Live Earth

I only saw a few moments of the Live Earth Concert last night... though what I did see made my toes curl... Madonna, introduced as if she was the high priestess of ecology by the pompous, theatrical-isms of Terence Stamp... and the Pussy Cat Dolls, who had all flown in from California, saying they took the issue of Global Warming so seriously that they had refrained from using any hairspray before their appearance!!!... The chassis of the Bandwagon must have been seriously strained by all the overblown egos jumping on it yesterday!  And whilst I do generally like Jonathon Ross, he was completely the wrong person to present the programme, from what I saw his cheeky, irreverent style took away from the seriousness of climate change. 

Even Bob Geldof said...

I would only organise Live Earth if I could go on stage and announce concrete environmental measures from the American presidential candidates, Congress or major corporations.  They haven't got those guarantees, so it's just an enormous pop concert or the umpteenth time that, say, Madonna or Coldplay get up on stage.

I suspect all this has done is to trivialise the issue... I wonder if the impact of these big concerts has been so diminished by their frequency that they are now have a negative effect... I hope that the energy saved as a result of the concerts is greater than the amount used in staging them, but to be honest I doubt it will be!

... I hope I'm wrong!

Technorati Tags: Culture: Media: News: environment: Television

Comments

[Kester]

I'm afraid you may be right.

May as well have got Pol Pot doing a Cambodia benefit.

Wrong medium for this message.

[Greg Colby]

Here in Sydney the concert lost power as they hadn't brought in enough bio-fuel to run the generators!

I don;t think these things hav any effect other than to get peopoe to superficialy do a few things and then feel good about themselves. "We use long life compact flourecent globes - we gona save da world from our very own lounge room!"

[richard]

Good rant Mark, I totally agree... so did you enjoy your 6 flights in the past few days (I only did 4 and I didn't use hairspray!)

[Laura]

Same reaction to the show here in the US. The first band or two was exciting but then the whole thing just got boring.
Like you, I wondered just how much electricity, gasoline and paper waste that concert produced and how many lightbulbs we'd have to all replace to make up the difference.

The one thing that I found the most amusing though was that although it was billed as a "global" event, the only other place we saw was London and only when an American band was playing. Not sure what happened to the rest of the world.

Glad I'm not the only cynic about this particular concert event.

[Matt Stone]

I saved power by leaving the TV off that night. I think your right Mark, it is trivializing it.