Guest article by George Hinchliffe, Founder & Musical Director of The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, and Lead for See Through Carbon’s carbon reporting pilot for Live Music.
Musical Feuds
There used to be rivalries between bands. Probably whipped up by the publicity departments.
Blur hated Oasis. The Stones hated the Beatles. Radiohead hate Coldplay. And so on.
Their fans can even have rucks in the street about it, like rival sports fans.
This article doesn’t advocate hating anyone. As someone who’s been adjacent to (and doing my best to avoid) the music industry for half a century, I might venture to suggest some bands simulate rivalry to get their names in the news.
But could it be that all of us, musicians or not, can be ignorant, or misled, or money grubbing, or publicity-hungry and venal?
Even if they, or we, are well-intentioned?
This article examines the gap between reality and image for bands – and venues – regarding their carbon footprints.
- Are musicians any more ignorant than the rest of us?
- If they are, does it matter?
- Is anyone trying to do something about what might be, cynically or naively, the most greenwashing business of all?
How green is your band?
Are your musical heroes saving the planet? Or even just making improvements to averting man-made discomfort and chaos on the thin surface of the planet?
Or is it just “GREENWASH”, i.e. “bullshit telling porky pies for publicity purposes”.
Does your band, or the band you like, really make a difference by taking a bus instead of a plane? Or banning plastic straws from their gigs? Or selling organic cotton T-shirts?
If they’re claiming to be “green”, or “carbon neutral” what does that even mean? Does what they do actually achieve anything? Are they making a difference?
If not, then it’s total GREENWASH.
The Importance of Measuring
If we want to make a difference we need to MEASURE things. That’s the basis of SCIENCE. Regarding the environment, the relevant unit is the one climate scientists use to measure greenhouse gases, i.e. metric tonnes of CO2e.
‘Green’ bands use the same practices as other industries to justify their environmental credentials. That is to say, they’re “inaccurate, opaque and proprietary”.
That’s because people pay for it. They’re thinking of money, or profit, of a balance sheet of financial accounting, instead of CARBON ACCOUNTING.
There’s literally a trillion-dollar industry producing certificates to support your green claims. There are very expensive green badges to signal your virtue. More importantly, they appear to have had no impact on actually reducing emissions.
By and large, it’s all greenwash, dependent on not counting all your carbon liabilities, and ‘offsetting’ them against dodgy carbon credits. If you still think ‘offsetting’ works, take a look at this simple explanation of how it doesn’t.
Let me tell you how to do it better, with accurate, free, open source, transparent carbon accounting.
If you can suggest how we might improve this effort, make it more accurate, better able to reduce emissions, then do sing out.
We’re all working on this together. Aren’t we?
The Intro
Since the 1970s scientists have been telling us human activity has had a damaging effect on the environment. Politicians and pundits have been talking about carbon footprints and greenhouse gasses and global warming for decades. Many, though not all, governments assure us they intend to do something about it.
But these always appear to involve future plans rather than immediate action. Meanwhile, the problems are getting worse. Fast. Years pass, and the climate crisis deepens.
Some politicians, invariably from oil-producing countries, still deny any human impact on the environment, claiming ‘ hoax’. Yeah… right… But then some people try to cure baldness with chicken manure ….
I tend to stick with the scientific consensus. Which is undeniable. You can change the laws of the land but you can’t change the laws of nature. And you can’t change the laws of atmospheric physics.
Politicians and pundits can grandstand all they like, but the atmosphere doesn’t care. It’s not a matter of opinion of belief, but physics. Like gravity, or the need to breathe.
It’s not about ‘saving the planet’. The planet will carry on regardless, as it has for billions of years.
But what we do has a significant effect on the environment. Our environment. Meaning the conditions of human life. Why would we want to compromise, damage and muck those up? Why would we knowingly continue burning fossil fuels to the point where life becomes difficult, or impossible?
You can’t fix a problem unless you can define it, and science depends on measuring what’s happening.
What does and doesn’t matter
Many bands, even some venues, claim to be ‘carbon neutral’. There’s no shortage of companies happy to take your money in exchange for giving you some form of “green” certificate. This usually involves paying someone else a small amount of money now to plant trees that may sequester carbon in future decades.
The rise of the value of the carbon trading industry to a trillion dollars, coinciding with the remorseless rise in greenhouse gas emissions, reveals the current version of ‘offsetting’ has had no appreciable impact. Any claim of ‘carbon neutrality’ might shift tickets and merch, but is a gesture that defies physics.
Like sorting out our cardboard and plastic is an attempt to “do the right thing”, carbon offsetting makes very little difference, and misses the point.
Changing the legislation governing how you make a shirt, how and what you farm, what materials you use to build your house, on the other hand, are the sort of actions that have a far more significant effect on the environment.
If the world, or every person on it, is going to take carbon and climate change seriously and take steps to do something about it, things have to change.
Some people don’t want to acknowledge things must change, but the effects of the climate emergency will increasingly impact them. Their children will remember them for being deniers, or ditherers, who caused further, avoidable, damage.
If the governments who claim they want to do something about it changed legislation, things could change substantially and quickly.
We’ve seen it happen with pandemics, airline safety rules, traffic regulations, seat-belts etc. A change in the law can lead to a statistically demonstrable reduction in mortality.
What’s stoppping us
Many people say:
‘It’s all very well but I need to make a living.‘
Some might be blunter,/more honest, and justify their inaction thus:
‘I’m a capitalist. I need to rip off my customers as much as I can and I can’t afford to save the whale, the tigers, the planet or worry about whether I’m polluting the air which we all breathe, I need to make a stinking big profit‘.
A dispassionate approach to the issue could be different, and realistic.
There’s not actually evidence that there’s a financial penalty to being “green”. On the contrary, there’s evidence that:
- wind power is cheaper than oil, coal and nuclear
- other initiatives and changes could result in more cash efficient procedures in industry
- a change in the customary UK building practices could result in far better insulation, more profit for the large companies which do most of the building, and a far better result for the atmosphere.
The other balance sheet
‘Green’ is not necessarily expensive, but surely we should be looking not just as financial accounting, but at carbon accounting too. And we could pretty easily create positive outcomes in BOTH spreadsheets.
Let’s imagine. If there was a massive fall of purple snow, which if left undisturbed would make everyone on earth feel ill, we could expect community volunteers would get out there shovelling, and councils and government bodies would organise ways of dealing with the problem.
Surely the climate crisis is the same…. so why is everybody snoozing on the job, and saying they’re do something about it tomorrow, or “in a bit”?
It’s difficult to quantify exactly, and remedies are challenging to identify and implement, but difficulty is no excuse for inaction. Putting the ‘cleanup’ in private hands, which charge for an alleged solution at the cheapest rate, is probably not the best way to sort it out.
The carbon accounting companies could wise up and do a more efficient job, but we can’t just wait for them to change their business models, or for the government to change the rules.
We also have a responsibility to demonstrate we’re serious on our own.
For better or worse people, especially young people, look to their musical heroes as role models.
Bands may not produce as much carbon dioxide as carmakers, but they wield considerably more moral leverage and cultural authority.
And so far, the music industry has failed, badly, when it comes to carbon emissions.
How bands greenwash
Companies and pop musicians who claim to be green are greenwashing if they don’t:
- present us with any hard data about what their carbon footprint actually is
- publish a real carbon audit
- detail their carbon reduction plan
- report on whether their emissions are falling
We need “hard numbers”, repeatable, verifiable data. The kind used by scientists and tax collectors. And if a band or venue wants its green claims to be taken seriously, we must surely transparently publish and share our results.
Really, every industry has to do this if there is to be any change, but why can’t music take the lead?
Carbon Footprint Basics
There’s a well-understood methodology regarding how carbon footprints are calculated.
Don’t be deterred by minor quibbles or nitpicking, it’s just multiplication, using the most accurate conversion factors available, and addition.
It’s called the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGP). 97% of all reporting entities use it – it’s as universally adopted as double-entry bookkeeping. Yet politicians, captains of industry and pundits don’t quote it, deal with it or refer to it.
The See Through Carbon website, among others, provides a simple explanation of carbon accounting basics, but it’s actually much simpler than you might think. I found it much simpler than, say, calculating VAT returns.
Any entity’s carbon footprint it made up of three categories, or ‘Scopes’:
- Scope 1: direct emissions from your activity.
- Scope 2: indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity
- Scope 3: all the other indirect emissions the value or supply chain
Scope 3 is usually by far the biggest, often 80%+ of any business’s emissions. It’s the most complicated to calculate, simply because it involves more entities up and down the supply chain.
Scope 3 has 15 different sub-categories, but the simple way to think of it is ‘all the emissions that would not have been emitted, had the businesses not existed’.
- The neutral news for the music business is that the carbon footprint of any venue, band or gig is probably around 90% from a single source – audience transport emissions as they arrive and depart the venue.
- The good news for the music business is that this is very easy to calculate, if you want to.
- The bad news for the music business is that no one is bothering.
It’s all about the audience, stoopid
WHAT?
- So all those newspaper headlines flight-shaming Taylor Swift for the number of jumbo jets required to fly her kit around the world are statistical nonsense, focusing on tiny Scope 1 emissions and ignoring vastly bigger Scope 3 emissions of the millions of fans who travel to see her?
- So all that PR stuff about bands drinking from reusable containers on stage is just sanctimonious guff?
- So banning plastic cutlery from the food concessions at a festival is little more than virtue-signally, perfomative, greenwash?
Er, yes.
The same is true, of course, of any ‘event’ industry, from sports to religion. Anything involving large numbers of people travelling to be somewhere at the same time will have a carbon footprint that is almost entirely made up of the emissions taken to travel there and back. (Think about a Taylor Swift concert at Wembley, deserted the day before and after her concert, but full of 100,000 fans the day she performed).
The issue is not one of BLAME, but of accurate reporting followed by a dispassionate consideration and implementation of ways to improve matters.
The surprising thing is that, as far as we can tell, no one has ever attempted to arrive at a figure for calculating scope three figures in carbon accounting for a music gig.
This involves using a “conversion factor” and some simple arithmetic with clear data, to arrive at a carbon equivalent figure.
It may be that football fans are less likely to be attuned to green and envinmental issues, but music fans may be slightly more so inclined, and they might be more likey to influence others in other industries. Or football fans.
What I did about it
It seems that the only musical group to have undertaken a statistically significant transport survey in order to arrive at a carbon audit is mine, The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.
Why? Because I thought it was important to start somewhere.
I heard that See Through Carbon (STC) was running a series of seven Pilot schemes, providing free carbon footprint calculations in exchanged for agreeing to make the data public. Pilot 2 was Live Music. I signed the band up to it.
STC provided volunteers and carbon accounting experts to help us conduct audience transport surveys on a 6-venue UK tour.
Using three different methods (people in hi-viz jackets holding clipboards/QR codes used on mobile phones/filling in forms) we asked each audience for the data required to calculate the biggest single emissions source of any music event – audience transport.
With just three questions
- How many of you came together?
- Where did you come from?
- How did you travel?
we got all we needed – and of course the venues can also benefit from the same data.
A bit of multiplication and addition, and STC can calculate the volume of greenhouse gas each audience emitted when they travelled to see us perform. Our data goes into an open-source database that others can use to calculate their own footprints more accurately.
STC”s statisticians told us an audience response rate of 30% was more than enough, but all our data well exceeded this (one venue was 80%). This suggests our fans respond positively to the idea of being able to reduce emissions.
You could join us. You could be an early adopter of this FREE system!
See Through News article Confessions of an Audience Tranport Surveyer – Don’t Mention The C-Word describes how people reacted emotionally to these, neutral, questions.
Interestingly, if you ask people how they got to the gig and say that it is for a carbon audit, they tend to try to skew their results, saying ‘Oh I’m green, my car is electric’, etc.. Or the opposite, ‘I’m terrible, we came by diesel car’.
Actually, there’s no value judgement involved, simply an attempt to arrive at an accurate figure.
The question then, is what can my band do with this data?
So what can we do?
Armed with accurate, verifiable, consistent data, music venues and bans can look to the future, and work to reduce their footprint.
It might even be cheaper that way. Capitalism may have caused pollution and damaged the environment, but enlightened capitalism might find profitable lower-carbon solutions.
Let’s be clear, accurate reporting is important. But there’s no point in a green claim without transparency about the method of arriving at a figure, and being transparent about the hard numbers.
So what can we do to improve things?
We could try virtual gigs, like streaming. This is not carbon neutral, as the data centres that enable AI and streaming require as much energy to power them as a small town, but at least we can compare real data, not exchange hand-wavy feelings.
Organising buses would hugely reduce total emissions, especially if the buses were electric, and recharged with renewable energy. Favouring venues with good transport access to late night trains and bus services – there are many possibilities, once you can put a number on their real-world impact.
Coldplay, The 1975, Massive Attack, Radiohead and others, have gained considerable reputational gain from their claims to be green, or carbon neutral.
It does appear that they are far from green. This may be because they are well-intentioned, but haven’t substantially eliminated ignorance from their thinking. Perhaps they could be induced to look at the seethroughcarbon.org methods.
Will the Ukulele Orchestra’s data be the start of arriving at a workable conversion factor, which will mean that we can all look at a more accurate carbon footprint?
Can the maverick, but successful 40-year career of The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain be the start of properly accurate carbon footprint information?
Will See Through Carbon’s Live Music Pilot pioneer accurate carbon accounting in the music industry? Will the data help drive creative and profitable carbon reduction plans, which shame other industries into getting their act together properly?
Get on board. Sign up. Let’s make this work.
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If you’re a venue or band interested in applying for a free carbon footprint calculation, this article explains how to apply.