The world’s carbon dioxide emissions did not plummet to zero after Live Earth and rock stars did not rise as one to trade their private jets for bicycles.
Yet the scandalous possibility presented itself that Al Gore’s seven-continent, 24-hour concert series had been rather impressive and might yet prove important.
Many pronouncements from the Wembley Stadium in London ranged from the asinine (”we’re here to save the Earth, yeah?”) to the obvious (”let’s all get smaller-ass cars!”). And the sellout crowd of 66 000 had clearly come for the music — Metallica, Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers specifically — not the climate.
But if you repeatedly tell an audience of up to two billion people via 120 TV stations, internet and radio to use energy-efficient lightbulbs and never leave TVs on standby, you must have some effect.
Live Earth’s role in stimulating such small changes cannot be measured. But as the atmosphere at Wembley finally started to crackle, you felt that would have been a poor excuse for not trying.
The best interpretation of Saturday’s concerts was that a middle of the road line-up helped move climate change to the middle of the road, fostering a vague but — at last — mainstream sense that ”something must be done”.
The performers acknowledged that their own carbon footprints did not bear close examination — the Chili Peppers fly to all their overseas concerts by private jet. Spectators travelling to the London and New Jersey concerts alone are thought to have generated 5 600 tonnes of greenhouse gases. Live Earth’s website is sponsored by the Chevrolet company, which manufactures SUVs.
And although climate issues are nowhere more pressing than in China, fewer than 3 000 people attended the Shanghai event.
Most were invited by sponsors, and the concert, headlined by Sarah Brightman, was broadcast live by only one Shanghai channel. Even so, organisers hoped to set an example: the start was moved an hour earlier to enable the audience to catch public transport, and there were recycling facilities.
But these caveats will fall away if the event achieves its twin goals: pressuring politicians to sign an international treaty pledging massively reduced emissions within two years and persuading individuals to make lifestyle changes.
Wembley was not a politically angry event, but the call to personal action was unmissable. ”In Africa there’s a proverb that says ‘if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,”’ Gore said, live from Washington. ”We have to go far, quickly.” — Â