Bono, Toilet Paper and Greenhouse Gases

The Anchoress delivers another delicious morsel:

Look, if we're going to be urged -- relentlessly -- to accept that global warming is "the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced", the unrelenting "crisis" of our time, if it's as urgent a matter as these preening moralists insist it is, then we need to explore concrete, measurable means of conservation that -- unlike "sparing the square" -- may actually matter. Let's start with Sheryl Crow's medium, the rock concert, shall we?

I recall U2's fun, splendidly ironic "Zoo TV" Tour of the early 1990's. The band spent over 18 months traveling the globe in support of their fantastic album, "Achtung, Baby", hitting all the stadiums and large venues on every continent. 157 shows. The tour boasted:

The stage ... featured vidi walls, 36 video monitors, numerous television cameras, two separate mix positions, 26 on stage microphones, 176 speakers, and 11 elaborately painted Trabants, several of which were suspended over the stage with spotlights inserted into headlights, which all required 1 million watts of power to operate: enough to run 2,000 homes.

A total of 52 trucks were required to transport the 1,200 tons of equipment, 3 miles of cabling, 200 labourers, 12 forklifts and one 40-ton crane, required to construct the stage. And that was for every show.

That's a pretty impressive bit of consumption, but let's add into it the luxury jets (and non-luxurious staff planes) that carted U2 and their handlers, techies, roadies, belly-dancers, make-up, costumers, etc all around. Add to it the air conditioning at the indoor venues. Add into it the trains, planes and automobiles used to transport hundreds of thousands of people to the shows. Add to it the klieg lights used for every televised interview, the trees killed to print every magazine promo and to print the $30.00 posters sold at all 157 shows. And consider if you will the souvenir teeshirts -- probably stitched together in some hellish Indonesian sweatshop -- that weren’t even made out of bamboo fiber!