Live Earth is a deadbeat duck !

moonrakerz

From today's Sunday Times, worthy of a wider audience - unlike the self-serving bunch who "performed" at Wembley yesterday !

"Live Earth is a deadbeat duck

Roland White

The vast majority of scientists now accept that Al Gore is a man-made phenomenon. There is the odd stubborn sceptic who still believes him to be a natural occurrence that appears during periods of intense sunspot activity (creating an effect known as Al Niño). But on yesterday’s evidence it looks as if we must all change our lifestyles if we hope to escape his worst effects. We might already be too late.
The Live Earth concert – behind which the former US vice-president was the driving force – certainly marked some kind of tipping point for me. If ever anything similar is broadcast again, I will have no hesitation in turning off the television to save electricity, remembering of course not to keep the set on stand-by.
Instead, I will consider the following question: where did we suddenly get the idea that the social problems of the world could be solved if only Madonna got more work? And wasn’t yesterday just another example of the overweening self-importance of modern music and musicians?"

msmiller

how did they all get there? surely not on private jets?

ManAtHome

Sounds like a good idea - get a bunch of above-average carbon footprints together, encourage (or maybe not) billions of people to use more juice watching it, all organised by somebody with a 12k leccie bill who did BA when he was in a position to do something. Perhaps the next one should be called Band Wagon..?

IFA

I don't think these people saw the documentary on BBC not long ago, basically rubbishing all evidence that man made c02 is the main cause for climate change. Try stoppng volcanoes or the effects of the oceans which create by far the most c02 compared to a tiny percentage of man made c02. someone is making money out of this climate change argument and its frankly dispicable.

morg_monster

to be fair i think they did try and get bands who are either UK based or here touring already. But yes we know it is all a bit hypocritical. I went yesterday - and had a great time. I was v cynical about it all before i went but there were some great bands on and I really wanted to see Wembley (which is amazing, btw)! Now, well I'm just slightly less cynical, I do think maybe some of the messages will get through, however I'm not sure it was promoting the right messages in the first place. ie all about turning off the lights when you leave a room and recycling, pretty small stuff. Not about the big matters of industry etc. But maybe it wil make people think about it all a bit more, maybe that is good.

the reason i think it might get through to people? usually its me nagging my bf about remembering to recycle things, etc, but today he has not shut up about it - he went to buy some energy saving lightbulbs for the 2 places we don't have them already, he's shouted at me for not turning the oven off the very second I took the food out of it, and had a go at me because the washing machine was only half full (he didn't realise there was a reduced load button..). He drew the line at taking one of my handmade bags with him when he went shopping today (well they are pink) but did take an old plastic bag in his pocket...Bless him, I wonder if it will last...

I think it is just a bit cliched to moan about Live Earth. OK maybe it won't make a huge difference - but it can't be that bad, can it. We never hear about how much any of the other green campaigns are making a difference to the problem, anyway. And as for people moaning about the energy expended by the whole shebang - really its a drop in the ocean, isn't it. When I was trying to get a tube back yesterday it certainly seemed that most people had used public transport to get there at any rate...

cazrobinson

i'm a greeny, but honestly what a waste of time.

it would be much better to spend the money on something really boring like reducing energy usage, water effiecncy or training kids in the fine arts of plumbing and engineering.

i wonder how much it cost to put on and how much profit was made?

moonrakerz

morg_monster wrote: »

When I was trying to get a tube back yesterday it certainly seemed that most people had used public transport to get there at any rate...

I bet Madonna didn't get a cheap day return from Tisbury to Waterloo !!!

full-time-mum

cazrobinson wrote: »

i'm a greeny, but honestly what a waste of time.

it would be much better to spend the money on something really boring like reducing energy usage, water effiecncy or training kids in the fine arts of plumbing and engineering.

Subsidising solar panels - I'd love one of these to reduce my fuel usage but can't afford the initial outlay.

cazrobinson

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,288195,00.html

follow the money and think of the merchandise!!!

Cardew

ManAtHome wrote: »

all organised by somebody with a 12k leccie bill who did BA when he was in a position to do something. Perhaps the next one should be called Band Wagon..?

This is just one of his homes:


As Gore's doom and gloom documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, picks up the Best Documentary Oscar, an outfit called the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has, rather inconveniently for the born-again eco-mentalist, picked up the phone and discovered that the man previously famous for being exceedingly dull used 221,000 kWh of electricity in 2006. Thanks to that pesky Freedom of Information Act, we discover that, last August alone, Gore used 22,619 kWh – more than an average American family uses in a year. Since the release of Gore’s hand-wringing documentary, his personal energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh to 18,400 kWh a month.

tom.senex

I was in Brentford today and noticed lots of those eletric german reg smart cars being loaded on to a lorry ready to be ferried back to germany. how about that?