Can music be sustainable?

Music has a climate problem - and these bands are doing something about it!

I've mentioned before how Coldplay was the first band to set a goal of cutting their tour's carbon footprint by 50%. According to their latest update, they've cut their emissions by 59% in the last two years, compared to their previous tour, through reducing air travel and even using a power-generating dancefloor: similar to that of a concert venue I reported on a few months ago in Glasgow, Scotland, that’s heated and cooled using the stored body heat of concertgoers.

It’s time for an update, though, because there are a lot more efforts afoot to curb the emissions from the music industry and call for climate action at a broader level. This week, the whole newsletter focuses on the music industry - the good news, the not-so-good news, and my top inspiration. Read on!

GOOD NEWS

Music Declares Emergency is a UK-based charity that counts performers from Billie Eilish and Radiohead to the London Symphony Orchestra and Julian Lloyd Webber among its activists. (Did you catch the Instagram Live I did with Billie’s mom a few weeks ago, and the live-streamed Overheated event they're hosting next week?) MDE has a new campaign titled No Music on a Dead Planet to “bring together artists, music industry professionals and music fans to call for an immediate governmental response to the climate change emergency to protect all life on Earth.”

To facilitate climate action within the industry, MDE has created climate info packs with practical steps the music sector can take to shrink its carbon footprint, from planning efficient tour routes with multiple stops in the same country or even the same city, to greening their banks and switching to a renewable energy provider. For fans, they’ve teamed up with the The ClimateMusic Project to create the BeCool campaign that focuses on civic engagement, emission reductions, and climate education.

Individual artists also understand the enormity of this problem and the importance of catalyzing climate action. The band Massive Attack worked with climate scientists at the UK’s Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research and A Greener Future , a nonprofit focused on lowering the emissions of the music industry, to create the gold standard for green touring. They highlighted that work at an August show at Clifton Downs in Bristol, England. The venue was powered by renewable energy, serviced by electric vehicles, catered with vegan food, and even featured composting toilets. The band also encouraged fans to use sustainable ways of traveling to the show, including electric shuttle busses that ferried concertgoers from the center of Bristol to the festival grounds.

At Climate Week in New York last month, Björk premiered a new film, Cornucopia, that focuses on her work around the climate crisis. A group of K-pop fans called Kpop4Planet convinced Hyundai Motor Co. to scuttle a deal to buy aluminum created using coal power in Indonesia. For more on what individual artists are doing, read this interview with Grammy-nominated producer Jayda G and rapper and zoologist Louis VI.

It’s clear that a growing number of musicians -- and their fans -- recognize the power of their voice, and are using it to call for change!

NOT-SO-GOOD NEWS

Touring for music concerts requires moving around large amounts of heavy equipment and band members, and powering the venue for the show itself is carbon intensive as well. One study found that (even with Coldplay's cuts) the music industry in the UK is responsible for emitting 540,000 tons of carbon each year; 74 percent of those emissions came from live shows.

I’ll let this excellent editorial from Nature say the rest: “Some might say that live music is, by its nature, unsustainable, and that the best solution would be for performers to stop touring altogether. But that is a joyless answer — and there is an alternative. [My colleague] Richard Betts, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, thinks that change will come only when it is driven by those highest up in the music industry and backed by good science. Now is the time to be vocal.”

Music has a large role to play in driving the social change we’ll need to fix this problem!

INSPIRATION OF THE MONTH

As you can see, there’s lots of good news in the music industry – but what impresses me the most is what the pop band AJR is doing to activate people. Adam Met, the band’s bassist, also founded the climate nonprofit Planet Reimagined. As the band toured the country this summer, AJR partnered with local nonprofits in each city to encourage concertgoers to take action at the local level (which is so powerful and so effective!).

For example, after the band played two Salt Lake City shows, fans mailed 625 letters and 77 postcards to members of the Utah legislature asking them to limit how much water is diverted from the Great Salt Lake. “In Phoenix, they sent more than 1,000 letters to the city council calling on them to recognize extreme heat as a climate emergency,” Adam told NPR. “In Chicago, 200 fans sent letters to Illinois legislators urging them to pass the Illinois clean jobs platform, which supports investments in building transportation and the grid.”

Planet Reimagined crunched the numbers and found that around 12,000 participated in climate action after attending an AJR concert. That’s incredible and so inspiring. And Planet Reimagined has put out a report titled  ”Amplify: How to Build a Fan-Based Climate Movement” that gives other artists a road map to inspire their own climate action. Shouldn’t everyone be doing this?

Thurs Oct 31 at 11am ET - Mapping the Future of Biodiversity with Esri UK and Oxygen Conservation, live on LinkedIn.

Thurs Oct 31 at 12pm ET - Understanding the Acceleration of Climate Change Around the World with the The Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in the United States (AFPC-USA) and Peter Schlosser from the ASU Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. Webinar, register here.