Credit: Jack Penates Shit

Music Towers went to the Festival Awards conference, and while we were there we watched one of the Green panels. The United Kingdom has made pledges to cut our emissions by 80% for 2050 - assuming we won’t be already under 10 feet of water, how will we actually go about changing the behaviour of each and every one of us?
 
Julie's Bicycle is an organisation that's trying to unite the music industry to be a unified force and voice of reason, in regards to all things music and planet-trashing. Julie's Bicycle cite 75% all the carbon in the music industry comes the live music industry, and of that 42% of is from the audience travelling to and from festivals. The stages and bands often account for just 2% in comparison. So to reach that 80% reduction figure, the consumer is going to have to bare the brunt of the change as they are the biggest cause of Co2.

Car-pooling becoming the norm would be good, but aren’t cars already laden on the way to festivals? Coaches although not anybody’s preferred choice, but do seem to tick a lot of boxes. National Express tells us how the coach is the most environmentally friendly way to get to a festival, so encourages people to take that option. His numbers don’t seem to stack up quite right; He seems to be using a national average of people in a car (1.6) to show the affectivity of coaches. Apparently average car occupancy for festivals is 3.6. This is one small example of how pulling apart at the threads of our national consumption isn’t as straightforward as it might seem.

Nobody mentions trains too much; they seem to have been disowned as a reasonable solution these days. The future according to today's discussion looks like it will have a lot more Coach-Only, or Carpool-Only tickets.

What is clear though is that while that there are government guidelines on carbon emissions that will take a long time to tackle, there is one thing that we can all deal with straight away : The state that the punters leave festivals in is disgusting.