Madonna's Carbon Footprint is 1,018 Tons
By Glenda Cooper
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, July 8, 2007
LONDON, July 7 -- "If you want to save the planet, I want you to start jumping up and down!" Thus Madonna revealed her plan to combat global warming.
The interspersing of musical numbers with lectures on climate change gave much of the show a staccato feel.
It's an inconvenient truth, but mixing rock with recycling is awkward. In a TV interview earlier this week, Matt Bellamy of the band Muse mocked the event as "private jets for climate change."
John Buckley of Carbon Footprint, an organization that helps companies reduce their carbon dioxide emissions, said Saturday that Live Earth will produce about 74,500 tons of the gas.
"We would have to plant 100,000 trees to offset the effect of Live Earth," he said.
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, 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. |
