Briton’s annual footprint. One viewer of BBC2’s Newsnight wrote online, “Would you hold a hog roast to promote vegetarianism?”

)

If we, to use a phrase conservatives like to throw around, want an event like this to pass the smell test of a cost-benefit analysis, I think Americans have to be reminded of the costs of global warming in words of the old Fram commercials (for those of you old enough to remember):

“You can pay me a little bit now or a whole lot later.”

Or, as Gore said: “You are Live Earth.”

Can we get someone to be just a little more open to the idea of treating this issue seriously now? Can we get an elected official, whether local, state or federal, to do that? That’s the biggie. As for getting someone we know to think and act more environmentally, two things:

One is that this is word-of-mouth marketing. The other, to paraphrase what Robert Redford said, is that environmental activism needs to be about what we can do rather than what we can’t.

That said, I don’t know whether I felt “that old” or “young again” hearing a band like UB40. I liked some of the short film clips a lot, some somewhat, and felt that some were little more than video equivalents of Adbusters magazine.

That’s my .02.