Global boring

I would like to think that if Al Gore, Sting and Madonna would stop abusing the privilege of exhaling carbon dioxide, global warming would cease to be a problem. \nMuch to my dismay, their efforts last Saturday with Live Earth, the music event that featured 100-plus artists on seven continents rocking against global warming for 24 hours straight, did not correct this issue. \nYou might be under the impression then that I, a person with a brain and the internet, am among the critics who condemn the event as useless just because it was full of boring entertainers with carbon footprints greater than small countries who propose inane “solutions” to global warming. \nBut on the contrary, I happen to believe the event was productive. Not because AFI and Alec Baldwin did much worthwhile themselves but because the press slammed them for being unproductive. \nI don’t know if it’s what he was attempting, but Al Gore deserves kudos for brain-parenting an event with so much potential for satire. I barely made it through watching Gore’s introduction by Leonardo DiCaprio before I started nodding off, but the most entertaining thing I’ve read all week has been Mark Hemingway of the National Review Online’s “Living Through Live Earth” diary of the event. \nIn his scathing breakdown of the coverage, he points out how ineffectual the “solutions” are that these celebrities propose will help with global warming. KT Tunstall, for instance, boasts of offsetting her carbon emissions via the impractical-if-everyone-practiced-it plan of planting 6,000 trees. And a Czech supermodel suggested that global warming rather than the actual sliding tectonic plates was what caused her husband’s death in the 2004 tsunami. Melissa Etheridge doesn’t even realize that the climate-change problem she’s droning on about is the now-irrelevant theory of global cooling. \nBut Hemingway was by no means the only one to denounce Live Earth for being counterproductive. The press, including such major papers as the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times brought to attention many hypocrisies of the event, from its massive carbon footprint to its overpriced organic T-shirt sales to the disinterestedness of performers who were allegedly taking stage to stir up passion about the issue at hand. \nI’m not saying the event in itself was completely useless. It brought attention to easy ways of conserving energy and using eco-friendly energy sources. And, I’ll admit, the used-tire stage backdrops looked pretty neat. But by inviting so many well-hated personalities to take the stage and putting on a tepid show, Gore and company made the press the real heroes of Live Earth. \nMaybe its flaws as a hypocritical snooze-fest weren’t supposed to be the reasons for its success (then again, maybe Al Gore is shrewder than I thought and believed it would be funny for his celebrities to look like idiots so the press would condemn them), but Live Earth seems to have become a success in attracting attention to global-warming solutions for the very reason that it wasn’t successful in doing so itself.