We’ve toured the world for years. To help save the planet we’ll have to change
The imprinting of climate emergency into the public consciousness, achieved by the school strikes and mass activist arrests, seems to have generated more introspection than positive action. The debate around personal sacrifice, hypocrisy and lifestyle change is playing at high volume and, as recently highlighted by the climate expert Michael Mann, this presents a danger that popular demand for catastrophe-avoiding systemic change could get lost in the mix.
This debate is just as alive (and equally confused) within the music industry. Headline emphasis is often placed on issues such as single-use plastics or band travel by air. Important as those things are, evidence shows that factors such as audience transportation and venue power account for as much as 93% of all the CO2 emissions generated by major music events.
As a band that has toured globally for several years, we’ve had cause to reflect on this. Concerns over our own carbon impact and those of our wider industry aren’t new to us, but the urgency is. Last year, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called for “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” and said carbon emissions were harmful, regardless of the fun had in their generation. In other words, what goes on tour doesn’t stay on tour.
We’ve taken unilateral steps for nearly two decades – like many bands, we’ve paid to have trees planted, prohibited the use of single-use plastics and travelled by train wherever feasible. We have explored advanced carbon offset models, but in researching these programmes serious issues arose.
First, the concept of offsetting creates an illusion that high-carbon activities enjoyed by wealthier individuals can continue, by transferring the burden of action and sacrifice to others – generally those in the poorer nations in the southern hemisphere. Evidence suggests that offset programmes can wreak serious havoc for the often voiceless indigenous and rural communities who have done the least to create the problem.
Ultimately, carbon offsetting transfers emissions from one place to another rather than reducing them. The European commission has warned that 85% of projects were unlikely to deliver “real” or “measurable” reductions, while the UN environment programme recently stated that offsetting cannot be used by polluters “as a free pass for inaction”.
We’ve also discussed ending touring altogether – an important option that deserves consideration. In reality, however, an entire international roster of acts would need to stop touring to achieve the required impact. In a major employment industry with hundreds of acts, this isn’t about to happen. Any unilateral actions we take now would prove futile unless our industry moves together, and to create systemic change there is no real alternative to collective action.
So today we’re announcing the commissioning of the renowned Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research to map the full carbon footprint of typical tour cycles, and to look specifically at the three key areas where CO2 emissions in our sector are generated: band travel and production, audience transport and venue. The resulting roadmap to decarbonisation will be shared with other touring acts, promoters and festival/venue owners to assist swift and significant emissions reductions.
The stark reality is that failure to do so could mean matters are taken out of our hands. In recent months, (thanks in no small part to those strikes and those arrests) 245 local authorities across the UK have declared a climate emergency, with 149 setting targets of zero emissions by 2030 or earlier. In the festival sector alone, this number includes the licensing authorities for each of the five best-attended UK outdoor events: Glastonbury, Download, Reading/Leeds, V Festivals and
Creamfields. Their event plans will now inevitably include mandatory rules on carbon emissions, and so the likelihood of licences being granted without emissions being dramatically and continually reduced is slim.
Given the current polarised social atmosphere, uplifting and unifying cultural events are arguably more important now than ever, and no one would want to see them postponed or even cancelled. The challenge therefore is to avoid more pledges, promises and greenwashing headlines and instead embrace seismic change.
The report produced by the Tyndall
Centre will not provide a panacea, and we know implementation of its findings will require significant change for us and our colleagues across the industry who are as keen as we are to create change. But in an emergency context, business as usual – regardless of its nature, high profile or popularity – is unacceptable.
• This article was written by musician Robert Del Naja on behalf of Massive Attack
not have prompted or agreed any of these compromises, but they are where the fever-dreams of the new hard right inevitably lead a country like the UK, shredding its already tattered social settlement.
One section of the leaked document shows US officials telling their UK counterparts they will “ban” any “mention of greenhouse gas emissions” in negotiations. If, as Johnson has claimed, this is “pure invention”, he has the perfect opportunity to deny it in public next week when Trump visits London. My hunch is he wouldn’t dare.
Against Johnson and Trump, the liberal establishment has so far reacted with proceduralism – with justified appeals to civility, with a blizzard of ingenious parliamentary amendments, with deep-voiced barristers in horsehair wigs. Yet this has had only limited success – because its opponents demonstrably do not care about liberal norms. And so each failure has chipped away further at our democracy.
Should Johnson be re-elected you can expect him to keep on attacking the country’s institutions. At this autumn’s Conservative conference in Manchester, I sat in on a Brexit fringe event where a QC proposed the abolition of the dangerously independent supreme court. His fellow panellists – including John Redwood, Arlene Foster and Mark Francois – did not protest but merely nodded in assent.
So what’s left to oppose the nihilists and denialists of the hard right? Only politics, of course, which in England and Wales primarily means Corbyn’s Labour. In all the focus on the leader, what is less often interrogated is the change in the party’s grassroots. Reporting on Labour’s ground campaign, I was struck by how many of the most engaged activists had been involved in protests over student fees at the start of the decade, or other social movements, and had opted to throw in their lot with parliamentary politics. In the space of just a few years, they had gone from getting kettled by the Metropolitan police to sketching out policies for government.
Something similar has happened across the western left. The indignados of Spain had Podemos, and many of the marchers on Athens’ Syntagma Square supported Syriza. In the US and the UK, the social movements opted to try to reshape two of the oldest and most fossilised parties of all. Occupy Wall Street organisers I met in 2012 are today vying to make Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders the Democrat choice to go up against Trump next year. And then there is Corbyn’s Labour.
Electability or even taking power was not traditionally much of a concern for that strand of the left. Corbyn stood to be Labour leader in 2015 to make a point. MPs put him on the ballot paper to give him a say. To put it mildly, this is an experiment that went beyond either side’s expectations – but it is hard to imagine the party going back to its pre-2015 configuration. It is impossible to imagine a Labour frontbencher following the example of former shadow chancellor Chris Leslie in 2015, and pleading for the party to back landlords.
As Michael Jacobs, a former adviser to Gordon Brown, says: “It cannot now be taboo, anywhere, to talk about capitalism, the huge inequities of income and wealth, the unsustainability of the economic system, the power of corporations and media empires to set the limits of debate and govern policy, and how all these need to be radically reformed.” Brown didn’t do it, he admits, while Ed Miliband timidly cleared his throat on the issue.
But Labour’s manifesto puts the party at the cutting edge of what is now mainstream leftwing thinking: it calls for workers to be given stakes in their employers’ firms, for taking back utilities under public control, for a green new deal, and for a universal basic income. No other major party in the west comes close to this ambition. In fact, Sanders has taken some of the ideas. This is not to heap undue praise on Labour’s platform. As a policy document it is not without its contradictions; as a political statement, it runs the risk of passing over the grinding reality of the here and now experienced by most voters, in favour of some gleaming spire of progress. Why flirt with a universal basic income when, this week’s headlines show, some low earners could wind up paying more tax under your proposals? Why should renationalising rail take priority over ensuring more buses between towns and villages? Most of all, Labour has done little work to win public support or understanding for some of its bolder ideas.
But still the choices in front of us are stark. Western politics has often been jointly defined by US and UK leaders. Roosevelt and then Attlee defined social democracy; Reagan and Thatcher ripped down that edifice. Blair and Clinton set off together on the third way. The next generation could be defined by Trump and Johnson – or it could have hope instead.
Labour’s new manifesto puts the party squarely at the cutting edge of what is now mainstream leftwing