(Originally posted in the Stratford Star newspaper on July 14, 2011, in “Walsh’s Wonderings”)
Earlier this month, Canada joined France, Japan and Russia by refusing to extend the Kyoto Protocol, which seeks to limit the emissions of industrialized countries (the US reiterated at a recent G8 dinner that it would continue to fight for climate change “outside the Protocol”). Poor and emerging economies wanted to extend the pact, but the departure of these big countries at U.N. climate talks that ran from June 6th to June 17th in Bonn, Germany, have cast a pall over the Green movement. While I respect how important “green” sustainable living is to the future of our planet, the infancy of this movement makes for great comedy.
Take carbon offsets, for example. A carbon offset is a reduction in the emissions of greenhouse gases or any carbon dioxide equivalent in order to make up the emissions made somewhere else. In other words, my wife guilts me into buying and planting trees to make up for the fact that I bought an SUV six years ago. In theory, they bridge the gap between what we should do and what we will do. In practice, however, they can be ridiculous. Rather than doing the hard work of capping harmful emissions, companies turn to carbon offsets as sinners do to the Catholic confessional: do what you like, but one visit to the priest absolves all sins. Unlike your spiritual salvation, however, you don’t need to wait long to see if it worked; former vice president Al Gore gives you the dispensation immediately (especially if you work for Generation Investment Management, a company Al Gore co-founded in 2004 that buys carbon offsets for all its employees).
The logic defies me. The next time I go out to eat, I will respond to my doctor’s concerns about my weight with, “I’ll order all the food I want, but I’ll also make sure to buy my dog a big salad. That way, it’s almost like I ate what I was supposed to, and not like the bloated pig I’ve become.” Even better, carbon offsets are now treated as a commodity. The Kyoto Protocol sanctioned offsets as a way for governments and private companies to earn carbon credits that could be traded in the global marketplace. The protocol established the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a watchdog that ensures “real” benefits as a result of the actions taken. In my case, I can store up the “credits” I created when I was forced to eat a salad after I’d run out of pizza last weekend and really go hog wild before the next tailgate. I haven’t worked out the math yet, but I’m thinking one salad offsets about 6,000 calories. God I love healthy living.
Luckily, the creators of the Kyoto Protocol are not as dumb as I am, so surely they had a better way to get the word out to the public before the initiative began. After setting these important standards, the next logical step was to seek out high-profile backers such as Al Gore to create… the 2007 Live Earth Benefit for Climate Protection. Musicians from all over the world performed to raise awareness of the climate crisis by… creating a small climate crisis. You might remember the 7-7-07 advertisements, or maybe you just remember a string of really bad musicians preaching about turning the lights off when you leave the room. In the pantheon of benefit concerts, it registers somewhere alongside the 2003 Pack 13 Polka Marathon Boy Scout Benefit.
First of all, if you can’t get Bono for your benefit concert, you have to know something’s wrong. He is to “important shows” what Elton John is to celebrity funerals. Even that desiccated corpse from the Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldof, complained, “We are all (expletive deleted) conscious of global warming.” Did the guy who created Live Aid and “Do They Know It’s Christmas” just bitch-slap Al Gore?
Bob and Bono must have seen the p.r. avalanche coming: more than 150 performers flew more than 222,000 miles around the world to appear in concerts from Tokyo to Hamburg, many carrying their own dancers, crew members, hair stylists, etc. As an estimated two billion people watched or listened during the 24-hour concert, MSN streamed 30 million videos of the concert to over 8 million people around the globe. Assuming the typical computer uses 100-140 watts in addition to the 35 watts of a typical 17-inch display, and the average of 5 videos each lasted for the length of a typical Scissor Sisters song, you’re talking, like… many, many hundreds and thousands of energy (I was told there’d be no math).
The final tally from the “Live Earth Carbon Assessment and Footprint Report” was actually 19,708 tons of emissions. At 5-30 dollars per ton to offset, that’s… you know, I don’t know what the hell that is. What is a credit? Where do you get them, and for how much? Even my dog has looked up from his salad for this one.
It was fitting that the “have your cake and eat it, too” idea of carbon offsets was highlighted by the biggest collection of mediocre musicians in music history. What better way to promote a lighter carbon footprint than by headlining your show with Madonna, one of the world’s worst offenders at an estimated 1,018 tons of emissions per year while on tour according to John Buckley, managing director of CarbonFootprint.com.
In short, Live Earth was like hosting a wet t-shirt contest to encourage women’s rights. While the organizers did realize their goal of “zero net impact,” it probably wasn’t what they had in mind. Now the Kyoto Protocol seems destined for the same fate, and one can’t help hoping someone else will come along with a bigger footprint and a clearer plan to get us all moving in the right direction.
