Investor's Business Daily, July 9th, 2007
Global Warming: If the rock stars who flew hundreds of thousands of miles in their jets to save the earth wanted to hug trees, they could have hugged the forest that once covered Greenland.
We didn't see Sheryl Crow passing out single-sheet allotments of toilet paper to Live Earth concert-goers. But we did see perhaps the biggest-ever exercise in hypocrisy and futility as performers around the globe plugged in and amped up to save the earth from the climate impact of excessive energy consumption.
John Rego, environmental director of Live Earth, insists the multi-continent charade, like the mansions of Gore, Madonna et al., was "carbon-neutral."
"We have chosen a reforestation and agricultural project in Mozambique," he explained. "It is a credible certifiable carbon-diffused project. We are in the process of purchasing a carbon-offset."
Certifiable, yes. Credible, no. Rego did not elaborate on just how many trees have to be planted to offset the emissions of the Lear and Gulfstream jets that flew performers an estimated 222,623 miles, as the Crow flies, to their respective events, not to mention back again.
That's about nine times around the Earth. One hour flying in a Gulfstream jet burns as much fuel as driving your family car for a year.
John Buckley of Carbonfootprint.com has calculated the footprints of the various stars, and we can only conclude that if Bigfoot exists, he (or she) is a musician. The top five performing acts have an annual output of 2,000 tons of carbon. Madonna alone has a footprint of 1,018 tons, according to Buckley.
All this does not factor in the trucks required to transport equipment, the fans transporting themselves or the power needed to stage each show. Then there is the waste.
Dr. Andrea Collins of Cardiff University estimated that the concert at Wembley Stadium produced 59 tons of garbage. It has 2,618 toilets. The aforementioned Ms. Crow, whose hit "Everyday Is A Winding Road" is used to sell Subaru AWDs, must have been very busy.
Carbon offsets are the scam by which greenies from Bon Jovi to Al Gore justify their energy-guzzling. Pay somebody to plant a tree in Mozambique, and your private jet is cleared for take-off.
As Bon Jovi said: "We wrote a check, we took care of our footprint and raised awareness." No fuss, no muss, no guilty conscience, no hardship or sacrifice.
Which is not to say some honesty, even if inadvertent, didn't slip through the hypocrisy.
Interviewed on radio, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame admitted that flying to concert appearances is one of the "least green" things he could do. But that didn't mean he wasn't "interested" in having a "smaller carbon footprint." It's just that, given his busy schedule, a smaller footprint for him would have to wait until he's a "very old person."
When asked if he owned a hybrid car, Waters said he didn't -- and never really thought about it. But, he hastened to add, so as to keep his environmental bona fides intact, he actually knew someone who had an interest in fuel-cell technology. Roger.
While all this was going on, Eske Willerslev, a professor at Copenhagen University and the world's leading expert in extracting DNA from permafrost, was wondering what might be under the Greenland ice sheet that supposedly was melting as the guitars twanged at Live Earth.
So he drilled for samples in the center of the Greenlandic ice sheet, in southern Greenland, and beneath the John Evans glacier in Canada. At the southern Greenland site, according to sciencedaily.com, Willerslev found under kilometer-thick ice fossilized DNA of plant, animal and insect life perhaps 400,000 years old.
The fossil DNA indicated that much of ancient Greenland was a conifer forest teeming with butterflies, moths, flies and beetles. He found an environment very similar to eastern Canada or southern Sweden today. Or maybe even Aspen or Vail.
Willerslev also found that it has been 450,000 years since southern Greenland was entirely ice-free. It was covered with ice during the Eemian interglacial period 125,000 year ago when the climate was five degrees warmer than the interglacial period we live in now.
So it's likely the Greenland ice sheet isn't going anywhere anytime soon. If it did, the jet-setters at Live Earth might have a cool vacation spot for their summer homes.
As we have said repeatedly, the warming and cooling of the Earth is a natural and repetitive phenomenon. The only thing added to the equation are pompous rock stars and demagogic politicians who don't know Earth's past, much less its future.
