Giddy Al Gore
Post
06/07/07, Sebastian Knauer, White Lies at Live Earth - DaimlerChrysler Kisses Green Goodbye, Source.
10/07/07, John Doyle, Live Earth: What was the point?, Source.
08/07/07, Mike Collett-White, Earth underwhelmed by environment pop extravaganza, Source.
09/07/07, Alessandra Stanley, Sounding the Global-Warming Alarm Without Upsetting the Fans, Source.
14/07/07, Rex Murphy, Live Earth? How about live irony?, Source.
06/07/07, Sebastian Knauer, White Lies at Live Earth - DaimlerChrysler Kisses Green Goodbye, (Back).
Carmaker DaimlerChrysler may appear as a green world savior at Live Earth on Saturday, but the PR push comes as the company scraps a number of its much-lauded programs to create eco-friendly cars and biofuel products. Daimler customers, unfortunately, would prefer a fat car than an environmentally friendly one.
On Saturday, DaimlerChrysler will sponsor Al Gore's Live Earth series of concerts, where it will promote its Smart "fortwo" line of fuel-efficient automobiles. Daimler's presence at the event has drawn heavy criticism from some environmental groups, including Greenpeace which has refused to affiliate itself with the global event.
"It's problematic that a firm like Daimler, which just several weeks ago was doing battle with the European Commission plans for mandatory emissions limits, can now present itself as a protector of the climate," Jürgen Maier of the Berlin-based Climate Alliance wrote in the July issue of Greenpeace Magazine.
And while Daimler may be packaging itself at Live Earth as an environmentally friendly firm, its recent track record of abandoning support for sustainability projects suggests the company isn't putting its money where its mouth is.
The following article first appeared on our German sister site in May:
DaimlerChrysler's top environmental man Herbert Kohler always had a double role. As a DaimlerChrysler executive, he is both the official vice president of the Group Research and Advanced Engineering Vehicle and Powertrain division and the multinational company's chief environmental officer. That makes for a certain degree of tension when it comes to reconciling environmental and economic considerations. Right now, Kohler the car engineer is in the fast lane, as the conservationist gets left behind in the slow lane.
DaimlerChrysler -- which will soon be divided into Daimler AG and Chrysler as a result of the sale of the company's American division in May -- is shedding itself of once highly praised environmentally friendly projects around the world.
The company's support for the natural fiber factory Poematec in Belém, Brazil, for example is to be fully abandoned. The production of car seats, head rests and natural fiber carriage components, made from coco fibers and latex, was pursued as an especially sustainable DaimlerChrysler environmental project after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The project was partly financed by public funds from the German government's development bank, KfW Entwicklungsbank.
About 500 families currently make a living by cultivating fiber plants in the region around the mouth of the Amazon River. Now the debts incurred by the factory -- about $1 million -- are to be shouldered by Poematec employees who had previously been promised a good return. In the future DaimlerChrysler will only continue to purchase about "80,000 to 90,000 components" produced by Poematec every year and the factory will remain one of DaimlerChrysler's regular suppliers.
It was an abrupt turnaround for a company where, just last year, managers like political director Michael Inaker were still rhapsodizing about a "global sustainability alliance" in South America, South Africa and Asia that would equip millions of automobiles according to the Brazilian model. In the end, the company went back to cheaper plastic alternatives. And now Daimler is considering selling the factory to a Dutch construction firm that specializes in coco mat insulation for homes.
Plastic Displaces Natural Fibers
Brazil, where Daimler has experienced disappointing sales of its Mercedes "A" series of cars, isn't the only place where plastic has once more won out over more environmentally friendly materials for fitting a car's interior. Similar projects involving sisal fibers in South Africa or banana fibers in the Philippines have also seen the multinational company terminating agreements or deciding to "further adjust the logistics," as one Daimler spokesperson puts it in the company's jargon.
As for the production of modern biofuels from jatropha plants in India, Daimler is also opting out and negotiating the possible divestiture of the facility to German chemical company BASF and American biofuel company ADM. That project received German development funds as well. Interest in jatropha developed vigorously the world over thanks to DaimlerChrysler's temporary interest in the plant, which involved the company sending two test cars across the Indian subcontinent.
In the future, though, DaimlerChrysler will not be a party to this growing interest. True, executive Thomas Weber, who heads Daimler's research and technology department, emphasizes the importance of biofuels. But the company's involvement, along with Volkswagen, in a production plant in the eastern German state of Saxony is also being minimized. And Daimler's Ulm research center for car components in southern Germany made from sustainable materials has also been scaled back.
In executive Herbert Kohler's opinion, these developments are "no pullout" from environmental protection. In fact the US-German company's "research and environment budget" for the further development of more fuel-efficient engines, fuel cells or resource-sparing production processes amounts to about €1.5 billion ($2 billion) a year. The eco-projects involving tropical fibers or biofuels were "successfully initiated" and have to now "prove their worth on the market," he says. "Such things need to make economic sense in the long term too," says Kohler, who continues to see "great potential" in the development of fuel cells and biofuels. Kohler said the company also plans to continue reporting on its environmental efforts in an annual "sustainability report" and in the context of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which is recognized as the international standard for corporate sustainability reporting.
Mercedes Customers Want Fat Cars, not Eco-Friendly Ones
But the reporting system has its critics, including Andreas Troge, president of the Dessau-based German Federal Environmental Agency, who says they are "only credible if they are complete." In the past, he says, members of the GRI initiative have come under fire for their lack of full disclosure in reports. General Electric, for example, failed to report on a major public controversy that broke out over one of its chemicals. "The biggest bandits always write the prettiest reports," he told attendees of a conference in Stuttgart earlier this year where GRI was promoted. More than 20,000 companies worldwide have agreed to use Amsterdam-based GRI's standardized sustainability reporting instruments, including 200 in Germany.
In defending their retreat from environmentally friendly products, Daimler managers also have some convenient statistics they can fall back on. According to a recent internal study, the company's customers care more about a car's technical performance and the extras it comes kitted out with than the vehicle's sustainability. That also makes it easier for the company to resist outside calls for it to produce more responsible cars. As a member of the Federation of German Industry, Daimler fought hard and successfully this spring against a European Commission proposal to establish mandatory emissions limits on new models.
That, however, doesn't keep DaimlerChrysler from attempting to cultivate an environmentally friendly image for itself. Not long ago, CEO Dieter Zetsche said: "Sustainability is not an abstract concept in the company, it's a part of everyday life."
10/07/07, John Doyle, Live Earth: What was the point?, (Back).
God give me and Bob Geldof patience
Bob Geldof had a problem with Al Gore's Live Earth's shindig on the weekend. Me too.
Geldof is entitled to take a stance. He started the entire global TV pop concert phenomenon. One day in 1984 he saw TV images of children dying of starvation in Ethiopia. Outraged, he organized a one-off charity recording, Band Aid. Learning more about the famine in Ethiopia and the depth of the need, he organized Live Aid - televised concerts in London and Philadelphia. Both to be shown on countless TV channels around the world. The point was to ask viewers to donate money to feed the starving.
When Live Aid opened in London, with Status Quo singing Rockin' All Over the World, an unstoppable trend in pop culture was launched. Soon came Farm Aid, to help embattled farmers in the United States and televised concerts to support Amnesty International. Here in Toronto, a few years ago we had the post-SARS televised concert. If I remember rightly, the point was to cheer up traumatized Torontonians.
At this point, and particularly after the bloated, meandering, self-congratulatory Live Earth thing, it's all gotten out of hand. On two consecutive weekends now, we've had televised rock concerts to raise awareness for something. Last week it was the Concert for Diana, from London. The true purpose was unclear. According to the official website, "Concert for Diana is designed principally not as a fund-raising event but as a celebration of the life of Diana, Princess of Wales. All net proceeds from the concert, however, will go to the charities chosen by Prince William and Prince Harry." Right. It's not like anybody has been allowed to forget Diana.
Those charities are, principally, organizations of which Diana was an official patron at the time of her death - the Royal Marsden and Great Ormond Street Hospitals, the Leprosy Mission, the National AIDS Trust and the English National Ballet.
God give me and Bob Geldof patience, but the English National Ballet? The nobs going to see the ballet can dip a bit deeper into their own pockets.
The problem with all these televised international concerts is that pragmatism has been forgotten.
Asked about the Live Earth show, Geldof told the Guardian newspaper last month, "I hope [they] are a success. But why is [Al Gore] actually organizing them? To make us aware of the greenhouse effect? Everybody's known about that problem for years. We are all [expletive] conscious of global warming."
Yes. There's a difference between raising awareness and raising money. And, in terms of raising awareness, there's a difference between creating genuine cognizance of an issue and posturing about it. Live Earth had a lot of posturing.
When Geldof organized Live 8 in 2005, 20 years after Live Aid, he did have a real point. No dilettante on issues related to poverty and starvation in Africa, he knew that debt relief was necessary to stop the stop the endless cycle of famine and starvation. The point was to make a worldwide audience aware of this and make the world leaders at the G8 summit cognizant of the fact that millions of young people in countless countries were asking the G8 to allow debt relief.
Geldof is mouthy and blunt. Al Gore is a posturing politician. There was that excruciating moment on Saturday when he appeared on stage somewhere, put up his right hand and began chanting "the pledge" about halting our part in the planet's destruction.
At Live Aid, Geldof banged his fist on a table in a TV studio and commanded people to give money to help starving people. Al Gore asked people to make a pledge. Then Bon Jovi performed Wanted Dead or Alive, a song with the chorus "I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride..." It's a song about a rock star travelling around on planes and in automobiles. Jon Bon Jovi joked that it was "the national anthem."
If you were watching Live Earth in downtown Toronto, as I was, as soon as you stepped outside the house, you heard the endless whine of high-speed cars going around and around, to no point, at the Toronto Grand Prix.
It all seemed utterly ridiculous, this Live Earth jamboree.
"If you wanna save the planet, jump up and down," Madonna called out at one point. Me, I'm thinking, if you wanna save the planet, stop driving around and around. Stop pledging and posturing. Stop pretending that all televised, worldwide rock concert jamborees are the same. They're not. Bob Geldof had a point. Live Earth didn't.
08/07/07, Mike Collett-White, Earth underwhelmed by environment pop extravaganza, (Back).
Live Earth rocks the globe
LONDON (Reuters) - They rocked the world, but as the clean-up at nine climate change gigs around the globe begins, many wonder if the galaxy of pop stars did much to change it.
U.S. and British media were generally underwhelmed on Sunday by Live Earth, the mega-concert organized by former U.S. vice president and green campaigner Al Gore, which, though built on the model of Live Aid and Live 8, created a less positive buzz.
In Germany, however, newspapers were more upbeat about Saturday's gigs designed to pressure leaders to sign a new treaty by 2009 that would cut global warming pollution by 90 percent in rich nations and more than half worldwide by 2050.
Several articles examined the green credentials of artists on the day, including Madonna, whose annual "carbon footprint" was estimated at around 100 times the average Briton's.
The News of the World tabloid, Britain's biggest-selling newspaper, detailed estimates of Madonna's carbon emissions from nine houses, a fleet of cars, a private jet and the Confessions tour, calling her a "climate-change catastrophe".
The Sunday Telegraph quoted U.S. reports of her alleged financial links to companies accused of being major polluters.
Her spokeswoman in Britain was not immediately available for comment, but in a statement appearing in the Independent on Sunday, her New York spokeswoman said:
"Madonna's agreeing to sing at the Live Earth Event is merely one of the first steps in her commitment towards being environmentally responsible."
The negative headlines took some gloss off Madonna's widely praised appearance at Wembley Stadium in London, where she sang her specially written anthem "Hey You" before a raunchy performance of three of her biggest hits.
MIXED MESSAGES
The New York Times' online edition on Sunday featured a small picture of the event and a headline linking to "Artsbeat Blog", and in Britain only the Independent on Sunday made anything more than a fleeting reference on its front page.
But in Germany, where Snoop Dogg was among the acts at the Hamburg gig, Live Earth dominated headlines.
"The bottom line is that if nothing else, the issue of climate protection was a lot of fun for two billion people for one day," wrote Bild am Sonntag, Germany's best-selling Sunday newspaper.
Organizers say that in addition to the tens of thousands of fans at the gigs, the television, radio and internet audience could be as large as two billion.
Commentators noted the difficulty in marrying pop music with serious themes like the environment.
"Madonna's agreeing to sing at the Live Earth Event is merely one of the first steps in her commitment towards being environmentally responsible."
The negative headlines took some gloss off Madonna's widely praised appearance at Wembley Stadium in London, where she sang her specially written anthem "Hey You" before a raunchy performance of three of her biggest hits.
"Mixing music and a serious message gives concert a clunky rhythm," was the Washington Post's description of the Wembley gig, arguably the biggest lineup on the day that featured Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica and the Foo Fighters.
Performances were interspersed with long gaps, some of them filled by short films on environmental themes.
Many performers were "on message", calling on crowds from Sydney and Tokyo to New York and Rio de Janeiro to cut down on their personal carbon dioxide emissions and recycle.
Yet U.S. comedian Chris Rock expressed the kind of disbelief shared by many on the day that Live Earth would make a lasting difference, even if he was only joking:
"I pray that this event ends global warming the same way that Live Aid ended world hunger," he said in London.
09/07/07, Alessandra Stanley, Sounding the Global-Warming Alarm Without Upsetting the Fans, (Back).
If less is more, then why is biggest better?
Al Gore declared Live Earth “the largest global entertainment event in all of history,” but this seven-continent, multimedia eco-extravaganza was colored by the very complacency it vowed to combat: No matter how dire the problem, the solution can be small and painless.
So much star power assembled in so many places to assure fans that all they need do to save the planet is change a light bulb, choose paper over plastic or, as Cameron Diaz recommended, turn off the shower while shaving their legs.
“Every tiny, tiny, tiny little thing adds up to something big,” Rachel Weisz said backstage at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., where, between performances, actors, models and pop stars shared their conservation tips and personal aperçus.
Petra Nemcova, the model who nearly drowned in the Asian tsunami, said: “While I was there I didn’t feel hate towards nature. I felt nature was screaming for help.”
Celebrity-driven charity concerts always blend good works with smug self-promotion; the camera has a way of letting the air out of the best-intentioned event. Live Earth, however, had an especially precarious balance between eco-consciousness and ego-consciousness.
The “think small” sermon was perhaps the only one that could register with a society so unused to sacrifice, but — if only by the event’s own carbon-offsetting, enviro-calculations — it seemed a somewhat timid exhortation for such a huge expense of energy, talent and time.
Or perhaps it just seemed too convenient for those celebrating.
Unlike benefits for world hunger or genocide, celebrity efforts to curb the greenhouse effect backlash into the glass-house effect: People who own Escalades, private jets and McMansions shouldn’t recycle bromides at people who fail to carpool to work. Carbon-offsetting, the newly fashionable practice of compensating for one’s own carbon emissions by paying into a fund to reduce them elsewhere, may be better than nothing, but to some it sounds too much like rich men paying others to take their place in the draft during the Civil War.
That credibility gap seemed to fuel much of the skepticism and sniping along the sidelines (British newspapers which gleefully counted Madonna’s many houses and cars, discouraged readers from following in her outsize carbon footprint) and drove Bob Geldof, founder of Live 8, to question this concert’s usefulness. There were more than 130 artists performing for 24 hours from Kyoto to Rio de Janeiro, but there were also some conspicuous no-shows, like Bono and Paul McCartney, who in the past have turned out at similar events, and even the Super Bowl.
There was some “green revolution” hyperbole onstage, but very little sanctimony in the green room, where artists like Keith Urban described their own contributions — using bio-diesel fuel and recycling bins — but also conceded that it wasn’t nearly enough. Even the Live Earth anthem, “Hey You,” written by Madonna, who sang it in London alongside a group of schoolchildren who looked like the Hogwarts Choir, had a modest message. (“Don’t you give up/it’s not so bad/there’s still a chance for us.”)
In New Jersey, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, stirred the stadium crowd by calling politicians “corporate toadies.” But on television the whole event was smoothly corporate and conventional. On NBC performances by Ludacris, Madonna and the Police were punctuated with commercials for the Apple iPhone and Procter & Gamble’s Pantene. (Surely one way to help the environment is to use less shampoo.)
Those glossy ads could explain why celebrities recruited to star in the eco-ads that were interspersed throughout — Jennifer Garner making coffee with reusable filters (“Brew Anew”), Jessica Alba in a towel and shortie robe in her driveway, tossing a plastic bottle in the recycling bin — were shot in artsy black and white: so many celebrities do endorsements that the line between public-service announcement and product placement has to be very sharply drawn. (David Holmes, a former MTV host who was a backstage master of ceremonies at Giants Stadium, discussed alternative eco-products while balancing an Apple computer on his lap).
Sometimes a few messengers inadvertently stepped on corporate toes. David de Rothschild, author of “The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook,” urged viewers to stay away from hot new gadgets. “The other day this nice new phone came out, and I got really excited,” he told Karen Duffy, a co-master of ceremonies for the Giants Stadium event. Mr. de Rothschild said he came to his senses, urging viewers to combat society’s “consumer idolatry.”
There were sobering short subject films and also some charming moments. In Antarctica, Nunatak, a garage band of Polar scientists, did its outdoor gig in parkas and snow boots. (At times it seemed as if the amplifiers would crumble the glacier behind them.) Humor occasionally filtered through. In London the mock-band Spinal Tap reunited, and Chris Rock made fun of eco-alarmists. (“Every day in Jamaica, a little baby bursts into flames.”)
There was even some choice. Sundance and Bravo both covered the concerts in full, sparing some viewers the NBC three-hour primetime special with Carson Daly and Ann Curry. Ms. Curry handled the bigger backstage interviews with her customary “Today” program flummery (“Why do you care so much?” she asked Trudie Styler) and invasions of personal space, poking her finger in Al Gore’s chest and slapping Sting with her script. (Perhaps as a precaution, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York held his taped interview with Ms. Curry at the far other end of a long park bench.)
All in all the irritations were minor, but then again, so were the expectations.
14/07/07, Rex Murphy, Live Earth? How about live irony?, (Back).
The reviews are in concerning last weekend's eco-sanctimony staged by global warming's Nostradamus, Al Gore, and most of them aren't pretty. It was, according to the advance hype - and the hype for this event matched anything Hollywood roars up for Johnny Depp in a bandana, or a new Jessica Simpson big-screen onslaught - going to command an audience in excess of two billion.
There is nothing original in rounding up a beaker full of rock stars and movie celebrities, faded songsters and a rapper or two to variously strum, gyrate and posture for a cause du jour. We have had We Are the World and Live Aid, Willie Nelson doing his minstrel bit for the American farmer, and last year's care-a-polooza, the Make Poverty History jamboree, which didn't.
NBC gave three hours of prime time to last Saturday's effort, which trawled a measly 2.7 million viewers, a number that would be embarrassing for a home-cooking show or a rerun of Three's Company. Not even such class-A world-dominating entertainers as Madonna and Shakira, assisted by those cleavage climatologists, the Pussycat Dolls, could lure the torpid and the unaware, in any numbers, to the home screen. Nor could Snoop Dogg (the bard of Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang) appearing on stage in Hamburg (Hamburg? Who knew?) jolt the sing-a-long into a zone of even mild and credible buzz.
What happened?
I suppose the spectacle of the world's most wasteful people, rock-star plutocrats with their cribs and bling, caravans of trailer trucks and 100,000-watt amplifiers, taking a day out of their wealth-stuffed lives to preach to the less well off of the world on the moral importance of consuming less "to save the planet" set the hypocrisy bar so high that it put too great a strain on the digestion of ordinary people. "Private jets for climate change," the phrase of one rock star who declined to join the bandwagon, summed up this aspect most wickedly.
Unless outfitted with a cast-iron stomach - and I mean a real one - how could anybody endure Madonna of the Nine Mansions wrapping herself in the ascetics of the eco-movement? Hyper-indulgent, super-pampered, colossally wealthy, manically consumerist entertainment celebrities preaching restraint to others: Live Earth was a weird and monstrous journey to a whole new dimension of live irony.
Come back Uriah Heep: All is forgiven.
Not even the professional environmentalists could stay their gorge at Madonna's participation. They gave the world the news that the Material Girl owns shares in the most politically incorrect enterprises, such as Alcoa, the American aluminum giant, the Ford Motor Company and Weyerhaeuser, which ... chops trees for money.
Then there was the sheer deep folly of it all. What has Shakira, or her hips, got to offer on the question of the world's weather over the next hundred years? But Shakira is Robert Oppenheimer on steroids compared with Geri Halliwell of the long-forgotten fluff band the Spice Girls - "Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want etc. etc. etc. etc."
Geri Halliwell, Snoop Dogg, Shakira, Madonna and the Pussycat arborists are an unlikely think tank (maybe a tank top) on global warming or anything else. They are career publicists of themselves, artists in the merchandising of fluff and ego.
But beyond the obvious hypocrisy, beyond the saccharine Mickey Rooney "let's put on a show" conceit of the Live Earth dud-spectacular, I think something rather deeper and, perhaps grimly encouraging, accounts for its failure.
The public has just gotten tired of "stars." These luminescent bodies are now in much the same leaky boat as most politicians, because, in so many ways, stars themselves, by trying to wed some aspects of politics to strengthen or underwrite their highly capitalist careers, are seen as manipulative in precisely the same cynical way politicians are. Entertainers are, primarily, politicians of their own careers.
They don't have the cred they used to have. They have been exposed as shills for themselves, before anything else. And so it's not the elephantine "carbon footprint" of Madonna or the big bands that turned people away from Live Earth.
It's the growing perception that the strutting icons up there on all those stages are playing a game just as the politicians play a game, and for very much the same self-serving, egotistic reasons.
It's an Animal Farm moment for our time. "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
Now it's: Which are the stars and which the politicians? Madonna and Gore - can you spot the difference?
(Back)
10/07/07, John Doyle, Live Earth: What was the point?, Source.
08/07/07, Mike Collett-White, Earth underwhelmed by environment pop extravaganza, Source.
09/07/07, Alessandra Stanley, Sounding the Global-Warming Alarm Without Upsetting the Fans, Source.
14/07/07, Rex Murphy, Live Earth? How about live irony?, Source.
06/07/07, Sebastian Knauer, White Lies at Live Earth - DaimlerChrysler Kisses Green Goodbye, (Back).
Carmaker DaimlerChrysler may appear as a green world savior at Live Earth on Saturday, but the PR push comes as the company scraps a number of its much-lauded programs to create eco-friendly cars and biofuel products. Daimler customers, unfortunately, would prefer a fat car than an environmentally friendly one.
On Saturday, DaimlerChrysler will sponsor Al Gore's Live Earth series of concerts, where it will promote its Smart "fortwo" line of fuel-efficient automobiles. Daimler's presence at the event has drawn heavy criticism from some environmental groups, including Greenpeace which has refused to affiliate itself with the global event.
"It's problematic that a firm like Daimler, which just several weeks ago was doing battle with the European Commission plans for mandatory emissions limits, can now present itself as a protector of the climate," Jürgen Maier of the Berlin-based Climate Alliance wrote in the July issue of Greenpeace Magazine.
And while Daimler may be packaging itself at Live Earth as an environmentally friendly firm, its recent track record of abandoning support for sustainability projects suggests the company isn't putting its money where its mouth is.
The following article first appeared on our German sister site in May:
DaimlerChrysler's top environmental man Herbert Kohler always had a double role. As a DaimlerChrysler executive, he is both the official vice president of the Group Research and Advanced Engineering Vehicle and Powertrain division and the multinational company's chief environmental officer. That makes for a certain degree of tension when it comes to reconciling environmental and economic considerations. Right now, Kohler the car engineer is in the fast lane, as the conservationist gets left behind in the slow lane.
DaimlerChrysler -- which will soon be divided into Daimler AG and Chrysler as a result of the sale of the company's American division in May -- is shedding itself of once highly praised environmentally friendly projects around the world.
The company's support for the natural fiber factory Poematec in Belém, Brazil, for example is to be fully abandoned. The production of car seats, head rests and natural fiber carriage components, made from coco fibers and latex, was pursued as an especially sustainable DaimlerChrysler environmental project after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The project was partly financed by public funds from the German government's development bank, KfW Entwicklungsbank.
About 500 families currently make a living by cultivating fiber plants in the region around the mouth of the Amazon River. Now the debts incurred by the factory -- about $1 million -- are to be shouldered by Poematec employees who had previously been promised a good return. In the future DaimlerChrysler will only continue to purchase about "80,000 to 90,000 components" produced by Poematec every year and the factory will remain one of DaimlerChrysler's regular suppliers.
It was an abrupt turnaround for a company where, just last year, managers like political director Michael Inaker were still rhapsodizing about a "global sustainability alliance" in South America, South Africa and Asia that would equip millions of automobiles according to the Brazilian model. In the end, the company went back to cheaper plastic alternatives. And now Daimler is considering selling the factory to a Dutch construction firm that specializes in coco mat insulation for homes.
Plastic Displaces Natural Fibers
Brazil, where Daimler has experienced disappointing sales of its Mercedes "A" series of cars, isn't the only place where plastic has once more won out over more environmentally friendly materials for fitting a car's interior. Similar projects involving sisal fibers in South Africa or banana fibers in the Philippines have also seen the multinational company terminating agreements or deciding to "further adjust the logistics," as one Daimler spokesperson puts it in the company's jargon.
As for the production of modern biofuels from jatropha plants in India, Daimler is also opting out and negotiating the possible divestiture of the facility to German chemical company BASF and American biofuel company ADM. That project received German development funds as well. Interest in jatropha developed vigorously the world over thanks to DaimlerChrysler's temporary interest in the plant, which involved the company sending two test cars across the Indian subcontinent.
In the future, though, DaimlerChrysler will not be a party to this growing interest. True, executive Thomas Weber, who heads Daimler's research and technology department, emphasizes the importance of biofuels. But the company's involvement, along with Volkswagen, in a production plant in the eastern German state of Saxony is also being minimized. And Daimler's Ulm research center for car components in southern Germany made from sustainable materials has also been scaled back.
In executive Herbert Kohler's opinion, these developments are "no pullout" from environmental protection. In fact the US-German company's "research and environment budget" for the further development of more fuel-efficient engines, fuel cells or resource-sparing production processes amounts to about €1.5 billion ($2 billion) a year. The eco-projects involving tropical fibers or biofuels were "successfully initiated" and have to now "prove their worth on the market," he says. "Such things need to make economic sense in the long term too," says Kohler, who continues to see "great potential" in the development of fuel cells and biofuels. Kohler said the company also plans to continue reporting on its environmental efforts in an annual "sustainability report" and in the context of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which is recognized as the international standard for corporate sustainability reporting.
Mercedes Customers Want Fat Cars, not Eco-Friendly Ones
But the reporting system has its critics, including Andreas Troge, president of the Dessau-based German Federal Environmental Agency, who says they are "only credible if they are complete." In the past, he says, members of the GRI initiative have come under fire for their lack of full disclosure in reports. General Electric, for example, failed to report on a major public controversy that broke out over one of its chemicals. "The biggest bandits always write the prettiest reports," he told attendees of a conference in Stuttgart earlier this year where GRI was promoted. More than 20,000 companies worldwide have agreed to use Amsterdam-based GRI's standardized sustainability reporting instruments, including 200 in Germany.
In defending their retreat from environmentally friendly products, Daimler managers also have some convenient statistics they can fall back on. According to a recent internal study, the company's customers care more about a car's technical performance and the extras it comes kitted out with than the vehicle's sustainability. That also makes it easier for the company to resist outside calls for it to produce more responsible cars. As a member of the Federation of German Industry, Daimler fought hard and successfully this spring against a European Commission proposal to establish mandatory emissions limits on new models.
That, however, doesn't keep DaimlerChrysler from attempting to cultivate an environmentally friendly image for itself. Not long ago, CEO Dieter Zetsche said: "Sustainability is not an abstract concept in the company, it's a part of everyday life."
10/07/07, John Doyle, Live Earth: What was the point?, (Back).
God give me and Bob Geldof patience
Bob Geldof had a problem with Al Gore's Live Earth's shindig on the weekend. Me too.
Geldof is entitled to take a stance. He started the entire global TV pop concert phenomenon. One day in 1984 he saw TV images of children dying of starvation in Ethiopia. Outraged, he organized a one-off charity recording, Band Aid. Learning more about the famine in Ethiopia and the depth of the need, he organized Live Aid - televised concerts in London and Philadelphia. Both to be shown on countless TV channels around the world. The point was to ask viewers to donate money to feed the starving.
When Live Aid opened in London, with Status Quo singing Rockin' All Over the World, an unstoppable trend in pop culture was launched. Soon came Farm Aid, to help embattled farmers in the United States and televised concerts to support Amnesty International. Here in Toronto, a few years ago we had the post-SARS televised concert. If I remember rightly, the point was to cheer up traumatized Torontonians.
At this point, and particularly after the bloated, meandering, self-congratulatory Live Earth thing, it's all gotten out of hand. On two consecutive weekends now, we've had televised rock concerts to raise awareness for something. Last week it was the Concert for Diana, from London. The true purpose was unclear. According to the official website, "Concert for Diana is designed principally not as a fund-raising event but as a celebration of the life of Diana, Princess of Wales. All net proceeds from the concert, however, will go to the charities chosen by Prince William and Prince Harry." Right. It's not like anybody has been allowed to forget Diana.
Those charities are, principally, organizations of which Diana was an official patron at the time of her death - the Royal Marsden and Great Ormond Street Hospitals, the Leprosy Mission, the National AIDS Trust and the English National Ballet.
God give me and Bob Geldof patience, but the English National Ballet? The nobs going to see the ballet can dip a bit deeper into their own pockets.
The problem with all these televised international concerts is that pragmatism has been forgotten.
Asked about the Live Earth show, Geldof told the Guardian newspaper last month, "I hope [they] are a success. But why is [Al Gore] actually organizing them? To make us aware of the greenhouse effect? Everybody's known about that problem for years. We are all [expletive] conscious of global warming."
Yes. There's a difference between raising awareness and raising money. And, in terms of raising awareness, there's a difference between creating genuine cognizance of an issue and posturing about it. Live Earth had a lot of posturing.
When Geldof organized Live 8 in 2005, 20 years after Live Aid, he did have a real point. No dilettante on issues related to poverty and starvation in Africa, he knew that debt relief was necessary to stop the stop the endless cycle of famine and starvation. The point was to make a worldwide audience aware of this and make the world leaders at the G8 summit cognizant of the fact that millions of young people in countless countries were asking the G8 to allow debt relief.
Geldof is mouthy and blunt. Al Gore is a posturing politician. There was that excruciating moment on Saturday when he appeared on stage somewhere, put up his right hand and began chanting "the pledge" about halting our part in the planet's destruction.
At Live Aid, Geldof banged his fist on a table in a TV studio and commanded people to give money to help starving people. Al Gore asked people to make a pledge. Then Bon Jovi performed Wanted Dead or Alive, a song with the chorus "I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride..." It's a song about a rock star travelling around on planes and in automobiles. Jon Bon Jovi joked that it was "the national anthem."
If you were watching Live Earth in downtown Toronto, as I was, as soon as you stepped outside the house, you heard the endless whine of high-speed cars going around and around, to no point, at the Toronto Grand Prix.
It all seemed utterly ridiculous, this Live Earth jamboree.
"If you wanna save the planet, jump up and down," Madonna called out at one point. Me, I'm thinking, if you wanna save the planet, stop driving around and around. Stop pledging and posturing. Stop pretending that all televised, worldwide rock concert jamborees are the same. They're not. Bob Geldof had a point. Live Earth didn't.
08/07/07, Mike Collett-White, Earth underwhelmed by environment pop extravaganza, (Back).
Live Earth rocks the globe
LONDON (Reuters) - They rocked the world, but as the clean-up at nine climate change gigs around the globe begins, many wonder if the galaxy of pop stars did much to change it.
U.S. and British media were generally underwhelmed on Sunday by Live Earth, the mega-concert organized by former U.S. vice president and green campaigner Al Gore, which, though built on the model of Live Aid and Live 8, created a less positive buzz.
In Germany, however, newspapers were more upbeat about Saturday's gigs designed to pressure leaders to sign a new treaty by 2009 that would cut global warming pollution by 90 percent in rich nations and more than half worldwide by 2050.
Several articles examined the green credentials of artists on the day, including Madonna, whose annual "carbon footprint" was estimated at around 100 times the average Briton's.
The News of the World tabloid, Britain's biggest-selling newspaper, detailed estimates of Madonna's carbon emissions from nine houses, a fleet of cars, a private jet and the Confessions tour, calling her a "climate-change catastrophe".
The Sunday Telegraph quoted U.S. reports of her alleged financial links to companies accused of being major polluters.
Her spokeswoman in Britain was not immediately available for comment, but in a statement appearing in the Independent on Sunday, her New York spokeswoman said:
"Madonna's agreeing to sing at the Live Earth Event is merely one of the first steps in her commitment towards being environmentally responsible."
The negative headlines took some gloss off Madonna's widely praised appearance at Wembley Stadium in London, where she sang her specially written anthem "Hey You" before a raunchy performance of three of her biggest hits.
MIXED MESSAGES
The New York Times' online edition on Sunday featured a small picture of the event and a headline linking to "Artsbeat Blog", and in Britain only the Independent on Sunday made anything more than a fleeting reference on its front page.
But in Germany, where Snoop Dogg was among the acts at the Hamburg gig, Live Earth dominated headlines.
"The bottom line is that if nothing else, the issue of climate protection was a lot of fun for two billion people for one day," wrote Bild am Sonntag, Germany's best-selling Sunday newspaper.
Organizers say that in addition to the tens of thousands of fans at the gigs, the television, radio and internet audience could be as large as two billion.
Commentators noted the difficulty in marrying pop music with serious themes like the environment.
"Madonna's agreeing to sing at the Live Earth Event is merely one of the first steps in her commitment towards being environmentally responsible."
The negative headlines took some gloss off Madonna's widely praised appearance at Wembley Stadium in London, where she sang her specially written anthem "Hey You" before a raunchy performance of three of her biggest hits.
"Mixing music and a serious message gives concert a clunky rhythm," was the Washington Post's description of the Wembley gig, arguably the biggest lineup on the day that featured Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica and the Foo Fighters.
Performances were interspersed with long gaps, some of them filled by short films on environmental themes.
Many performers were "on message", calling on crowds from Sydney and Tokyo to New York and Rio de Janeiro to cut down on their personal carbon dioxide emissions and recycle.
Yet U.S. comedian Chris Rock expressed the kind of disbelief shared by many on the day that Live Earth would make a lasting difference, even if he was only joking:
"I pray that this event ends global warming the same way that Live Aid ended world hunger," he said in London.
09/07/07, Alessandra Stanley, Sounding the Global-Warming Alarm Without Upsetting the Fans, (Back).
If less is more, then why is biggest better?
Al Gore declared Live Earth “the largest global entertainment event in all of history,” but this seven-continent, multimedia eco-extravaganza was colored by the very complacency it vowed to combat: No matter how dire the problem, the solution can be small and painless.
So much star power assembled in so many places to assure fans that all they need do to save the planet is change a light bulb, choose paper over plastic or, as Cameron Diaz recommended, turn off the shower while shaving their legs.
“Every tiny, tiny, tiny little thing adds up to something big,” Rachel Weisz said backstage at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., where, between performances, actors, models and pop stars shared their conservation tips and personal aperçus.
Petra Nemcova, the model who nearly drowned in the Asian tsunami, said: “While I was there I didn’t feel hate towards nature. I felt nature was screaming for help.”
Celebrity-driven charity concerts always blend good works with smug self-promotion; the camera has a way of letting the air out of the best-intentioned event. Live Earth, however, had an especially precarious balance between eco-consciousness and ego-consciousness.
The “think small” sermon was perhaps the only one that could register with a society so unused to sacrifice, but — if only by the event’s own carbon-offsetting, enviro-calculations — it seemed a somewhat timid exhortation for such a huge expense of energy, talent and time.
Or perhaps it just seemed too convenient for those celebrating.
Unlike benefits for world hunger or genocide, celebrity efforts to curb the greenhouse effect backlash into the glass-house effect: People who own Escalades, private jets and McMansions shouldn’t recycle bromides at people who fail to carpool to work. Carbon-offsetting, the newly fashionable practice of compensating for one’s own carbon emissions by paying into a fund to reduce them elsewhere, may be better than nothing, but to some it sounds too much like rich men paying others to take their place in the draft during the Civil War.
That credibility gap seemed to fuel much of the skepticism and sniping along the sidelines (British newspapers which gleefully counted Madonna’s many houses and cars, discouraged readers from following in her outsize carbon footprint) and drove Bob Geldof, founder of Live 8, to question this concert’s usefulness. There were more than 130 artists performing for 24 hours from Kyoto to Rio de Janeiro, but there were also some conspicuous no-shows, like Bono and Paul McCartney, who in the past have turned out at similar events, and even the Super Bowl.
There was some “green revolution” hyperbole onstage, but very little sanctimony in the green room, where artists like Keith Urban described their own contributions — using bio-diesel fuel and recycling bins — but also conceded that it wasn’t nearly enough. Even the Live Earth anthem, “Hey You,” written by Madonna, who sang it in London alongside a group of schoolchildren who looked like the Hogwarts Choir, had a modest message. (“Don’t you give up/it’s not so bad/there’s still a chance for us.”)
In New Jersey, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, stirred the stadium crowd by calling politicians “corporate toadies.” But on television the whole event was smoothly corporate and conventional. On NBC performances by Ludacris, Madonna and the Police were punctuated with commercials for the Apple iPhone and Procter & Gamble’s Pantene. (Surely one way to help the environment is to use less shampoo.)
Those glossy ads could explain why celebrities recruited to star in the eco-ads that were interspersed throughout — Jennifer Garner making coffee with reusable filters (“Brew Anew”), Jessica Alba in a towel and shortie robe in her driveway, tossing a plastic bottle in the recycling bin — were shot in artsy black and white: so many celebrities do endorsements that the line between public-service announcement and product placement has to be very sharply drawn. (David Holmes, a former MTV host who was a backstage master of ceremonies at Giants Stadium, discussed alternative eco-products while balancing an Apple computer on his lap).
Sometimes a few messengers inadvertently stepped on corporate toes. David de Rothschild, author of “The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook,” urged viewers to stay away from hot new gadgets. “The other day this nice new phone came out, and I got really excited,” he told Karen Duffy, a co-master of ceremonies for the Giants Stadium event. Mr. de Rothschild said he came to his senses, urging viewers to combat society’s “consumer idolatry.”
There were sobering short subject films and also some charming moments. In Antarctica, Nunatak, a garage band of Polar scientists, did its outdoor gig in parkas and snow boots. (At times it seemed as if the amplifiers would crumble the glacier behind them.) Humor occasionally filtered through. In London the mock-band Spinal Tap reunited, and Chris Rock made fun of eco-alarmists. (“Every day in Jamaica, a little baby bursts into flames.”)
There was even some choice. Sundance and Bravo both covered the concerts in full, sparing some viewers the NBC three-hour primetime special with Carson Daly and Ann Curry. Ms. Curry handled the bigger backstage interviews with her customary “Today” program flummery (“Why do you care so much?” she asked Trudie Styler) and invasions of personal space, poking her finger in Al Gore’s chest and slapping Sting with her script. (Perhaps as a precaution, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York held his taped interview with Ms. Curry at the far other end of a long park bench.)
All in all the irritations were minor, but then again, so were the expectations.
14/07/07, Rex Murphy, Live Earth? How about live irony?, (Back).
The reviews are in concerning last weekend's eco-sanctimony staged by global warming's Nostradamus, Al Gore, and most of them aren't pretty. It was, according to the advance hype - and the hype for this event matched anything Hollywood roars up for Johnny Depp in a bandana, or a new Jessica Simpson big-screen onslaught - going to command an audience in excess of two billion.
There is nothing original in rounding up a beaker full of rock stars and movie celebrities, faded songsters and a rapper or two to variously strum, gyrate and posture for a cause du jour. We have had We Are the World and Live Aid, Willie Nelson doing his minstrel bit for the American farmer, and last year's care-a-polooza, the Make Poverty History jamboree, which didn't.
NBC gave three hours of prime time to last Saturday's effort, which trawled a measly 2.7 million viewers, a number that would be embarrassing for a home-cooking show or a rerun of Three's Company. Not even such class-A world-dominating entertainers as Madonna and Shakira, assisted by those cleavage climatologists, the Pussycat Dolls, could lure the torpid and the unaware, in any numbers, to the home screen. Nor could Snoop Dogg (the bard of Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang) appearing on stage in Hamburg (Hamburg? Who knew?) jolt the sing-a-long into a zone of even mild and credible buzz.
What happened?
I suppose the spectacle of the world's most wasteful people, rock-star plutocrats with their cribs and bling, caravans of trailer trucks and 100,000-watt amplifiers, taking a day out of their wealth-stuffed lives to preach to the less well off of the world on the moral importance of consuming less "to save the planet" set the hypocrisy bar so high that it put too great a strain on the digestion of ordinary people. "Private jets for climate change," the phrase of one rock star who declined to join the bandwagon, summed up this aspect most wickedly.
Unless outfitted with a cast-iron stomach - and I mean a real one - how could anybody endure Madonna of the Nine Mansions wrapping herself in the ascetics of the eco-movement? Hyper-indulgent, super-pampered, colossally wealthy, manically consumerist entertainment celebrities preaching restraint to others: Live Earth was a weird and monstrous journey to a whole new dimension of live irony.
Come back Uriah Heep: All is forgiven.
Not even the professional environmentalists could stay their gorge at Madonna's participation. They gave the world the news that the Material Girl owns shares in the most politically incorrect enterprises, such as Alcoa, the American aluminum giant, the Ford Motor Company and Weyerhaeuser, which ... chops trees for money.
Then there was the sheer deep folly of it all. What has Shakira, or her hips, got to offer on the question of the world's weather over the next hundred years? But Shakira is Robert Oppenheimer on steroids compared with Geri Halliwell of the long-forgotten fluff band the Spice Girls - "Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want etc. etc. etc. etc."
Geri Halliwell, Snoop Dogg, Shakira, Madonna and the Pussycat arborists are an unlikely think tank (maybe a tank top) on global warming or anything else. They are career publicists of themselves, artists in the merchandising of fluff and ego.
But beyond the obvious hypocrisy, beyond the saccharine Mickey Rooney "let's put on a show" conceit of the Live Earth dud-spectacular, I think something rather deeper and, perhaps grimly encouraging, accounts for its failure.
The public has just gotten tired of "stars." These luminescent bodies are now in much the same leaky boat as most politicians, because, in so many ways, stars themselves, by trying to wed some aspects of politics to strengthen or underwrite their highly capitalist careers, are seen as manipulative in precisely the same cynical way politicians are. Entertainers are, primarily, politicians of their own careers.
They don't have the cred they used to have. They have been exposed as shills for themselves, before anything else. And so it's not the elephantine "carbon footprint" of Madonna or the big bands that turned people away from Live Earth.
It's the growing perception that the strutting icons up there on all those stages are playing a game just as the politicians play a game, and for very much the same self-serving, egotistic reasons.
It's an Animal Farm moment for our time. "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
Now it's: Which are the stars and which the politicians? Madonna and Gore - can you spot the difference?
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