Al Gore started it. In July 2007, Live Earth fashioned a trend when it beamed across the world, staging twelve massive concerts in all seven continents over 24 hours. All for the noble cause of raising awareness about climate change. Then the Foo Fighters, Rolling Stones, and Coldplay jumped onboard the green gig bandwagon. So what's the problem? Outdoor music festivals are responsible for generating 100 000 tonnes of carbon emissions each year in Australia, where one single music festival can emit up to 700 tonnes of CO2 whilst patrons contribute 1500 tonnes travelling to and from the gig [Greening Australia]. The series of Live Earth concerts contributed at least 74,500 tonnes of carbon from artist/patron travel, television audience, and concert energy consumption. Let's put these numbers into perspective: the average Australian household generates 12 tonnes of C02 annually, and we are the second worst per capita polluter in the world amongst developed nations. Although Gore's Live Earth concerts had good intentions of raising awareness about climate change, having made 'green' music festivals fashionable, concert promoters are now staging more 'climate-friendly' music festivals under the guise of raising more awareness of climate change - sounding a bit like profit over planet? Surely you have sit up and suspect when even the World Bank admitted that making our lifestyles 'climate-neutral' was an industry already worth US$11 billion in 2005.
But how much climate change awareness is really raised at these gigs? Are people really showing solidarity for the cause and a love for Mother Earth, or are they just there for the music/drugs/booze? For those of you who travelled (*gasp* you flew?!) to see Live Earth - would you consider your actions to be hypocritical? But it's not just the patrons who might be hypocritical, the organisers also have to get their act together. Simply 'offsetting' emissions is only a small part of an active solution: staging a gig causes environmental issues beyond just carbon emissions from running the event and jetting musicians with their gear around. Sure, powering 10kW of speaker/subwoofer towers illuminated by rigs of 200 500W stage lights (mind you, outdoor music festivals need more stage lighting than indoor concerts to combat natural light) would overload the electricity grid that we use, so outdoor gigs have to bring in multiple electricity generators the size of shipping containers to satiate such a huge demand for power. But power aside, tonnes of waste are generated by humans biologically and otherwise: 1,025 tonnes of food and drink waste were estimated to have been generated from the Live Earth venues around the world. The physical environment at outdoor festivals also takes a severe bashing: spilling beer and jumping around on drought-ravaged grass can only lead to death by alcohol poisoning and trampling. Composting toilets, composting/biodegradable/recyclable food packaging, offering organic, vegetarian food, running on solar and renewable power where possible, providing compost and recycling facilities, providing mass-transport options for patrons, and limiting merchandising (do we really need more commemorative t-shirts made from pesticide-ridden cotton sown and sewn by malnourished children to show how cool and trendy we are?) are all part of minimising the environmental impact of an outdoor music festival.
The fashionable demand for 'green' music festivals (a neo-hippie oxymoron?) has brought Greening Australia and GreenTix together to offer these massive events voluntary options for patrons to offset their travel emissions, and options for organisers to plant a tree for each ticket sold and offset the emissions caused by the festival itself. So far 13 festivals have signed up to this initiative, including The Pyramid Rock Festival, Falls Festival, Corinbank, Peats Ridge Festival, and Blues and Roots Festival. For the John Butler Trio's national tour, ticket buyers can fork out an extra 50 cents for a 'green ticket' to 'carbon neutralise' their contribution as a patron, whilst WOMADelaide 2008 'carbon neutral' tickets started from an extra $4 per ticket, and the Splendour in the Grass 'green ticket' was an extra $3.50 in 2007. Ticketmaster even takes it one step further and carbon offsets the emissions from producing the paper tickets sold for this year's V-Festival! But paying an extra few dollars to make going to a gig 'carbon neutral' sounds suspiciously like paying to remove your climate guilt. And easing that guilt in such a trivial manner makes it too easy to keep going to more power-hungry, waste-generating music festivals without having to think too hard about the effects of your (in)actions. Should we keep living our musically indulgent lifestyles whilst islands in the Pacific and atolls in the Maldives slowly drown, along with people's livelihoods and homes? But what's the alternative: crawling back into our caves to sing 'Kumbaya' with the humble acoustic guitar around the campfire?
Perhaps we should just listen to gigs in the dark, since concert lighting uses at least 3-5 times as much power as the audio; but that depends on whether people are there to hear the music or see the performance. I know I'm of the former category, but I'm probably in the minority. Or perhaps we should all just sit back, reflect upon our over-indulgent lifestyles, differentiate between what we need and what we want, and adopt a 'prevention is better than a cure' mentality to reduce our emissions rather than trying to offset the damage already done. Don't get me wrong, although I am a left-wing, wannabe greenie hippie, I am also an engineer (and not an environmental engineer at that!) who loves (electronic) music and is an audio gear aficionado. Sure, call me a hypocrite, but you won't catch me buying a 'green ticket' just to ease my climate guilt, or going to the Climate Festival, a dance music festival touring this month to raise 'eco-awareness' of climate change. Don't fall for the greenwash marketing, blindly pay that extra 50 cents (where is the money actually going?), or have a tree planted to make yourself feel better (where is that tree being planted and what kind of tree is it?). If you have to go to a music festival, go for the music and learn/get active about climate change outside the realm of an outdoor gig. Did you really pay for your ticket so that you could learn how to compost? Sure, it's a great bonus that it's a 'carbon-neutral' festival, but don't go to a music festival just because it boasts about being 'climate-friendly'! Don't support such a farcical fad: the only way a music festival can be climate-friendly is if it doesn't happen at all.
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1 comment:
you requested a criticism.
i think it's well-written. i don't know when you started writing so well, maybe you always have and i just never noticed; but i can't produce essays like this.
i'm surprised you're so angry. but i guess that's good. but in my state now, i think it's a bit extreme. i crunched the numbers you provided a bit more.(that's quite a bit of research- i'd like to ask how you weave the researching in with the writing - do you research all numbers first. or do you write the whole thing first, and then fill in the numbers when you find them?)
Assuming 20,000ppl at an outdoor concert bear the additional 'cost', that being (conservatively) 5,000 households, then those 2200 tonnes for a festival is adding 15 days of CO2 to their annual CO2 output. i think that's not so much if you only attend one outdoor green concert per year. or maybe it is. Are you willing to go 15 days in the dark in your house in order to attend such a concert? That's what it would mean to be really carbon-neutral, i guess.
Is the outdoor concert thing really getting so much mileage in the press down there, and the climate-friendly angle getting out of proportion, that you were driven to write this? Probably, especially when compared to, say, some serious enviro-engineering solutions that really do deserve attention- there's always new smart wind energy applications, good building design, dual use buildings, .. (i would have to say yes, the hype is out of proportion without even experiencing it) . perhaps ironically, the event organisers would rate the event's success based on its publicity exposure.
I thought that the US$11 billion figure belonging to the industry "making our lifestyles 'climate-neutral'" was at first a bit misleading. As an aside, using the word "suspect" as an intransitive verb sounded odd, but is surprisingly correct. But the meaning behind the sentence has sent me on a research course that hasn't yet ended. I don't understand how this carbon trading works and where the money is coming from. At the moment, I just find it hard to believe that, outside of the EU, governments have agreed to cap-and-trade at a level that generates much of the $60 billion (in 2007) carbon market. Then again, with trading there's always speculative trading, and probably the underlying 'asset' is only worth a tiny fraction of that. There's a lot to this concept- basically i'll need to read this: http://www.carbontradewatch.org/pubs/carbon_neutral_myth.pdf
So maybe the sentence is right after all. but I can't get back to you before you submit.
of the article as a whole: i don't know what to make of it. To me it's certainly been good because it's given me some ideas to research in teh short term, and even a potential research path to pursue in teh longer run. acutally in the last couple of days , i've found myself at a real loss as to what to do next year if i don't do a phd,(not that i should be thinking about that at this stage) . so thanks for providing a bit of hope!
for others, i think it ends well 'cos it refocuses on what the article is about. how many ppl reading your article would think bout going to green music festivals? maybe lots - then that's good. if not so many, then i think the article is insightful enough to make them think about other similar instances of indulgent environmental spending (in the both the usual sense and with reference to the medieval indulgences). though perhaps that could be made a bit more explicit. ie. for those who don't go to music festivals.
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