Live Earth — the concerts, the concept

July 6th, 2007

Despite naysayers, Live Earth will be happening tomorrow, so check listings or go to Google to get some info. There is no question, now, that we’re in the grip of climate change … fuss about Gore as a candidate or schlepping disinformation for political traction be damned; the naysayers will go the way of the brontosaurus. Let’s just hope we don’t.

Here’s a note from Al, and a place to sign the pledge to participate in environmental activities; after that, articles and links for more green reads and justification for Gore and those who support him.

By the way, it’s the Decider’s birthday, and evidently he’s showing the wear, these days — I’ve thought so, lately, from snips on TV. I’ve never understood why anyone would want to be Prez, anyhow — they’re all sucked dry by the end of their terms.

Oh — and as regards the snip on endangered species, I saw a couple of eagles overhead the other day, scouting the lakefront for dinner, I’d suppose. Amazing creatures, but extraordinary predators for sure — and I can’t help but wonder … because I think symbolism counts in shaping consciousness … what direction the US of A might have taken if Ben Franklin’s pitch for the turkey [in the wild, these are hardy, smart and peaceful critters] had won popularity as the symbol for the country, instead of the eagle. But from a totem point of view, eagle is the blending of both dark and light power — balance counts — and they’re something to see, wheeling above you with that mighty wingspan.

Jude

From Al Gore:
http://www.algore.com

Live Earth is tomorrow and even if you’re not coming to one of the concerts, there’s still a way for you to be a part of this historic event. Right now there are thousands of Live Earth parties taking place in 129 countries. (It’s pretty unbelievable, actually.)

From the beginning, you have been the driving force behind our work here at AlGore.com. That’s why it’s so vital that as many AlGore.com members as possible attend these parties.

So don’t miss this incredible event — sign up to attend a Live Earth party near you by visiting:
http://friendsofliveearth.com/page/event/search_simple

Just as important as attending a Live Earth Party is making sure that you sign the Live Earth Pledge. It’s through this document that we will show our leaders how united we are behind solving the climate crisis.

Sign the Live Earth Pledge by visiting:
http://liveearthpledge.org/algore.php

Thank you,

Al Gore ++

Gore Slams US-Led Climate Pact as Sham
Truthout

Could This Be the Global-Warming Generation?
Live Earth concerts in eight countries hope to inspire action. Will it work?
Peter Ford, The Christian Science Monitor
Thursday 05 July 2007

Beijing - It’s billed as the biggest show on earth: eight pop music concerts spanning 15 time zones and an expected TV, radio, and Internet audience of 2 billion people.

The “Live Earth” shows that start Saturday in Australia are meant to be more than a planetary party. Event founder Al Gore hopes they will kick-start a global civic crusade to combat climate change and to inspire individuals everywhere to do their part.

Will the event mark the debut of a “Global Warming Generation” - a significant shift in attitudes and behavior? Or will it simply be a fun, musical follow-up to Mr. Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” that resonates little beyond the current advocates?

Reporting from eight countries indicates that today the issue is most relevant to residents of the US and Europe. But in the developing countries where the concerts are being held, such as China, South Africa, and Brazil, few citizens appear to see global warming as a pressing personal problem. In Turkey, the concert was canceled because it couldn’t get enough local support.

No matter, say organizers. “These concerts are a way to engage individuals who have not been engaged before,” says Andrea Robinson, in charge of gathering support from nongovernmental organizations worldwide for the event. “Music can have a definitive effect on a culture at a particular moment.”

In industrialized nations, where more people say they are worried by climate change, surveys indicate that not many of them are yet doing much about it in their daily lives.

Eighty-eight percent of Americans believe individual actions can have a positive impact on climate change, according to a poll carried out in anticipation of the “Live Earth” concerts, and 51 percent of those who had heard about the event expected it would inspire them to do more.

Using music by the likes of Ludacris and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to attract young people’s attention, “Live Earth” aims “to have people make changes in their own lives,” says Yusef Robb, global coordinator for the concerts. “When people change, corporations and leaders follow.”

Critics, such as Roger Daltrey, former lead singer for “The Who,” and Bob Geldof, the original global-gig guru, have said that the last thing the world’s climate needs is a yeti-sized carbon footprint left by rock stars jetting to venues that will tap megawatts of electricity for lighting and sound systems.

“Live Earth” planners counter that they have deployed “sustainability engineers” at all the venues to make them as green as possible, from using recycled toilet paper to LED lights. And they say that hundreds of millions of people are not aware enough of global warming’s threat.

Certainly the Turks do not appear overly concerned. Plans for a concert in Istanbul had to be scratched because “nobody is interested,” complained Cengizhan Yeldan, the frustrated promoter.

In China, No. 13 on Green Issues List

In China, which is about to overtake the United States as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, climate change came 13th on a list of 14 environmental concerns in an opinion poll last year, way behind food safety and air pollution. “The sense of urgency is still not so big as in other countries,” says Ma Jun, head of the Institute for Environmental and Public Affairs, a Beijing think tank, “because here air and water pollution threaten people’s health directly every day.”

When Hu Xin, an environmentalist, returned home recently from studying in Sweden to take the helm of “Global Village,” a prominent NGO in Beijing, he says he found “hardly anybody (on the staff) who knew enough about climate change to conduct change-related projects.”

In South Africa, host to the Johannesburg concert, a poll late last year found that nearly half the respondents did not think global warming would affect them personally. “When you come from a place where people are looking for their next meal,” says Kushmika Singh, a student of Environmental Sciences at Witwatersrand University, “you might not care what is going to happen to the environment in 50 years.”

In Rio de Janeiro, organizers hope 1 million people will show up for a concert on Copacabana beach starring Lenny Kravitz. If so, it’s likely to be the music, not the cause, that draws. When Greenpeace staged a bicycle ride through the city this past Sunday to draw attention to global warming, only a few hundred people turned out.

Many around the world appear to feel that climate change is so large a problem there is nothing they themselves can do about it. “Individuals can take action by pressuring their government to do something, but I don’t think my turning off the lights or driving less will do anything,” says Fang Jie, a 27-year-old in Shanghai, China, who has bought a ticket for the concert there.

Ursula Wolsoncraft, a 28-year-old project administrator in Sydney, says she encounters a similar attitude among her generation of Australians. “They feel climate change is such a big problem they have no control over it,” she explains.

That is where “Live Earth” hopes to make a difference, says Ms. Robinson. “People feel powerless,” she acknowledges. “They wonder what they can do about a melting glacier. Part of “Live Earth” is to tell them, ‘Hey, there is something you can do.’”

Bring Your Own Chopsticks

Concertgoers and TV viewers will be shown video clips and public service messages proposing scores of practical tips for cutting CO2 emissions, from turning off their computers at night in America to bringing their own chopsticks to restaurants in China, so as not to use the disposable wooden ones provided and thus save millions of trees.

In Fukuoka, Japan, English major Yuko Araki says she expects young Japanese to pay more attention to musicians than to politicians discredited by a string of scandals. “If popular artists send some message about environmental problems to young people they are sure to listen,” she says.

How much they - and their peers in other industrial countries - will actually do, however, is unclear. A poll published Tuesday in Britain found that though 68 percent of respondents believe we are seeing climate change, 37 percent admitted to doing nothing at all about it.

“Most people seem to accept climate change but don’t buy into it enough to translate into action,” says Phil Downing, head of environmental research at IPSOS Mori, which conducted the poll. And though young people “seem to be the most concerned about climate change,” he adds, “paradoxically they are the most likely to engage in behavior that’s environmentally destructive like flying, buying plasma screens and fast cars.”

While US high school students may not be indulging in such pastimes yet, they do not seem to care much about global warming. A poll last November by Hamilton College found that only 28 percent of American high school students think it is very likely that climate change will affect them personally in the future.

Generation Y: Seeks Green Employer

Their older brothers and sisters, however, think differently. “Generation Y is getting fired up about global warming,” says Jeff Angel, director of the Total Environment Centre, a green advocacy group in Sydney. “There’s a lot of evidence in Australia to show that young people look for employers with the right environmental credentials.”

In America, too, “there has been an absolute explosion among young people whose main concerns are related to the environment,” says James Pittman, who teaches Environmental Studies at Prescott College in Arizona. “They are concerned about their future and it is really starting to sink in.”

Global warming “is the defining challenge of our generation,” proclaims Billy Parish, a 25-year-old who dropped out of Yale to found Energy Action, a coalition of US universities and students seeking to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions. “The window of time … we have to solve this problem is a narrow one.”

“Live Earth” is seeking to capitalize on that sort of attitude. “Today’s generation has a decision to make, it has a choice,” says John Hanawa, who works at the Beijing office of the UN Development Program, which is helping to organize the Shanghai concert. “That’s why we have these events … to get traction with young people.”

If the strategy is not working so well in Rio, where “there has not been one article in the Brazilian press about the cause of the show, about global warming,” complains environmental activist Sergio Ricardo, the sky is a little brighter elsewhere.

In China, for example, climate change has become a “hot topic” among young people in the past few months, says Mr. Hu, now that the government has begun to tackle the subject more frankly and opened it for public debate. “It is almost like trying to be green is some sort of fashion,” adds Mr. Ma.

In South Africa, where young people have been at the forefront of protests to win better public services in the townships and for new government policies on HIV/AIDS, global warming could be the next big youth cause, says John Langford who is organizing the Johannesburg concert.

“While “Live Earth” might be another step in a long-running campaign against global warming in the US and Europe, here it could be the launch of a broad social movement,” Mr. Langford predicts. ++

Written and reported by Peter Ford in Beijing. Reported by Nick Squires in Sydney, Takehiko Kambayashi in Tokyo, Jude Blanchette in Shanghai, China, Stephanie Hanes in Johannesburg, South Africa, Yigal Schleifer in Istanbul, Turkey, Mark Rice-Oxley in London, Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro, and Tony Azios in Boston.

Climate S.O.S.
7/6/07
Center for American Progress Action Fund

[open for links]

This summer’s concert season is about more than just impressive displays of live music. It will also push individuals, corporations, and governments to address global warming. This Saturday, Al Gore’s Live Earth, the biggest concert in history, will last twenty-four hours on all seven continents and feature more than 100 music artists such as Madonna, Snoop Dogg, and Kanye West. Gore will kick off the event Saturday morning with a 10 a.m. concert in Washington, D.C. at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. “The Live Earth concerts represent an unprecedented opportunity to ask for the world’s attention long enough to deliver an S.O.S. and then to begin delivering information about the solutions to every single person,” said Gore. This year “is on track to be the second warmest since records began in the 1860s,” and unless global carbon dioxide emissions fall at least 60 to 80 percent by 2050, the planet will heat up more than two degrees Celsius. Increasingly, people worldwide view climate change as the greatest threat facing the earth. Yet just like it did before the Iraq war, the Bush administration is waging an assault on reason, manipulating the facts and “staying the course” on a policy of environmental destruction. Sign the Live Earth Pledge and demand that your country cut global warming pollution by 90 percent by 2050.

HEADING TOWARD CATASTROPHE: In Aug. 2001, President Bush ignored the dire warning, “Bin Laden determined to strike inside the US.” Four days after Hurricane Katrina, Bush claimed, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” in New Orleans. But evidence shows that he and his administration were warned repeatedly about that possibility. The same thing is currently happening with climate change. As Gore writes in Assault on Reason (pp. 208-9), “Now, the scientific community is warning us of the worst catastrophe in the history of human civilization. … The president says he is not sure humans are responsible for the threat of global warming. … He tells us that he believes the science of global warming is in dispute. This is the same president who said after the devastation of New Orleans, ‘Nobody could have predicted that the levees would break.’” Just as his administration relied on Ahmed Chalabi for flawed intelligence about the Iraq invasion, Bush has now turned to ExxonMobil for policies on global warming that will benefit no one but the oil industry. Most recently at the G-8 summit in May, the United States rejected German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s global pact on carbon emissions, which would have reduced global emissions “50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.” But instead of mandatory emission reductions, Bush pushed for “aspirational goals.” “Countries would work independently for the next ‘ten to twenty years’ to develop strategies to ‘improve energy security, reduce air pollution and also reduce greenhouse gases.’”

CHENEY’S MANIPULATION: On global warming, as on the war in Iraq, the Bush administration’s policy outcomes have been “predetermined, in spite of the voluminous evidence that it would lead to catastrophe.” New reports show that Vice President Cheney took “full advantage of the president’s cluelessness” on climate change and dominated the policies. On Sept. 29, 2000, Bush pledged, “We will require all power plants to meet clean-air standards in order to reduce emissions of…carbon dioxide within a reasonable period of time.” In February and March 2001, then Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman urged the White House to take steps to combat global warming, but she was overruled. Instead, Cheney armed the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) with industry heavyweights. Thereafter, “a CEQ memo concluded Bush’s promise to regulate CO2 ‘did not fully reflect the president’s position’ and that ‘it would be premature at this time to propose any specific policy or approach aimed at addressing global warming.’” The authors of the memo stated that “the current state of scientific knowledge about causes of and solutions to global warming is inconclusive.” CEQ chief of staff Philip Cooney, who worked for the oil industry before joining the White House and then joined Exxon in 2005, repeatedly censored government reports to play down the links between global warming and human activities. In March, Cooney admitted to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, “My objective was to align these communications with the administration’s stated policy” of climate skepticism. Evidence also shows that the Vice President’s office was in regular contact with CEQ. Kevin O’Donovan, an aide in Cheney’s office, wrote a memo to Cooney suggesting they try to “reinvigorate debate on the actual climate history of the past thousand years.”

LIVE EARTH: The ten Live Earth concerts will be broadcast to 2 billion people in more than 100 countries. Even Antarctica will have a performance by the indie rock band Nunatak, which is “made up of five scientists aged 22 to 28 who are stationed on the generally unpopulated continent.” Recognizing that large concerts often have damaging environmental footprints, the organizers of Live Earth are striving to make the events as ecofriendly as possible. Each artist has been given “a ‘Green Handbook’ of touring tips, such as where to get biodiesel for their trucks and how to offset carbon emissions.” Electricity to power the concerts will come from renewable energy sources, and greenhouse gases from the “stars’ jets or by the audience’s travel will be offset by investments in renewable energy and by safeguarding forests. Concert props may live on long after stars such as Madonna, Shakira and Bon Jovi have left the stage — old tires and oil drums used in the New York set will be re-used while some concert signs in Johannesburg will be used as roofing.” The seven-point Live Earth Pledge asks individuals to demand that their countries “join an international treaty within the next two years that cuts global warming pollution by 90 percent in developed countries and by more than half worldwide.” It also “asks people to cut their own pollution, to make their homes, business, schools and transport more energy efficient, and to plant new trees and preserve forests.” “We have to get all nations involved, but in order to accomplish that we have to bring about a sea change in public opinion,” said Gore. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) both signed the pledge in June.

ENVIRONMENT — BUSH GUTS WETLAND PROTECTION POLICIES AFTER HEAVY INDUSTRY LOBBYING: In 2004, President Bush announced that “[i]nstead of just limiting our losses, we will expand the wetlands of America,” proposing to “create one million acres of wetlands and restore another million damaged by development” by the end of the decade. Wetlands are a crucial part of America’s ecosystems, providing biological hubs for “an immense variety of species of microbes, plants, insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, fish, and mammals.” But the New York Times reports today that Bush has reneged on that promise after “a concerted lobbying effort by property developers.” In particular, the administration is scaling back guidelines for enforcing a 2006 Supreme Court decision that would have brought thousands of small streams and wetlands under the protection of the Clean Air Act of 1972. “But just before the new guidelines were to be issued last September, they were pulled back in the face of objections from lobbyists and lawyers for groups concerned that the rules could lead to federal protection of isolated and insignificant swamps.” Last month, the administration again issued new guidelines, “which environmental and recreational groups said were much more narrowly drawn.” Environmental groups have long been concerned about Bush’s wetland policies. In 2005, the Sierra Club noted that the administration was pursuing policies preventing “massive numbers of wetlands from protection under the Clean Water Act.” Today, it notes a worsening trend: “There are definitely waters that will not be protected because of this latest guidance. … The final guidance is clearly weaker than what we saw in the September guidance,” said Navis Bermudez of the Sierra Club.

“GLOBAL WARNING is radically changing the face of Mount Everest, the sons of the men who first reached its summit 54 years ago said.” The sons of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay say “their fathers would no longer recognise the world’s highest mountain,” noting the base camp is now 132 feet lower than it was 53 years ago.

TRIPLE-DIGIT temperatures are expected to set records in parts of the West. Forecasters predicted a high of 107 in Boise, ID, and 125 in Baker, CA. Residents in some states were warned “that outdoor activities could be dangerous except during the cooler early morning hours.”

“THE BALD EAGLE may be soaring back from near-extinction, but hundreds of other imperiled species are foundering, as the federal agency charged with protecting them has sunk into legal, bureaucratic and political turmoil.”

NEARLY HALF of the National Hurricane Center’s employees urged the Bush administration to replace their boss. “The staff of the National Hurricane Center would like nothing more than to return its focus to its primary mission of protecting life and property from hazardous tropical weather,” they wrote, “and leave the political arena it now finds itself in.”

“AN EXODUS of highly trained mid- and upper-level firefighters” from the U.S. Forest Service has left “swaths” of flammable national forests protected by little more than luck. “On any given day, about 40 of 271 U.S. Forest Service engines remain in firehouses rather than on patrol, idled by a shortage of supervisors.” ++

How We Can Survive the Age of Energy Anxiety
Peter Teague, Jeff Navin, The American Prospect via Alternet
July 3, 2007
There is a way to attract a sustainable majority of Americans who will enact, and then defend, comprehensive policies to solve the climate crisis.

Union Heavy Embraces Green Energy as Crucial Vision for the Future
Joan Hamilton, Sierra Magazine via Alternet
July 6, 2007
A new alliance is forming between the labor and environmental movements, beginning with United Steelworkers president Leo Gerard.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves