Live Earth: Sustainable Rocking In the Free World

If you browse the website for Live Earth concert series, Al Gore's attempt to do for the planet what Live Aid didn't really do for Africa, you will eventually come across the "green event guidelines" - which somebody wisely decided should be in place before mounting a colossally expensive (by any measure) concert.

According to the guidelines they intend to observe every environmentalist commandment - from offsetting "artist travel" by way of carbon indulgences - to making sure the office computers used by organizers are quick to go into sleep mode.

[Al Gore joke goes here.]

Of course, nobody has done the math on how much juice the whole effort will consume - even with LED lighting and so forth. It would be much more persuasive, even quasi-scientific, to add everything up in terms of kilowatts - even taking into account the somewhat fraudulent economics of supposed carbon offsets. Honest accounting would also consider all of the energy required to transmit the performance worldwide, right down the the TVs and radios the expected audience will use to listen to rock and rap stars posture sanctimoniously about climate change.

Even if the event proved to be a net energy drain, I suspect it would be excused as "raising awareness" anyway: A few more thousand people worldwide may feel bad about themselves, and vaguely like they must be subtracting more than their fair share in the zero-sum game that environmentalism encourages.

(On the other hand - the guys in the Arctic Monkeys, at least, display some healthy skepticism and sense.)

Tags: Live Earth, Al Gore, Climate Change