Al Gore’s “Live Earth” international jamboree was a truly global endeavor with a truly global carbon footprint. The organizers emphasized emissions would be offset through a Mozambique tree-planting project. I wonder how many trees this would take, though. To transport the horde of star musicians, powerful Lear and Gulfstream jets flew approximately 223,623 miles - about nine times the Earth’s circumference. And a one-hour flight in a Gulfstream jet burns as much fuel as driving your family car for a year. The concert at Wembley stadium in London alone produced 59 tons of trash. The parking-lot of New Jersey’s Giants Stadium resembled a venue for college tailgate, full of youngsters who cheered for the environment with beer bottles and hot dogs.

It took a 4-hour bus-ride, a train and another shuttle bus for the Bureaucrash team to get from D.C. to New York and hear Ludacris yell, “I wanna lick you from your head to your toes,” in between prattling by Leonardo Di Caprio and Rachel Weisz about how the time to act is now. There might have been the occasional flower-dressed hippie in the audience, but the majority seemed to care about the performers much more than about the environmental propaganda. Gore’s solemn calls resonated poorly with a guy close to my seat, who was nonchalantly throwing around peanut shells and never brought the packaging to the recycle bins. In addition to global warming, Melissa Etheridge haphazardly commented on politics (“I remember when we had a president who was a criminal”) and expressed disappointment as to why flying cars had not spread by the year 2000. Who would not take her seriously? Forget about science. Disregard the fact that researchers have not come up with a consensus on whether glboal warming is a serious problem and to what extent it is driven by anthropogenic activities. Musicians know best: Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist Flea prophesied that “The climate change situation is the No. 1 problem facing humanity,” and Chester Bennington of the rock-rap band Linkin Park has argued that following Gore’s agenda is costless. A high school kid would have had the same credibility to address the topic. It is one thing to have celebrities directing attention to the factual evidence about the situation in Africa (the Live 8 in 2005), and it is entirely different to use them as mouthpieces to promote Al Gore’s scare-them-green agenda.

Sheryl Crowe, whose music was a backgrounder for a 4×4 Outback SUV commercial, and Madonna, whose annual carbon foot print is estimated to be 100 times that of the average Briton, demanded awareness of global warming. This is not surprising - if green is the new black, it is in the self-interest of musicians to demand selflessness from the audience, hoping to get some positive publicity out of the latest fad. To think otherwise would be naïve. Rather than dig deeply into the supposed impact of “Live Earth”, the global media devoted equal if not more coverage to enumerating the singers and attending celebrities, commenting on who said the f-word when, and revealing that Madonna’s charity fund owns shares in Alcoa and the Ford Motor Company. Surprise, surprise. Political activist Bob Geldof, who was the mastermind behind Live 8, labeled the event accurately: “It was just an enormous pop concert for the umpteenth time.”