More than 150 music acts will come together tomorrow on the propitious date of 7/7/07, to take part in Live Earth: the Concert for a Climate in Crisis, which will occur over 24 hours on every continent and will reach about a third of the July estimate of the world's population of 6,602,224,175 people.
There will even be a performance from Antarctica by the Nunatak band, which has been raised from the small number of scientists over-wintering at the South Pole. (Nunatak, by the way, is Greenlandic for a peak within an icefield or glacier.)
It will all go off very well, I am sure.
Satellite links will bring you music from Shanghai, Sydney, Johannesburg, London, Hamburg, Rio and Tokyo and everywhere we will see the misty-eyed warmth of the human spirit briefly "engaged" with the problems of rising sea levels, desertification, melting glaciers and the pH levels of the oceans.
We will have the sense of creating a unified front just as we did during Live Aid and less universally during Live8. There is no part of me that resents the enjoyment that will be had, but let's not mistake it for political action and hard-headed political thinking.
It is simple-minded to think that Madonna, the Red Hot Chili Peppers or the Beastie Boys will achieve anything other than a slight rise in the carbon emission of those traveling to events or switching on their TVs to watch them. Certainly, lives were saved by Live Aid and its anthem Do They Know It's Christmas? Bob Geldof and Bono have done a great deal to prod the West's conscience but what more was accomplished by the people who formed daisychains in druidical white prior to the Gleneagles summit and the Live8 concert in July 2005?
The answer is probably not a lot.
To Geldof's despair, debt relief and aid have fallen short of promises made two years ago. There's just only so much that music and stadium politics can do.
That's not to say that mass movements don't work, but how will people's consciences be affected by lectures from rock stars who use private jets? How many of those at Wembley have plans to escape an appalling summer by traveling on easyJet to the record temperatures being experienced in southern Europe? Whatever your views on manmade global warming, we must keep this clear: swaying with Sting will do nothing for rising sea levels.
My absolute conviction about climate change dates from Feb. 3, 2005 and the International Symposium on Stabilization of Greenhouse Gases at the Met office in Exeter, when, in the final session, scientists got up to express surprise and horror at how quickly things appeared to be unfolding in their colleagues' research.
Global warming does not mean long, hot summers, but aberrant weather that defies previous patterns and long-range prediction.
The evidence of abrupt changes seems to become more obvious every month. But this is going to take decades of concentration and the sort of cooperation between competing states that the world has never seen before.
The people cannot wait for government. There is a requirement for each of us to change our habits in driving and flying and in energy consumption at home.
This is where politics becomes personal, a question of self-control and, I suppose, morality. It is all rather pedestrian and dull, but what needs to happen next Saturday for Live Earth to mean anything at all is a bit of a chat about practical measures.
If Madonna sells 100,000 energy-efficient light bulbs and Sting endorses bicycles rather than Jaguar cars, all well and good.
My passion for personal action stems from a deep gloom about the way government will tackle the problem if we fail to adapt voluntarily. Legislation will fall thick and fast, and if I know Labour and its nature, it will be bossy and intrusive.
In many areas, climate change represents an opportunity for the people to lead government, but that is not the spirit of the times we live in. We are content to hand over decisions of personal choice to the government (see the smoking ban which starts in the UK today) because we have come to accept that each of us is somehow incapacitated and that the government knows best.
If the government had pursued national carbon emission targets with the Jesuit-like fervor of its plans to stamp out smoking in public places, we'd be in a lot better shape. But as things stand, the UK will exceed the European targets for the years between 2008 and 2012 by about 25.4 million tonnes per annum. The point is that it is easier to police the individual than big business.
The other reason for doubting the politics of Live Earth comes from James Panton, an Oxford don and a founder of the Manifesto Club, a new group of young libertarians dedicated to debate.
Writing about Live Earth in last month's issue of the Chatham House journal The World Today, he says of the marriage between conventional politics and rock events: "As the realm of serious political debate contracts, pop concerts become a model for how politicians communicate with the public. Attending a charity event, or even worse, watching it on television, becomes a way in which the citizenry is encouraged to become more politically engaged."
Panton is a climate-change sceptic and objects to my miserablist views about not taking Ryanair. However, he makes a good point about the exchange that takes place at one of these big rock events. The people are reassured when politicians express what is an easy and glib solidarity, while the politicians gain credibility from an audience that they are otherwise unlikely to reach.
The two interests coalesce around a simple moral message and everyone goes away happy.
But there is nothing to keep either party up to the mark: no debate on the fundamentals, no scrutiny of outcomes. This is not politics in any real sense, but a rally of good intentions.
Still, one must not be too harsh. Good intentions are better than nothing. They are better than apathy and ignorance. They are better than a refusal to accept the blindingly obvious which, after all, was US President George W. Bush's position until former US vice president Al Gore set about getting his message across. Gore used his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, to persuade first the US, then the world, about the seriousness of the problem. He is one of the few politicians who has managed to step outside conventional politics and make a case which appealed directly to the public.
And because of this, he has earned a rare legitimacy, which I certainly hope is transformed into the Democrat nomination next year.
As the extraordinary events in East Germany 18 years ago showed, a mass movement with an unerring sense of purpose can do great things. Few now appreciate that as well as demonstrating against repression, a huge number of people on the streets of Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin in 1989 marched against the destruction of the environment by the communists.
It requires more than listening to rock music to change the world, yet Live Earth is no bad thing and, in one way, it can be seen as huge affirmation of democratic civilization, a sign that we accept responsibility for the planet's health. The trouble is that it takes more than listening to music on a Saturday afternoon. This problem needs personal action, commitment and deep understanding.
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