To say the response to “Live Earth” was a bust, would be like saying Sir Laurence Olivier did a little acting, sometimes. The London Times: [1]
With the exception of the closing act Madonna – who played next door at Wembley Arena only last summer – there was nobody on the Stadium bill with the cross-generational appeal, and catalogue of monster hits, to supply the great unifying moments which event gigs need to make their message stick in the mind.
Yeah, well, about that: (The Telegraph) [2]
She provided the finale to yesterday’s Live Earth concerts, even writing a special song to mark the worldwide musical event.
But instead of being lionised, Madonna found herself accused of hypocrisy last night after allegations that she has financial links to some of the world’s biggest polluters.
The Ray of Light Foundation, a charitable fund established by the star to support her favourite causes and named after one of her biggest selling hits, has $4.2 million (£2.1 million) of shares in a string of companies including Alcoa, the American aluminium giant, the Ford Motor Company and Weyerhaeuser, an international forest products company. All have been criticised by environmentalists.
In all, Hewitt [3] quips…
Al Gore’s try at getting the feeling back went over worse than Shrek 3. Tim Blair provides some details [4], as does Mark Steyn at The Corner [5], Glenn Reynolds [6], and Michelle Malkin [7]. Is anyone surprised?
no, not particularly. In the end, this is simply Al Gore and his followers trying to regain some semblance of significance. And, failing miserably…. Except insofar as the press willing to give them a hand…Indeed it rather left one wondering if they were watching the same concert.
For example, an early Reuters report bluntly described the extremely poor turnout for the free Live Earth concert in Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach (on a “perfect” winter night – when tropical Rio is merely comfortably warm) as les than 100,000. Since the hype had it that over a million would come, and since Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones managed at least twice as many concert goers a year ago in the same location, it does look like an embarrassment.
But in the hands of the Associated Press, the same concert was a huge success – the biggest crowds in the whole world for the triumphant effort. Suddenly less than one hundred thousand became “400,000” and they were “packed” onto the famous beach, which just recently was thought able to handle a million-plus concert-goers.
As to the commitment to environmentalism of the concert goers the nominally leftist Washington Post [9] speaks to that point :
Certainly, on the way into the show, some of the 65,000 people who’d spent $110 on a ticket appeared unaware of the seven-point pledge that Al Gore [10], the event’s chief impresario, had asked all spectators to make. Asked about it, they offered blank looks and said they were there for Madonna (whose annual carbon footprint, according to Buckley, is 1,018 tons — about 92 times the 11 tons an average person uses per year).
“I’m not even sure who Gore is,” said Georgie Simpson, 35, from Ipswich, in eastern England [11].
The scary part is, the people who put this nonsense together, are the ones who want to be in charge of your government. They wanna make decisions about what you do in your life. Ponder that for a moment the next time you see Gore hawking himself and his fellow Democrats.