Live Earth - Greener Than Green?

Bounding down the stairs on Christmas Day at five years old trying to catch Father Christmas doing his business right in the middle of the living room under tree, I rounded the corner only to find he’d already been. Fortunately, I’d been a good boy that particular year, and sitting there was a brand spanking new Amiga 500+ rather than anything unpleasant.

Joining the state-of-the-art computer system (well, it was at the time) was a box containing a rather sought-after video game. Straight from the cartoon was the platform game, to give it its full name: Captain Planet® and the Planeteers™ by Mindscape Games. Environmentalism, back then, had a rather corporate edge.

So inspired was I by Wheeler, Kwame, Linka, Gi and Ma-ti’s heroics in saving the planet, I had the back pages of the instruction manual photocopied, which contained ten eco-friendly tips to help save the planet. A poorly-drawn poster later and the word was out; I’d send anyone who gave a damn about our Earth a copy if they provided a stamped-addressed envelope. One person replied. Still, I think I managed to get through to him, and that I’d done my bit for the environment. I threw the other 19 unused copies in the bin and thought no more of it.

In a similar fashion to the above anecdote, Live Earth's resulting fallout is a confusing lot. Intentions were unclear from the outset; sound bites on Radio 1’s Newsbeat bulletin had many of the US acts struggling to explain what, in fact, climate change actually is.

More to the point, many of these acts were indeed being ferried to their respective stages about by means that were, to put it bluntly, taking rather a large dumped on our o-zone layer. Razorlight appear to be the worst offenders, who went to great troubles to get very enthuse the message in to their art well before their set at Wembley, only for the band to realise they were due to play a gig in Scotland on the same evening. How did they get there? No prizes for guessing. The Planeteers would be spinning in their bio-degradeable graves.

With detractors pointing out that 90% reduction in carbon emissions is pretty much unfeasible, what exactly was the point of Live Earth? That statistic, which may seem like a load of hot air (sorry), was the ‘big picture’. Problem is, it didn’t serve as a call to action to anyone. America won’t bow to such an outlandish idea in the meantime. China has just emerged as a key player in climate change; how to take them on is still a grey area.

Sorry to sound so negative – it’s just things don’t quite add up.

Live8 had a tremendous pressure point aimed directly at Gleneagles, and without it ever taking place, the summit would’ve probably harked back to the days when it was no more than a fireside chat instead of exactly how much each country could pledge to make poverty history.

Even Captain Planet had more of a point to it – do what you can, personally, to reduce waste and leave the planet as you’d expect to find it. That seems to be the soft undertone of Live Earth, but to many (including the 1% populace of the USA who actually tuned in) the message may well be sadly dwarfed by those picking apart the logistics of saving the world.