And the award for holier than thou green credentials goes to...
Make what you will of Greta Thunberg, the Swedish 16-year-old and world leader of the green movement. As a fanatically committed, primly stern martyr figure, she has shown herself to be amazingly charismatic and able to mobilise millions. Above all, she has introduced a new litmus test of what it means to be a good person: you shun air travel in grand style.
There was no going back after she arrived in New York from Europe by boat in August. With her example, the whole nature of entertainment and fun has had to be rethought.
And it’s no surprise that those always keenest on public displays of virtue are in the vanguard here. Last week, the notoriously holy band Coldplay announced they won’t be touring with their new album, Everyday Life – details of which were, erm, quirkily dropped through the personal ads pages of regional newspapers.
“We’re taking time over the next year or two to work out how our tour can not only be sustainable, [but] how can it be actively beneficial,” frontman Chris Martin told BBC News. “All of us have to work out the best way of doing our job.”
The result is that Coldplay will only play three gigs: one in London, and two in Amman, Jordan, to be broadcast live on YouTube. The Amman concerts were given on Friday, one at
sunrise and one at sunset to reflect the album’s two parts.
If there were an award for pretentious self-importance in the name of eco-virtue, nobody would be too surprised if Coldplay won it.
But the band are part of a wider rethink of traditional forms of fun. Glastonbury went green for the first time this year, which meant no single-use plastics, no ketchup sachets (pumps instead) and inducements to forego non-biodegradable face wipes and glitter – all this to help achieve its pledge to “leave no trace”.
US entertainment bigwigs have cracked down on nongreen entertainment, too. A major Chicago music festival, Mamby on the Beach, was cancelled just a month before it was due to take place because of climate-linked erosion and fears over endangering “the presence of Great Lakes piping plover shorebirds, a federally protected species”.
A few months ago, I wrote here about a term my friends and I use to describe, well, almost everything these days: TINOTL (things it’s not OK to like). While the urgency of the climate crisis cannot be disputed, the culture of waving your green creds around has produced a whole new world of TINOTLs among entertainment stars – and no ketchup sachet will be too small to escape.