Live Earth hopes action follows global concerts

updated 1:54 p.m. ET July 2, 2007

NEW YORK - Live Earth is ambitious by any standard: eight concerts featuring the biggest names in music, playing for a 24-hour period across the globe, all for the cause of global warming.

But like its template — 2006’s Live 8, the global concert devoted to poverty in Africa — the mission of Live Earth is somewhat amorphous. Its aim is to “trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis.”

Whatever Live Earth’s accomplishment on Saturday, it will be difficult to measure. Former Vice President Al Gore, who partnered with Kevin Wall in founding Live Earth, believes the world needs to rise up as one giant vox populi to influence “a new political reality.”

“The tipping point in the political system will come when the majority of the people are armed with enough knowledge about the crisis and its solutions that they make this cause their own,” Gore said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Then, you will see the entire political system shift dramatically.”

Wall, an Emmy-winning concert producer who produced Live 8 and founded Live Earth, hopes Live Earth will change attitudes about global warming and jettison a larger movement.

“This concert is not the solution,” says Wall. “This concert is providing, hopefully, that global tipping point to start to get us into empowering people, get them into the tent.”

“Maybe we can make the noise, maybe we can be the town crier, maybe we can say like Paul Revere, ‘The British are coming,’ ” he adds.

Live Earth will send proceeds to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit organization chaired by Gore (tickets for the U.S. concert range from $83-$348). Wall was originally inspired to put on Live Earth after seeing “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Academy Award-winning documentary on Gore’s global warming slideshow.

“The question I kept asking myself is, ‘What can I do?’ ” says Wall.

Concerts are scheduled for Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.; London; Johannesburg, South Africa; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Shanghai, China; Tokyo; Sydney, Australia; and Hamburg, Germany. A band of scientists will also perform in Antarctica, stretching Live Earth across seven continents.

More than 150 artists will perform, including Madonna, the Police, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Alicia Keys. Sixty short films and 30 public service announcements have been produced, which will be broadcast between performances.

Also planned are more than 6,000 parties in 119 countries — ranging from home viewings to museum festivals. The concerts will be broadcast in the U.S. on NBC, Telemundo, the Sundance Channel, Bravo, MSNBC and Universal HD. They will also be broadcast online at LiveEarth.MSN.com and on XM satellite radio.

Lessons from Live 8
Live Earth has been organized mindful of lessons learned from Live 8, which was planned just weeks in advance by Bob Geldof to rally support for Africa. Envisioned as a sequel to 1985’s Live Aid (which benefited famine in Ethiopia), Live 8 didn’t charge for tickets and generally kept to a vague message urging help for Africa.

The underlying point of Live 8 was to pressure world leaders who days later met for that year’s G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. Some success could be claimed: the G8 nations committed to increasing aid to Africa from $25 billion annually to $50 billion by 2010. The leaders also endorsed a deal to cancel the debt of 18 of the world’s poorest nations.

Since then, Geldof has created the Web site www.thedatareport.org to audit how faithfully the G8 nations keep to their Gleneagles promises.

Though Africa has now largely ceded ground to global warming as the dominant cause celebre, many of those involved with Live 8 still grind away. Bono, U2 frontman and outspoken advocate of aid for Africa, recently guest edited an issue of Vanity Fair devoted to Africa.

On the largely dormant Live 8 Web site, Bono is quoted: “Live 8 was and remains a brilliant moment but what is more important is the brilliant movement of which it was a part.”

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