What are your opinions on the Live Earth concerts?

From various blogs I have been reading, most environmentalists are very sceptical about it to say the least, mainly because it seems to be raising awarness of something which most people will have already heard about, and will be using vast amounts of energy to power it.

I think that these bands have a lot of influence amongst a lot of people, and the huge exposure that it is going to get could really help if it is done properly and there is an emphasis on telling people how they can help.

I've been watching on and off and they have some good acts mixed with some terrible ones. The beastie boys for example were awful! As were the black eyed peas in my opinion.

As for the message of the concert, I'm sure some people will be inspired to try and lower their emissions, at least for a short time. I'm not sure it will change anything long term.

I missed most of the concert as I was working yesterday, but when I did manage to watch some of it, there was no mention of the world or global warming whatsoever. I was watching for a good 45 minutes and unless I had known beforehand what the concert was for, I wouldn't have been any the wiser!

You must have watched at the end when they had madonna and the foo fighters on, because throughout most of the show they had mini clips and interviews with climate change experts every 20 minutes or so.

The individual acts didn't say much about the problem which I'm thankful for - celebrities are notorious for getting scientific fact mixed up!

Good luck to the people organising the concerts, but I don't think getting a bunch of highly paid celebrities to preach about global warming is going to be very effective when they probably emit the most carboin dioxide with the amount of flights they take!

Not sure that the concert achieved a lot other than publicity and self-gratification for the artists involved (none of whom will be changing their jet-setting lifestyles to lead by example). As for Madonna shouting for people to jump up and down if they wanted to stop global warming: what was that all about?

I thought that the message was muddled as it seemed to be saying that we could reverse the effects of global warming if we all do our bit (whatever that might be). Meanwhile, China is set to build one coal-fired power station a week for the next 7 years. What we need on this issue is real leadership.

One interesting snippet I picked up from a radio phone-in this morning was that the event had no recycling facilities to deal with the empty glasses etc. A bit of an own goal there, me thinks.

That is a bit of a mistake not to have recycling facilities, you would have thought that was one of the basic requirements for an environmentally friendly concert. I heard that they did try to cut down the emissions of the concerts - electricity supply back stage was limited and some artists got there by train - but the energy used must still have been huge.