Well, Thaddeus and I have arrived at Giants Stadium, the main event is rapidly approaching, and, from the looks of the parking lot, not too many of our fellow concertgoers followed our lead and the suggestion of the concert organizers and took the bus. But that's ok -- Live Earth, its participants and promoters keep reminding us, is not going to solve this whole global warming problem over night. It's just a "launch event," said a publicist in a recent issue of Rolling Stone. A "launch event" reiterated Live Earth creator Kevin Wall to Variety, "not a silver bullet"; better yet, "a tipping point of behavioral change." Despite the out-of-this world promises in the press kit for the concert extravaganza -- "more than 100 music artists"; "2 billion people"; "unprecedented global media architecture" -- you get the sense that Wall and Live Earth guru Al Gore are trying to keep any hopes for immediate climatological salvation, well, down-to-earth. A call to arms -- not a victory cry.

Ok, fair enough. As any right-headed viewer of Gore's Oscar-winning documentary should know by now, there's not much room left for equivocation on global warming -- we're talking systemic change, and fast. You have to start somewhere. As one reporter put it, Live Earth can be a "message to people to change their lifestyles."

And lifestyles are changing. As the New York Times reported last week, sales for Toyota's "built from the ground up" hybrid, the Prius, are up a whopping 93.7% from last year, well outperforming the hybrid versions of popular models offered by other car companies. Why? According to a market research poll, a sizable majority (57%) of Prius owners bought their eco-friendly ride because "it makes a statement about me," almost double the number that offered the same explanation three years ago. By contrast, 36% cited the car's higher fuel economy, and only one in four was attracted by its lower emissions. As the article concluded, "The Prius has become, in a sense, the four-wheel equivalent of those popular rubber ‘issue bracelets'...it shows the world that its owner cares." Another recent Times article, aptly titled "Buying Into the Green Movement", found "that vision of an eco-sensitive life as a series of choices about what to buy appeals to millions of consumers and arguably defines the current environmental movement as equal parts concern for the earth and for making a stylish statement." Even Time Out New York, which normally busies itself with ferreting out hip downtown night spots, implores readers to "be earth-friendly on your terms" on this week's cover.

The cynic in me says this is not ideal. George Black of the Natural Resources Defense Council calls it "eco-narcissism", which might just as well describe the spectacle of scores of pop music celebrities prancing about on stage for twenty-four hours of self-congratulatory hand wringing about the environment. After all, nothing says narcissistic excess like rock-and-roll, and those unparalleled purveyors of the aesthetic of overconsumption are unlikely role models for an environmental movement that must, ultimately, be about a wholesale reconsideration of current patterns of production and consumption, not simply pricey green homes and stylish cotton jeans.

Lest we forget when he shares the stage with Gore et al later today, in late April the proudly "light green" John Mayer reminded readers of his awesomely inane blog, "I drive a Porsche SUV, I still drink lots of bottled water, and I will be flying private charter several times during my summer tour." Sure, it's a good thing that Kanye West is using his public stature to tell millions of fans about the urgency of global warming, but his music is still used to shill SUVs in television commercials.

Just because the messenger is flawed, of course, doesn't mean the message itself is, and maybe it's our responsibility as the consuming public to send a message back to the green celebrities and other eco-narcissists. Reversing the climate crisis will mean doing away with a consumer culture that is fed by and feeds off of our collective celebrity worship. Buying green can't just mean buying different; it has to mean buying less. Let's hope some of today's performers will get serious about changing lifestyles, not just car models.

Comments (15)

1. "Just because the messenger is flawed, of course, doesn't mean the message itself is..."

   No, just means the Standard Operating Procedure, by which politicians and celebrities lecture THE REST OF US about how WE should "change our lifestyles", while they (like Gore) "buy off their carbon footprint" from companies that THEY founded (i.e. buying stock in their own company)....or more often, do nothing.

   But since "they mean well", they get a pass and a "Don't concentrate on the hypocritical messenger, look at the message and straighten YOUR act out, John/Jane Q. Public....we're off to Aruba on our private jet to do some jet-skiing and ATV'ing up the sand dunes!"

   Posted by Mask at 07/07/2007 @ 2:13pm

2. BTW, ask here (as I didn on the other Live Earth thread)...

   are all the performances....acoustic?

   or are the amps AND guitars AND stadium lights AND Jumbotron TVs, etc. powered by solar panels?

   Posted by Mask at 07/07/2007 @ 2:14pm

3. Another excuse for a monster concert and celebrity love fest, and nothing more. This will accomplish nothing against global warming, unless Al Gore and others have suddenly found a way to alter the cyclic solar patterns that are currently in play.

   http://www.junkscience.com/

   http://www.oism.org/news/s49p1828.htm

   Many of the assertions Gore makes in his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," have been refuted by science, both before and after he made them. Gore can show sincerity in his plea for scientific honesty by publicly acknowledging where science has rebutted his claims.

   For example, Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame."

   Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."

   Gore claims global warming is causing more tornadoes. Yet the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in February that there has been no scientific link established between global warming and tornadoes.

   Gore claims global warming is causing more frequent and severe hurricanes. However, hurricane expert Chris Landsea published a study on May 1 documenting that hurricane activity is no higher now than in decades past. Hurricane expert William Gray reported just a few days earlier, on April 27, that the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined in the past 40 years. Hurricane scientists reported in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters that global warming enhances wind shear, which will prevent a significant increase in future hurricane activity.

   Gore claims global warming is causing an expansion of African deserts. However, the Sept. 16, 2002, issue of New Scientist reports, "Africa's deserts are in 'spectacular' retreat . . . making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa."

   Gore argues Greenland is in rapid meltdown, and that this threatens to raise sea levels by 20 feet. But according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology, "the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins and growing inland, with a small overall mass gain." In late 2006, researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that the past two decades were the coldest for Greenland since the 1910s.

   Gore claims the Antarctic ice sheet is melting because of global warming. Yet the Jan. 14, 2002, issue of Nature magazine reported Antarctica as a whole has been dramatically cooling for decades. More recently, scientists reported in the September 2006 issue of the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, that satellite measurements of the Antarctic ice sheet showed significant growth between 1992 and 2003. And the U.N. Climate Change panel reported in February 2007 that Antarctica is unlikely to lose any ice mass during the remainder of the century.

   http://globalwarminghoax.wordpress.com/

   Posted by antiliberal at 07/07/2007 @ 3:59pm

4. Masky & Antylib, May I inject a bit of bipartisanship? Sticking strictly to the article posted, there is little to disagree with....(references to Algore's documentary and related comments notwithstanding)

   Even though I believe that the global warming hysteria is the product of politicians, activists and assorted busy bodies who have way too much time on their hands, Lets give Max Fraser some credit for introducing us to the phrase eco-narcissism and exposing many instances of it, and lets concede that there are tangible benefits to living a life of less consumption, conspicuous and otherwise.......

   Posted by davebarlett at 07/07/2007 @ 4:58pm

5. Not that i'm giving up my SUV or frequent steak dinners, of course.....

   Posted by davebarlett at 07/07/2007 @ 5:00pm

6. Posted by DAVEBARLETT 07/07/2007 @ 4:58pm

   I wasn't hitting Mr Fraser, DAVE. His is about the most honest assessment of this ego-trip, I've seen....yet he too fails to mention Gore's complicity.

   Posted by Mask at 07/07/2007 @ 5:13pm

7. hey "SUV"ers

   don't you have kids? do you drink gasoline?--even if you don't believe in global warming, gasoline is still poison. it seems obvious that the less gas we expose ourselves to, the better of we'll be.

   as to "live earth"...............

   it seems ironic to power thousands of watts of electrical equipment trucked-in on diesel sucking monsters in order to tell us to use less electricity and fuel

   i wonder how much of the garbage from these concerts will be recycled

   oh well

   Posted by frosty zoom at 07/07/2007 @ 5:29pm

8. "better off"

   oops

   Posted by frosty zoom at 07/07/2007 @ 5:54pm

9. here in Montauk where the sun,sand,sea, and seashells are free no eco-narcissist dare tread...

   Posted by Ocean Lover at 07/07/2007 @ 6:16pm

10. OK, while we are on the subject, let's get this straight:

    "The dirty little secret about hybrids is that their batteries and extensive use of aluminium parts make them costly to build in energy terms as well as financial terms. One life-cycle assessment claims that, from factory floor to scrap heap, a Prius consumes more energy even than a Hummer H3."

    from The Economist, Feb 9 2007, 'Rudolf's Revenge'. (I'd include the url, but the Nation web site won't let me, because it is apparently 'too long')

    Posted by maddox at 07/07/2007 @ 8:42pm

11. I guess we are all feeling a bit guilty these days. It seems humanity needs to shape up or ship out. We should feel guilty. We could fight all this nasty corporate and governmental behavior but instead we would rather stay safe and complacent. Global warming shouldn't get you too worked up. Who really likes winter anyway? What you might want to worry about is food supplies. We will see huge growth of urban populations, woops, well the folks in Asia and Africa will see that. We will see a huge decline in wild fish populations. (Yep that's affirmative). We will see skinny whales. If the whales are starving then what's going to happen to the human populations that rely on the seas for sustinance? Hhhmmmmmm? Seems the whales may have a bit more experience fishing. Anyway back to Live Earth. If we all get together we can all move to Mars and let the Earth be. Maybe it will fix itself in time. So is Live Mars next? God I hope so. We are out of excuses here. If global warming kills us all, what can you say but "We deserved it"? Sure you might tell yourself that there was nothing you could do but, are you lying to yourself? Of course this concert as well as everyone's newfound eco-centric leanings are the flavor of the week. If anyone meant it we'd have no problems. The real truth is that we all (Humanity) live under a global facism and could liberate ourselves but are too scared and pathetic to do so. It's all the same. There are differences in the details but it's all the same. Americans die from obesity while people in Darfur starve. Greeks die from record high temperatures while Afghanis die in NATO bombings. The guys in the Congo fight for their land and mineral rights. Chavez is fighting the Conglomerate for control of his country's resources. We just let our government sell our wilderness to the oil companies because some weird twist of fate put a well connected half wit in the driver's seat. And even though we all know that he and those he represents want to pillage and plunder all they survey, we are just too scared to act. I say Long Live Global Warming. We deserve anything this world dishes out.

    Posted by abnorml at 07/08/2007 @ 12:00am

12. antiliberal-- i'm not trying to get into a whole debate about al gore, but you should know that at least one of his positions in the text you quoted has been mischaracterized. he says that some scientists now believe that global warming will yield stronger storms (due to rising ocean temperatures), not more of them.

    Posted by sabi at 07/08/2007 @ 4:29pm

13. Posted by ANTILIBERAL 07/07/2007 @ 3:59pm

    I was going to do a detailed refutation of each of your examples, with all the research that implies, but as I was looking at the original source for your first example, I realized I didn't need to go any further than that to make the point that needs to be made.

    For example, Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame."

    This short paragraph is the epitome of how anti-science apologists on a whole array of scientific issues (global warming, evolution, cosmology, etc., etc. ad infinitum) abuse the very essence of science. They use quote mining, selective interpretation, exclusion of inconvenient facts, and misconstrual of data and conclusion to try and support positions that simply do not fit the available data on the question at hand. It is a highly disingenuous form of pseudo-science, one that uses the very efforts of legitimate scientists to undermine legitimate science and sow unwarranted doubt on matters that scientists consider settled.

    This exercise in pseudo-science has a number of elements and your first example displays them all. First, the citation is always deliberately vague to some degree, invariably making checking that citation more difficult by design. In your example, not only is the Journal of Climate quite difficult to access unless you have access to a fairly large university library or happen to be a member of the American Meteorological Society, since the journal itself is restricted access, but it is also a bi-monthly journal, so there are two September issues, thus clouding the waters a bit more. Then of course, you did not cite any of the really relevant information, like the title or authors of the article. The actual reference should have been:

    Fowler, H. J. and D. R. Archer. "Conflicting Signals of Climatic Change in the Upper Indus Basin" Journal of Climate Volume 19, Issue 17 (September 2006), pp. 4276–4293.

    From the obscuring of sources, we move on to the second technique on display, that of misattribution. The quote you use does not appear anywhere in Fowler and Archer's article, which I have carefully reviewed and searched in an attempt to find a passage that is even similar, but none exists. I'm sure you will argue that this was not meant to be a quote from Fowler and Archer, but the presentation of it is specifically designed to give that impression. And that impression leads directly to the next and most insidious of these pseudo-scientific techniques; exclusion of evidence and misconstrual of data and conclusions.

    First is the exclusion of evidence, in the form of this statement that "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains..." which blatantly ignores the authors' own limitions on their study and their recognition of the wider situation in the Himalayas. I'll quote from the article's abstract rather than bother to try and summarize:

    "The observed downward trend in summer temperature and runoff is consistent with the observed thickening and expansion of Karakoram glaciers, in contrast to widespread decay and retreat in the eastern Himalayas." [emphasis mine]

    This was a limited study of the Karakoram range and it's associated systems, which are only one part of the western Himalayan system. The studies they cite are well known and provide the evidence that makes the retreat of glaciers in the vast majority of the Himalayas (the eastern or Greater Himalayas) well-establish fact.

    Then of course there is the implication in the rest of that quote that Fowler and Archer's study refutes global warming in general, which it specifically does not. The authors, in fact, point to explanations (which fall outside the limited scope of their study) that include both the retreat in the eastern Himalayas and the advances in Karakoram. Again, I'll quote their actual conclusions on these matters:

    "Increase in diurnal temperature range (DTR) is consistently observed in all seasons and the annual dataset, a pattern shared by much of the Indian subcontinent but in direct contrast to both GCM projections and the narrowing of DTR seen worldwide. This divergence commenced around the middle of the twentieth century and is thought to result from changes in large-scale circulation patterns and feedback processes associated with the Indian monsoon. ...the shared response with the Indian subcontinent suggests a regional or latitudinal effect associated with large-scale climatic processes and their feedbacks, and related to changes in the monsoon circulation. Recent modeling work by Ramanathan et al. (2005) suggests that aerosol cooling brought about by the Asian Brown Cloud in the nonmonsoonal months from October to May has caused the observed cooling of sea surface temperatures over the North Indian Ocean. This, in turn, weakens the monsoon circulation and causes a southward shift, reducing rainfall in India by ∼5%. In the UIB, summer precipitation has increased but this may be due to the incursion of more westerly weather rather than monsoonal incursions. The relationship with circulation patterns will be investigated in further work."

    I'll note for those of you who do not know, the Asian brown cloud is a pollution phenomenon associated with the inter-monsoon season in the Indian subcontinent that creates extensive haze (think smog) and is produced by, you guessed it, humans. The best treatment of this issue is found in the UNEP Impact Study "The Atmospheric Brown Cloud : Climate and other Environmental Impacts" [rrcap.unep.org]. It is an effect directly involved in the same processes as global warming, since the aerosols involved in this cooling process are produced by major sources of global warming gasses (especially biomass and fossil fuel burning.) But whereas the gasses (and resulting warming effect) are long lived and accumulative, the cooling effect from aerosols is short lived and non-accumulative (due to their short life spans in the environment.) So there is little in this for deniers to latch on to.

    What all this amounts to is we have Antiliberal (or more accurately, his source for these "examples") employing the usual tactics of pseudo-scientific deniers, and with no more validity than it usually musters, i.e. none. The problems are really not with these foolish cranks and well-paid lackeys who spout this garbage but with the money behind them, the vested interests who simply don't care what happens to the planet once they've made their billions and had their fun, believing that money on that scale can buy you out of almost anything. And they may be right, but that will hardly help the rest of us or the other unfortunate inhabitants of this planet should we fail to heed the knowledge that science reveals for us.

    Posted by Stwriley at 07/08/2007 @ 8:18pm

14. Posted by STWRILEY 07/08/2007 @ 8:18pm

    luvvy is lying again? No wonder he has to keep changing his name to get people to talk to him

    Posted by Will C. at 07/09/2007 @ 12:50am

15. Reversing the climate crisis will mean doing away with a consumer culture that is fed by and feeds off of our collective celebrity worship.

    (1) Who exactly will "do away" with our culture? Is the writer advocating doing more than turning our noses at the vulgar masses? Should the government force a toning down of the celebrity culture? Should police upset the newsstands that sell celebrity magazines? Should the FCC come down hard on The Insider and Entertainment Tonight? Should it be illegal for movie stars to give interviews?

    These flourishes of would-be totalitarianism that seem to crop up in leftie (and right-wing) screeds against our society give me pause.

    (2) The writer gives an example of how the market has resulted in a positive change, environmentally speaking, (the Prius) but gives no vision of what our society would be like if we were to "do away" with the things he dislikes. Would I be able to go see a concert or movie when I wanted, or would my celebrity-worship be rationed out by local authorities? Would my trip to the grocery store or K-Mart be interrupted by a "Consumption Agent" at the door who makes sure I am not buying too much?

    I submit that it will be consumerism, if anything, that will improve our environmental situation. Caring individuals should work towards harnessing its power, not doing away with it.

    "Where the danger lies, therein lies the saving power."

    Discuss.

    Posted by BlueSpark at 07/09/2007 @ 09:51am