Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Live Earth Carbon Cost

Does anyone know what the total carbon cost of the Live Earth Concerts will be?
Is there a plan in place so the organizers, performers, and media will be offsetting their costs by purchasing carbon credits?
Have the concert organizers vetted the various organisations selling these credits to weed out the unreliable ones so those people who attend any of the concerts can effectively offset their carbon costs?

c.

No clue. I did hear Al Gore very briefly on Larry King (no, I don't watch that, I just happened to be channel hopping at the time ) say that they'd made every effort to make the event carbon neutral. Whatever that means. Could mean anything you wanted it to mean, really. And it seems a rather tall order to me, admittedly.

It does seem a somewhat ironic notion really to use up all those resources and all that power on such an event. Quite bizarre. And I'm not impressed with the whole notion of carbon credits generally - sounds like a con to me.

There was a programme I saw a while back now about some people acting as roadies for The Who on one of their UK tours and they were operating a fleet of dozens of trucks to carry their equipment from one venue to the next - including all 90 something of Pete Townsend's guitars!

So, no...not impressed really. Could you tell?

LabRat

PS I also hear that The Arctic Monkeys declined to participate because they thought it would be hypocritical as they 'use up the power of a small nation to light their concerts and jet around all over the world in private planes'. So they didn't feel they had the moral high ground to tell others what to do to save resources.

I don't know how they plan on offsetting their carbon costs. An event like this really should give out information about it, given their agenda, rather than who's appearing where and when.
I'm still confused about how Live Earth is going to help the planet - the whole thing is going to use up a lot of energy, create a lot of pollution, and I really doubt that people are going to take any more notice of the environment because of it. Also, it is really annoying that you know most of the people appearing are just jumping on the bandwagon and don't know the difference between climate change and global warming . It all seems rather pointless to me.
(Can you spot the person who studied the environment at university?)

They're hoping to raise money and awareness, I expect.

As for carbon offsetting , it's generally done by giving money to an environmental group, who then go and plant trees and such.

It's what they do at http://stopglobalwarming.care2.com and there was some carbon offset thing they were doing with airline tickets, too. When I booked through Expedia last year, they had TerraPass as an optional add-on. You can choose to make a donation of a few extra dollars when purchasing your ticket, an amount calculated to offset the emissions from your share of the flight. There are a few other companies that do it, too, such as http://www.carbonneutral.com and http://www.carbon-clear.com . Apparently, AirCanada teamed up with http://zerofootprint.net to give their customers that option, too.

Not sure what all this is worth, but hey... having more trees around is a good thing.

As long as they don't end up running out of space to plant them. Back when I was a kid, there used to be a program where you could donate money to have a tree planted in Israel. Very popular on Lag Ba'omer, (Jewish Arbor Day, but with picnics and games and bonfires and stuff). Unfortunately, they got so many donations, I'm told that they had to start pulling up old trees so they could have room to plant the new ones within the designated areas, as promised. Oops.

Paul

Interesting comments.

I understand that a great many of the carbon offset schemes are either cons or so badly run that nothing gets done. A Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail published a ranking of some of them and only 2 managed to get a completely clear rating. Sorry, I can't recall which issue - it was about a month ago.

Anyway, where these carbon offsets are legit, they seem to be a useful idea. And who can object to planting more trees? Have planted a few myself. [should add I know that carbon offests can be projects other than tree planting )

But most of the carbon offet receipts out there right now seem to be like the papal indulgences that were once sold by the Papacy so people who had sinned could get into Heaven.

As for the awareness issue, it would be interesting to do some polls testing for increased awareness of the issue after the event, as well as increased understanding of the complexity of the issue (as Alisha pointed out) among those who attended.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing the carbon print balance sheet at the end of the concerts.

c.

Raising awareness, yeah.

'Cause hardly anybody's ever heard anything about global warming. :rolleyes:

To steal an illustration from somewhere, it's like having a pie-eating contest to raise awareness of famines.

PJ

That's all I got...

Found a few articles...

The UK Daily Mail

and

The Washington Post (US)

and

The Daily Telegraph (also UK)

PJ

Yes, that's exactly what it sounds like to me, too. I think I'll just move to Krypton...oh, wait, that planet was destroyed too! :rolleyes:

thanks for the links, Pam.

c.