Overdose on Hypocrisy or Carbon Dioxide

There's plenty of both at Live Earth!

First, there are the musicians themselves. While musicians of the level performing at Gore’s concerts might come for free, they do not come cheaply. For the LiveEarth concerts, local airports are expected to be filled with luxury private aircraft – aircraft that have used large quantities of fuel and polluted the skies for the sake of the environment. A single Gulfstream IV jet burns 5,000 pounds of fuel in the first hour of flight and 3,000 pounds of fuel every additional hour, according to the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, a U.S. government agency.

Then there are the bands’s equipment – instruments, microphones,lights and the stage itself. A single band alone can require an army of heavy duty trucks to move the equipment. By example, last year’s European tour of legendary rock band, The Who, required 1,000 flight cases to load and unload equipment, which included seventy guitars for guitarist Pete Townshend alone, as well as a six-ton drum kit.

It has been estimated that between the actual concerts, webstreaming and television broadcasting, the Live Earth concert series could produce as much as 200,000 metric tons of carbon, after the conversions from electricity have been calculated. In other words, the Gore concerts could produce more carbon dioxide than was produced by all of Afghanistan in 2006.