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EDITORIAL: Climate message lost in 'Live Earth' spectacle
Staff Editorial
The Daily Athenaeum (West Virginia U.)
07/11/2007

(U-WIRE) MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Thanks to the Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," former Vice President Al Gore has become a rock star in the world of global climate change.

This weekend saw another of Gore's climate change projects, Live Earth. According to the Web site, LiveEarth.org, Live Earth used "the global reach of music to engage people on a mass scale to combat our climate crisis."

Live Earth followed the vein of recent Live concerts designed to appeal to specific causes, such as Live Aid and Live 8, each transmitting from various points across the world to the tune of millions, if not billions, watching on television and listening through the radio.

According to a press release from the concert Web site, MSN's live, streaming broadcast drew 10 million requests for the show, the most for an online presentation, beating Live 8 in 2005.

Back on television, an estimated 19 million viewers found some coverage of the show during the day, but only 2.9 million tuned in for the prime time presentation - beaten by a rerun of "Monsters Inc."

The concert, which aimed to raise awareness of the hotly debated issue of climate change, was a nice idea, but it was no "Inconvenient Truth."

The main reason behind the concert was to raise awareness to global warming and to encourage us, as human beings, to minimize our carbon footprints. Sadly, the appeal was buried under the spectacle of the event and the talent performing.

While the this specific Live concert might have had good intentions, the idea of appealing for mass conservation at the same time as staging massive concerts on seven continents, broadcasting to millions, if not billions, of electricity-burning television sets, to radios in gas burning cars may seems a little contradictory.

The concert can claim to be "green" in its many approaches to bringing talent together, to the way the Web site is hosted - LiveEarth.org touts an eco-friendly host - but it is still a mass consumption of energy, burning the very elements we need to keep out of our environment.

Let us hope that in the end, Live Earth does prove beneficial, and that the means to broadcast it were not lost to an audience more interested in seeing The Police perform than becoming more aware of climate change.

Copyright ©2007 The Daily Athenaeum via UWire



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