Live Earth's Critics

The big criticism of Saturday's incredible series of concerts to stop global warming, Live Earth, was that, well, they were concerts. The idea was to listen to music and have a good time. And people burn fossil fuels getting to concerts, and performers sometimes travel very long distances to get there. But I'm pretty sure that the billions who watched from home would probably have burned more fossil fuel on shopping trips they didn't take Saturday than all the performers put together used getting to their venues.

As the Boston Globe said, to complain about the performers' shortcomings as environmentalists was to miss the point. The performers weren't enlisted as role models. They were there to deliver an audience -- two billion strong if estimates are accurate, via television, satellite radio, and the Internet. And odds are good that most of them were roughly as eco-enlightened as NBC news anchor Ann Curry, who confessed to a small group of reporters that she had bought her first compact fluorescent light bulb earlier that day.

But Live Earth was a concert, and its function was to create public energy to support solutions to restore the climate -- by itself it's not a solution. So it's exciting that in Cleveland this morning thousands of solar energy advocates have gathered for SOLAR 2007. The conference is a very important one. A year ago, at SOLAR 2006, the American Solar Energy Society, which sponsors the conference, hosted a series of nine panels by prominent government scientists working in the renewable and efficiency field. From those panels, ASES and the Sierra Club released a road map we call "America Leads," a scenario that demonstrated how using renewable and efficiency alone we could reduce our emissions of greenhouse gasses by 80 percent by 2050 -- two percent a year, year after year.

Having laid out the road map last year, ASES this year is focusing on economic opportunities and barriers. Sharing my panel this morning are leaders from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) in Los Angeles, who are working to make sure that, as solar technology develops, America has enough trained solar installers. The data they share is exciting. Right now California is on track to meet its ten year goal -- 3,000 megawatts of photovoltaics -- in eight or maybe fewer years. And later this week, ASES will release a report documenting the full potential jobs impact of the energy innovation revolution that's beginning to sweep America.

Bottom line: We need both concerts and training programs for solar installers -- a new energy economy is going to need both glitz and grit. And both are being put in place. Because, after all, if IBEW trains tens of thousands of installers, and the next generation of young people couldn't care less about global warming -- we'll just have a bunch of unemployed solar installers, and we'll keep frying the climate.

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