A Look Back on Live Earth
By Ray Waddell
Remember Live Earth? We thought so.
Last summer's global megaconcerts were precedent-setting on many fronts, from the clarity of the cause and the mammoth logistical challenges faced, to the ambitiously green staging of the shows and the multiplatform mass-messaging.
They pulled off their primary goals: raising awareness, executing as green an event as possible and setting a new standard for environmentally friendly live entertainment. Live Earth was a carbon-neutral event on a global scale, reaching an estimated 2 billion people with a message about climate crisis.
While artists have for decades supported environmental issues, Live Earth in many ways galvanized the live music industry toward a common cause. "Live Earth was that great big spotlight on an issue we all were kind of working on and aware of," says Jason Garner, CEO of North American Music for Live Nation, which produced Live Earth concerts in new York; London; Hamburg; Washington, D.C.; and Shanghai, China.
"Live Earth united the industry behind this movement," Garner continues. "We were already on our way to sorting through it, but they took it and moved it to the forefront as a major issue that every entertainment company has to be aware of because it's important to the fans and the artists, and that's what we're all here for."
The question is, Does Live Earth's message live on? Its executive producer, Kevin Wall, whose extensive résumé includes Live Aid in 1985 and Live 8 two decades later, is obsessed with making that happen, though it's a process fraught with challenges.
"When we worked on Live 8 or Live Aid, we could say, 'This young person here in Africa is starving and they're going to die unless you send $20.' A person at home could have a feeling of emotional attachment, reach into their pocket and pull $20 out, giving it to you and that kid would live for a year," Wall says. "With the environment, the reason this has never happened before on a global basis is there's no immediate result you could look for. It's about the air we breathe, the climate, etc. That made it very tough."
Live Earth has now transitioned from a one-time event producer to an "ongoing advocacy organization harnessing the power of entertainment to deliver a solutions-driven, action-oriented message to a global audience to combat the climate crisis," according to Live Earth marketing/PR director Ehrin Cummings.
So now that the concerts are a memory, this clearly isn't a case of problem solved. "There are changes happening . . . but in general when you read these scientific reports that keep coming out you realize that these problems didn't just go away because we did a concert, or a movie won an Academy Award, or Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize," says Wall, who received the Humanitarian Award at the Billboard Touring Conference last fall for his Live Earth efforts. "This crisis is only going to go away because real actions are taken."
Wall's goal now is to work with Gore to get the "Kyoto 2" treaty ratified around the world. A series of fall concerts and events are geared to draw attention to the issue (see story, page 35).
"We've done the global awareness thing and we've moved the needle. Certainly the greening issue and sustainability is talked about in every corporation in every country in the world today and we're part of that," he says. "Now we're going to get very specific with that emotional 'ask' in trying to achieve a very specific goal, which is the Kyoto 2 treaty."
Meanwhile, the ongoing voice of Live Earth will be heard via an industry "best practices" guide. The organization will soon publish a book with the working title of "Live Earth Sustainable Standards (LESS)" in conjunction with the British Standards Institute. In the fall, live events will be able to green their projects according to this standard and receive a certification.
While "LESS" will be a lasting legacy, Live Earth might well be remembered as a touch point to the evolution of media and how people consume live events.
Wall says that in delivering Live Earth, "we really were challenged with old media versus new media." In the United States, Live Earth claimed an aggregate 19 million viewers across its various TV outlets. However, he says the more impressive feat was what Live Earth generated online. "We ended up with over 100 million uniques. The press focused in on the NBC prime-time number and didn't focus in on the new-media number, and I think we are in an evolving state today that's no longer about appointment TV and what happens on a network."
Today's music fans are "platform agnostic," Wall says. "The real story was in digital form. We broke all records, it was a multiple of five above anything that had ever been done in this country."
MAKE IT GREEN
Live Earth organizers were always aware of the potential hypocrisy involved in staging a global rock concert against climate change. So not only was there the challenge of producing such a massive undertaking, with 150 acts at 11 sites around the world, it also had to be green.
By all measures, Live Earth achieved the environmental goals of its event. "The idea was to produce a green event from start to finish," says Josh Stempel, captain of the Live Earth "green team."
Going in, producers wanted to reduce impact and increase efficiencies in the areas of energy use, transportation and waste. Then they wanted to accurately measure how well they did in those areas, conduct an "accounting" and then purchase carbon offsets to effectively create a carbon-neutral event. (Buying carbon offsets is the act of making contributions to a separate project or organization to help support renewable energy sources.)
Stempel says, "We did a little bit of comparison analysis, and when you look at other events like the Super Bowl, World Cup or Olympics, you'll see that in terms of the music space that Live Earth is really setting the standards as to what a green event is, what a carbon-neutral event is in the music space." Live Earth calculated its estimated gross carbon emissions, throughout its 10-month planning and execution process and including the concert day itself, at 19,708 tons.
By comparison, according to Stempel, the carbon accounting for the 2006 Super Bowl was roughly 500 tons for the one-day event. The World Cup greenhouse gas accounting captured approximately 92,000 tons of carbon equivalents, and the 16-day 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, measured total carbon emissions at 106,000 tons. "The important thing to note here," Stempel says, "is that all of these events, and Live Earth, have committed to making sustainable live events to reduce environmental impact."
Indeed, Live Earth's overall "diversion rate" was 81%, meaning that of all the waste created and collected at the events, 81% of it didn't go to landfills. "It was composted and turned back into dirt or mulch, or it was recycled in the form of plastic or aluminum or something like that. And that's really unprecedented for a set of events the scale of Live Earth," Stempel says.
Day of show, Live Earth also raised the bar in terms of its emissions footprint, purchasing renewable energy credits to offset some 1,000 tons of carbon emissions and somewhere between 300 and 400 tons of production-related emissions.
"The audience transportation for events like this represents around 87% of the emissions related to the event because you're moving thousands of people," Stempel says. "At Giants Stadium we got the public transportation usage up to 23%, [and] everybody I talked to at New Jersey Transit and elsewhere said that was unprecedented."
The question remains: Is such sustainability sustainable? Stempel thinks it is. "A lot of things Live Earth pioneered I believe are continuing," he says. "A lot depends on the tour manager and the artists to continue on their own, and Live Earth is certainly going to help people do that."
Of course, some touring professionals talk a good green game until they see increases in budgets of as much as double-digit percentages in the short term. But according to MusicMatters president Michael Martin, "Greening an event doesn't have to add more to a budget," noting that costs can be defrayed through sponsorship or marketing value.
For those interested in greening up, Live Earth has already published a first edition of a green event guideline, essentially a how-to manual to greening events. "In the spring we'll publish a second edition that really fleshes out a more practical way, a way that doesn't require as much input from environmental specialists like myself," Stempel says.
Stempel fully believes that venues and live events are greener today because of Live Earth. "And the trend on that is still increasing quickly," he adds. "You're seeing more artists come out and announce green tours, you're seeing more venues implementing things independently and through corporate structures as well, and Live Earth was a big part of inspiring and driving that effort and showing how you can do that."
Indeed, the touring industry in particular has accelerated environmental friendliness. Instead of press releases touting massive production and a fleet of semis, "now you're starting to see extremely conscious bands use less lighting, more greening of the tour itself, not just telling people to get green," Wall says. "I think that's a fantastic movement in our business."
But are we in a better environmental place overall in the wake of Live Earth? "Certainly there is more awareness, and the awareness is global," Wall says. "In terms of being in a better place, huge corporations are making massive moves; that's great news. Government is still giving a lot of lip service and that's not good news. We need to take the lip service and develop it into real policy that follows, and it has to be on a global basis." |
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