Al Gore had a good February.
To nobody’s surprise, his shockumentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won two Oscars (Melissa Etheridge’s song took the second honor). He also teamed up with an outfit called SOS - Save Our Selves - to announce a series of climate awareness concerts slated for July 2007.
Dubbed Live Earth, the concerts are already as star-studded as they are ambitious.
Not a bad lineup. And not a bad idea, either. After all, concerts and causes go together like Hall and Oates. From Woodstock to Farm Aid to Live Aid, there’s nothing like a good rock show to get idealistic youth focused on some plight or another, even if just for one day.
This time, of course, the focus will be on Mother Earth and collectively lowering our emissions (despite the ironic twist that rock concerts tend to promote the burning of certain vegetation). “In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to reach billions of people,” Gore said, “The climate crisis will only be stopped by an unprecedented and sustained global movement.”
True to Gore’s desire for a global movement, the concerts are scheduled for Sydney, Australia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Shanghai, China; London, England; Kyoto, Japan; Johannesburg, South Africa; and a U.S. city that has yet to be determined. Gore added that the campaign plans to stage the first-ever rock concert on Antarctica.
Antarctica? In July? We can only hope that Gore is enough of a climate expert to know that the frozen continent, not terribly hospitable under the best of circumstances, is downright deadly in winter. The lowest temperature ever recorded on the planet, -129 F, was recorded in Antarctica.
In July.
Snow Patrol might be already slated for that gig. And it will be interesting to see what intrepid concertgoers will be willing to schlep to McMurdo Sound to be a part of history. Dude, are you on Verizon or Cingular? I can’t get a signal. Is there a Starbucks’ around here?
Gore’s crusade took a bit of a hit this week when the Tennessee Center for Policy Research dug up, and published, the Gore family utility bills. Between gas and electric, the Gores’ 20-room mansion and adjoining pool house ate up about $30,000 in both 2005 and 2006. That’s twenty times the national average.
To be fair, the Gores are installing solar panels on the house. And perhaps it’s not right to single them out. Other self-anointed eco-warriors have a similarly tough time living up to their own standards. Producer Laurie David slams drivers of SUV’s as “terrorist enablers,” yet makes regular use of her own Gulfstream. (It takes more than a few trips to the grocery store in a Hummer to make up for the Sasquatch-sized carbon footprint of a private jet.)
Still, with the help of Live Earth, Gore wants billions of people to start making hard choices about energy consumption. And he’s in favor of government coercion to help us make the right ones. Yet the “global movement” he espouses apparently doesn’t have to start at a certain, posh address in Nashville.
It starts, apparently, with the average Joe, the guy whose annual salary equals the Gores’ utility bill. A few tunes from the Chili Peppers should convince him to take the bus to work, even if that adds several hours to his weekly commute.
We should be wary of causes spearheaded by people who, passionate as they may be, have the resources to afford, or shield themselves from, the consequences of their own ideas.
People like Al Gore, Oscar-winner. He wants to reach two billion people with his message.
If he followed his own advice, he could bump that to two billion and one.