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The dark ages are approaching… No, wait, here’s Chris Moyles

They just came here for the pop songs,
They just came to feel less scared,
And to feel someone else will take care of the problem.

Those lines are from a Swimmer One song called The Dark Ages, recorded recently but written about a year and a half ago. I’ll come back to it in a minute. But first…

Warning: cheap joke approaching. On the bus to the T in the Park festival on Saturday morning, I suddenly realised I was going to miss the whole of Live Earth. There was a moment of mild regret. I was curious to see what it would be like, at least. Then I read a description of the running order. “Black Eyed Peas introduced by June Sarpong.” “Damien Rice and David Gray introduced by Boris Becker.” Wow, I thought. The end of the world can’t come soon enough, really, can it?

If that’s the first cynical comment you’ve read about Live Earth, then you clearly haven’t been reading very much about Live Earth. It’s such an easy, obvious thing for any semi-intelligent person to do that it feels practically compulsory. How can you NOT ridicule an event so condescending, so in thrall to shallow celebrity culture, that it expects us to take lessons in climate change awareness from Russell Brand and Chris Moyles? Or, for pity’s sake, Madonna, globe-trotting owner of eight homes and numerous cars? Even Bob Geldof, the man who invented this kind of epic, sentimental, self-righteous pop gesture, thought it was ludicrous.

It’s so easy to take cheap shots at Live Earth that it makes me feel like defending it. I may have missed the gig, but I did read the weekend papers, which were full of useful information about climate change and what the average person on the street can do about it. Much of this, of course, was printed to counter Live Earth more than complement (or compliment) it – it was the media smugly saying: “We all know this frothy, hypocritical pop nonsense is absurd; read our informed take on the issues instead.” Except that this particular wave of climate change coverage – very little of which was “news” as such - wouldn’t have been printed without the frothy pop star event, somewhat proving its value.

It was interesting reading the Independent, which has probably done more than any other British newspaper to raise awareness of climate change (or, to put it another way, scare the crap out of us). As you’d expect, on Saturday it ran a big interview with Al Gore, and a 32-page pullout called EcoLife, and made a big point of conspicuously wrapping its magazine pullouts in a recycled plastic bag. But it also ran, without irony, a big magazine piece that practically salivated over all the far corners of the earth still undiscovered by travellers, and how great it is that cheap flights mean that intrepid souls can now reach them. Which is, of course, exactly the sort of thing we all need to stop doing as soon as possible.

I’ve recently started reading the online blog by George Marshall, an environmental campaigner who argues, consistently and persuasively, that we’re all living in denial about climate change. As he wrote in the Guardian last week, in response to Live Earth, “We argue that the primary responsibility always lies with someone else – Uncle Sid, or rich people, or, increasingly, the Chinese. Or as some cynical columnists will say, it is those jet-setting hypocrites on stage at concerts such as Live Earth. And many people don’t blame anyone; they are just waiting for someone else to sort it out. Live Earth also plays strongly to another powerful denial strategy: the adoption of minimal and tokenistic behaviours as proof of our virtue. One concern is that people will believe that their participation in the concerts is in itself an action against climate change.”

There’s something in this, but it also feels a bit unfair. There is a good reason why many people feel that someone else needs to sort climate change out. It’s because all the things we’re told to do as individuals – recycling, using low energy bulbs, driving less etc – seem like hopelessly small and insignificant gestures in the face of the looming environmental catastrophe we keep being told about. Half the time we aren’t even sure what the right gestures are. Do you buy Fair Trade products from Africa to support farmers? Or do you buy local to boycott unnecessary food miles? Do you dry your hands with electric dryers to save paper towels, or on paper towels to conserve electricity? Do you pigheadedly support your local corner shop, even though it is obviously doomed to close anyway, or do you take your conscience to the supermarket and only buy environmentally conscious goods, and by doing so persuade them to stock more of them? (As, in fact, they increasingly are).

It can be bloody hard work. The Monday after Live Earth, I walked a short journey I normally take by car, out of climate change guilt (see: Live Earth did influence someone’s behaviour!). Result: it took me half an hour instead of a few minutes, and I ended up grumpy, stressed and late. So late, in fact, that the only way to make up time later was to drive somewhere instead of walking. Am I in denial? No, I’m just busy, stressed, and feeling like an environmental failure.

Does this sound lame? Maybe it will to a seasoned environmental campaigner like Marshall. Am I a slave to consumerism, in need of enlightenment? Maybe. But this is the big worry about liberal-based climate change campaigning. It argues that if everyone just makes a bit more effort to live a different kind of lifestyle then we can prevent disaster, but much of the time all it does is ask politely and hope.

The language Marshall uses is revealing; he talks idealistically of “a world based around health, animal and social rights, justice for the poor, good housing for all, and the promotion of happiness rather than consumption”. That sounds like a nice place. The problem is it also sounds like socialism, and the 20th century seemed to demonstrate, pretty conclusively, that given a choice of the kind of world they want to live in, the majority of people choose capitalism – which, in general, means no justice for the poor, good housing only for those who can afford it, and the promotion of consumption rather than happiness (or, put more positively, the right to choose what makes you happy rather than have someone else foist their idea of happiness on you). We worry about the injustice of it, we give money to charity, but when it comes to the crunch most of us are not selfless enough to sacrifice our personal freedom and ambitions to the national interest – or, in this case, international interest, which is even more abstract and daunting.

Once we’ve tasted personal freedom and wealth, it is very hard to let it go again, maybe even in the face of environmental disaster. Not everyone is going to drown, after all. If you make enough money, maybe you and your family will survive. Work hard, look after those close to you, everyone else can look after themselves. The alternative is socialism, which believes that it can make us care about the welfare of everybody, simply by force of argument. In practice, though, socialism tends to involve more than force of argument. It involves force. This doesn’t seem to be an option that the West, on the whole, is willing to consider, so our governments fudge and compromise, our pop stars ask us to sign pledges, we recycle bottles, when we have the time, and we hope it’ll all work out. You can call it denial, as George Marshall does, or you can call it democracy in action.

Of course, people like Al Gore would have us believe it’s the other way around. Democracy is what will save us - we have the power to put pressure on governments and big business (who are the biggest culprits in all this, after all) to change their ways. If we don’t buy products that damage the environment, companies will stop making them. If we don’t vote for politicians whose actions harm the environment, then they’ll have to change their policies. Watch An Inconvenient Truth and you get the impression this is already happening. A consensus is forming among the public, across the world, and the tide is turning. Watching Live Earth seems to support this. If even pop stars - some of the most ignorant, self-indulgent creatures on earth - are on board, then the argument has surely been won already? (This is one of the ironies about campaigning pop gigs - the performers believe they are raising awareness, but often the fact that they are involved at all is proof that awareness has already been raised). I’d like to believe this, but at the moment the trend for green consumerism feels like exactly that - a trend. Businesses, you suspect, will be as environmentally friendly as they need to be to exploit our environmental panic in order to sell us stuff, but no more, and the world will still go to hell.

The lyric of The Dark Ages is, I suppose, my little attempt to get to grips with all this. It was actually written after Live8 - another mildy embarrassing ‘pop stars try to save the world’ moment - but it could just as easily be about Live Earth. It’s about a parent wondering what kind of world they’ve left their daughter and what advice to offer, and hoping the girl can find some way to negotiate the frightening, confusing, contradictory times we’re living in. Hence “she will learn to feel less hopeless at the lack of maps or torches. We gave it our best and I know that she’ll make us proud.”

I really hope it doesn’t come across like that terrible Melissa Etheridge song from An Inconvenient Truth. And I really, really hope no one listens to The Dark Ages and feels the way I felt when I did, in fact, catch an hour of Live Earth, towards the end. My God, it was excruciating. Even the crowd looked slightly embarrassed by the whole thing.

Andrew

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The dark ages are approaching… No, wait, here’s Chris Moyles

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