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Singer Eilish
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Magdalena Wosinska / The New York Times / Redux / laif
If pop culture were to take climate change seriously, it should actually get rid of it.
A study on the greenhouse gas emissions of the British music industry came to sobering results: a large music festival with more than 40,000 visitors produces around 2000 tons of CO2.
For comparison: a vacation flight from Hamburg to Mallorca produces around 0.4 tons of CO2 per person.
Surprisingly: It is not tour buses or airplanes, stage construction and the other resource-guzzling logistics of the bands that prove to be the most damaging for the ecological balance, neither is the production and distribution of their phonograms.
No: Much more serious, the study found in 2008, is the individual arrival of fans.
It accounts for almost half of the emissions.
Anyone who makes a pilgrimage to a festival or concert is therefore most likely a climate sinner - and in Fridays for Future times, the fun of partying should now be paired with a bit of guilty conscience.
Enjoyment instead of responsibility: In pop culture, climate awareness has long been viewed as hostile to fun and uncool.
In the warning that mankind will ruin the future of the planet with unreasonable actions today, there is everything that pop just doesn't have in its program: renunciation instead of excess, objectivity instead of sensuality, political engagement instead of hedonism, long-term planning instead of living for the Moment.
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