Don't Even Think About It (25 page)

Wall argues that the concert format enables an extraordinary access to the airwaves. “Try to get editorial control over three hours of prime time—impossible! But go to a network and get editorial control through a large entertainment charity concert that has your messaging in it? We can do that.”

But, what was the message? Live Earth struggled to find a unifying narrative for climate change that could accurately present the issue while honoring the artistic integrity of the performers. They settled on the uncomfortable compromise of filleting short bursts of information and speeches in between the entertainment. In the event, this felt like a tax. As the British DJ Chris Moyles said after earnest filler on reducing your carbon footprint, “Serious stuff over! Shall we get back to the show?”

The usual green narratives were all in play. The grand finale at Wembley Stadium in London was preceded by a symbolic turning off of the lights. The lights came back up as Madonna bounded onto the stage in a black satin leotard, accompanied by a long line of children in school uniforms (sarcastically called the “Hogwarts School Choir” by the
New York Times
) and swore at the audience: “If you want to save the planet, let me see you jump. Come on motherfuckers,
JUMP!
” There were 150 complaints.

Her song, even if not that jumpable, started off upbeat and hopeful: “Hey you, don’t you give up / it’s not so bad / there’s still a chance for us,” before turning to a more naked self-interest in the second verse: “Hey you, save yourself / don’t rely on anyone else / first love yourself.” It was an unfortunate echo of the Live Aid anthem of a generation earlier to raise money for the starving Ethiopians, which had contained the killer line: “Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.”

It was the images that ran on the video screens behind Madonna that grounded this firmly in the environmentalist version of climate change: smokestacks, traffic jams, flooding, hurricanes, starving dark-skinned children, chickens on conveyor belts, polar bears on icebergs, burning rainforest, melting glaciers, oil rigs, Martin Luther King Jr. The words of the song came up over the top like karaoke, bizarrely with the
s
’s transmuted into dollar signs: “ONE DAY IT WILL MAKE $EN$E.”

One day
it will make sense? Previous global events like Live Aid and Live 8, which Wall also organized, had made eminently good sense at the time. They had focused on bringing attention to issues that already had proximity: starvation in Ethiopia and debt alleviation. But Live Earth was building awareness for an issue that was still distant to most people.

Wall was “very disappointed” by the lack of follow-up on the momentum he had created, complaining that environmentalists had “done a lousy job of working together.” Bob Geldof, organizer of the original Live Aid concert, had already warned that the absence of concrete measures meant that Live Earth would “just be an enormous pop concert.” A spokesman for Live Earth responded to Geldof, saying that “people are aware of global warming but millions are not doing anything about changing their lifestyles.”

And so the focus ended up on the minutiae of petty lifestyle changes, not on building a movement for change. The rock stars showed that they, too, were doing their bit. At the Tokyo show, the Japanese singer Ayaka told the stadium, “I started to carry my own eco-bag so I don’t have to use plastic grocery bags, and use my own chopsticks instead of disposable ones.” The hit eighties band Duran Duran opened its set with an ironic lifestyle tip: “Everyone who did not arrive on a private jet put your hands in the air,” said lead singer Simon Le Bon, who also raised his hand. It contained an awkward echo of Michael Crichton’s sarcastic comment in the live radio debate just four months earlier about his environmentalist friends flying their private jets to their second and third homes.

Maybe it all made $en$e to Madonna. A few weeks before the concert, she had discussed the environment over a macrobiotic dinner with the British prime minister in her eighteen-bedroom pied-à-terre in London. It’s where she stays when she is not in her twelve-million-dollar house in Beverly Hills or her forty-million-dollar apartment in New York. A specialist contacted by the BBC estimated Madonna’s annual emissions to be more than a thousand metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Climate change is a wicked problem in search of a narrative, and celebrities are not just people; they are narratives in their own right. The problem emerges when that celebrity-defined narrative (wealth, global fame, conspicuous consumption) comes into conflict with the environmental one (simplicity, locality, reduced consumption). As one viewer of Live Earth complained online: “Would you hold a hog roast to promote vegetarianism?”

Kalee Kreider, former communications director for Al Gore, has nothing but praise for the celebrities who participated in Live Earth, who, she says, put things on the radar that otherwise would not be there. “Does anybody say, ‘Wow, that Princess Diana really brought
some baggage
to that land mines issue’? These people come to this as human beings doing the best they can with what they have. And you know what? God love them.”

Ultimately, though, the celebrities were never going to be a measure of the event’s success; they were the attraction that could bring in the punters to learn more, on the assumption that exposure to information would generate change. Gore told the media in the run-up to the concerts, “The tipping point in the political system will come when the majority of the people are armed with enough knowledge about the crisis and its solutions that they make this cause their own.”

So this was a numbers game to arm enough people, and two billion viewers was a damned good stab at it. It was hoped that bringing so many people together would itself create the historic moment; as though the concerts alone could single-handedly create a social norm for action. But in the absence of a clear objective and a movement that could galvanize the audience into action, it created a global bystander effect: two billion people waiting on the sidelines to see if someone else would do something.

30

Postcard from Hopenhagen

How Climate Negotiations Keep Preparing for the Drama Yet to Come

Great hopes were set for
the 2009 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen—indeed, every subway station and bus stop carried the slogan “Hopenhagen,” sponsored by Siemens or Coke. The city became a vast theme park for climate kitsch: fiberglass eco-globes by local artists, giant blow-up faces of indigenous people, melting ice sculptures of polar bears, a photo display of “100 places to remember before they disappear.”

The Rådhuspladsen was dominated by a fifty-foot-wide illuminated globe on which energy saving tips alternated with the logos of the sponsors. On one side of Kongens Nytorv, there was a structure of scaffolding and flapping bedsheets, which on closer investigation I found to be scribbled with pleas for political action. And in Copenhagen harbor, alongside the statue of the Little Mermaid, the Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt installed a new sculpture called
Survival of the Fattest
, featuring a grossly obese white goddess of justice (with a dinky set of scales) sitting on the shoulder of a frail African who was sinking under the waters.

The negotiations took place in a cramped conference center on the edge of town—accessible only by car or a little raised tramline that glided past shiny bland apartment buildings and a pointless Potemkin windmill erected by Siemens alongside the conference center. In the late afternoon light, it all looked unnervingly similar to the cool eco-world of Sustainia.

Inside the conference center, things were a lot less cool: ten thousand sweating observers and five thousand journalist milled about, holding meetings and press events for each other, taking photographs of themselves in front of the melting ice sculptures, or watching activists in polar bear costumes parading with placards reading “Save the Humans.”

There was some grand talk in the political speeches, but it was mostly in the familiar slippery “we” form. Obama said, “We can act boldly, and decisively, in the face of this common threat.” Wen Jiabao, the premier of China, said, “We will honor our word with real action.”

The familiar metaphors clocked up. Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy, called for “that old comic-book sensibility of uniting in the face of a common danger threatening the earth. It’s not a meteor or a space invader, but the damage to our children will be just as great.” In an opening address (reading from a script as full of exclamation points as a Valley Girl Facebook page), the Danish energy minister said, “This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we get a new and better one. If ever! Let’s open the door to the low-carbon age! Let’s get it done! Now!”

And then they all watched the official opening film “Please Help the World”—four minutes of global eco-apocalypse in which a little girl desperately reaches for her stuffed polar bear cub toy as it falls down a crevasse in the cracking ground, just before the flood gets them both. Turn off the lights or the teddy bear gets it.

A year earlier, Yvo de Boer, the chair of the process, had warned that if this conference failed to set a deadline, “then one deadline after the other will not be met, and we become the little orchestra on the
Titanic
.” It did fail to set the deadline. And the little orchestra did keep playing.

It is anathema to ever suggest that it might be better if the process should stop altogether. Oliver Tickell, the editor of the
Ecologist
, has struggled to get attention for proposals to reform the process. He says that the only thing that they really want to save is their annual meeting: “They negotiate overnight and then, sometime on Saturday, they all stand on the stage and say the same thing: We have achieved a historic breakthrough because we have agreed that by a date set sometime in the future we will agree on all outstanding points of disagreement. They may bicker, but they have a class interest in the continuation of the jamboree and to deliver just enough to keep it going.”

And so President José Manuel Barroso of the European Commission duly admitted that he was disappointed, but that this was a positive step toward the many more steps in the future. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed the Copenhagen conference as an “essential beginning.”

The climate negotiations are always beginning, or in their favorite cliché, “setting the stage” for the drama to come. The U.N. declared that the Vienna climate talks in 2007 “set the stage for the Climate Change Conference in Bali.” The U.S. Council on Foreign Relations explained that the 2009 Copenhagen conference “set the stage for ambitious action.” According to Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate action, the Durban negotiations reached an agreement to “set the stage for the big deal in 2015.”

“Setting the stage” is not just a diplomatic cliché—it is a narrative frame. It means that even when the meetings do not do anything, they are still preparing for the great drama to come. It is like the surreal films of Luis Buñuel in which the well-heeled dinner guests keep meeting for dinner but never actually get to eat.

This evasive circularity is now the rhetorical style of all official speeches about the process, with the same blocks of language reappearing and rearranging themselves in new patterns: “our goal must be nothing short of” “a call for a bold initiative” to “lay the foundations” with “concrete commitments” for a “roadmap for the further negotiations.”

Or, as the British comedian Marcus Brigstocke put it in
The Now Show
’s “Dr. Seuss at Copenhagen”:

So they blew it, and wasted the greatest of chances,

Instead they all frolicked in diplomat dances,

And decided decisively, right there and then,

The best way to solve it’s to meet up again.

And decide on a future that’s greener and greater,

Not with action right now, but with something else later.

31

Precedents and Presidents

How Climate Policy Lost the Plot

It is fortunate that the
issue of climate change emerged at a time of unusual optimism, when there were three very recent precedents of proven success and international cooperation on which to draw. In retrospect, it is also extremely unfortunate that these issues had such strong metaphorical similarities to climate change that policy makers failed to notice the glaring and important differences.

The first was the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), negotiated between the USA and the USSR between 1982 and 1991. START established the use of targets and timetables in the cause of mutually verifiable reductions, which was carried directly over into greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Al Gore, then a senator, was a very active member of the bipartisan group of lawmakers that pressured President Ronald Reagan to moderate his stance in the START negotiations, and Gore refers to it regularly as a metaphor for decisive political action on climate change.

Gore, along with Tim Wirth, a Colorado Democrat, also led congressional efforts in the mid-1980s to mobilize U.S. support for a control on the production of ozone-depleting chemicals. This global struggle provided the second precedent and the mental model for the fight against climate change.