Rock Band Coldplay Takes First Steps to Cut Carbon Footprint of World Tours

As the clock ticks down to COP 26 in Glasgow, some superstar bands are taking steps to design a concert tour that does less harm to the climate.

Two years after pledging to stop touring until they could do so more sustainably, U.K.-based rock band Coldplay has vowed that its 2022 Magic of the Spheres world tour will produce 50% less CO2 emissions compared with its last tour in 2016.

Time—and future analysis by climate researchers at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute—will reveal to what extent the promise is kept, and what kind of impact it actually has.

Helpful right out of the starting gate will be the tour’s considerably reduced itinerary, with 30 performances scheduled in nine countries—a considerable retreat from the 114-show megatour organized to promote Coldplay’s A Head Full of Dreams album six years ago.

Beginning in Costa Rica on March 18, Coldplay will travel to the Dominican Republic for one show. Then it’s on to Mexico (4 stops), the U.S. (11), Germany (4), Poland (1), Belgium (2), France (2), and the U.K. (4), finishing up with a single performance in Brazil in September.

While opening in Costa Rica could build some environmental cred, given that the country has some of the highest rates of renewable energy generation (mostly hydro) in the world, Coldplay’s bounce back across the Atlantic to Brazil—where the band will be headlining the Rock in Rio concert on September 10—should generate some interesting PR along with its added emissions.

While this past September witnessed a relative reduction wildfire activity in the Amazon, the two autumns before that saw vast swaths of tropical rainforest ecosystem and its myriad creatures incinerated—with President Jair Bolsonaro, aka “Capitão Motoserra” (Captain Chainsaw), proving an infamously poor protector of this vital global carbon sink.

Coldplay’s promise to plant a tree for every ticket sold during its 2022 tour could read anywhere from poignantly incommensurate to the problem to wildly hypocritical when it takes the stage in Rio. For their part, the Rock in Rio organizers have already released a Sustainability Management Plan for the event.

Also included in Coldplay’s 12-point plan for a more climate-friendly 2022 tour is a commitment to use renewable energy as much as possible, with solar panels to “be installed on the floors, stage, and elsewhere in open-air stadiums as soon as the band arrives, to generate power in the run-up to the show,” writes BBC. Shows will also feature a “kinetic” dance floor that will use the energy created by fans jumping up and down to help power the show, aided by a purpose-built mobile and recycled battery produced by BMW, and a stage built out of bamboo and recycled steel.

In its “reality check” of the dance floor promise, BBC notes that a similar installation at the 2013 Paris Marathon “saw 40,000 runners generate 7 kWh,” adding that “numbers in that range would meet only 2 to 3% of a typical Coldplay venue’s energy needs.”

As they were for Coldplay’s recent performance at Prince William’s inaugural Earthshot awards, cyclists will also be on hand, using their legs to help keep the lights on and the music playing.

While the tour’s route was purportedly designed to minimize air travel (the keyword being “minimize” rather than “avoid”, a caveat highlighted by that final skip back across “the pond” in the tour) and the band plans to use “more sustainable” airplane fuel, writes BBC, Coldplay is sticking to private jet travel, even for its European performances. BBC notes that a short-haul private flight in Europe generates 17 times more emissions than taking the train.

Telling BBC that he anticipated particular “backlash” about the decision to use private jets, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin said that while such criticism was essentially correct—“we don’t have any argument against that,” he admitted—the band was trying its best.

Setting perhaps a rather low bar, he added that Coldplay’s hope for the 2022 tour is that it will have “slightly shifted the status quo of how a tour works.”

The band also plans donations to rewilding, reforestation, and other projects across the globe to help offset the tour’s impact. While there are doubtless good intentions and some genuine climate benefits in this grab-bag effort to achieve carbon neutrality, such offsets are notoriously difficult to quantify and track, too often amounting to little more than greenwashing at the expense of the world’s most vulnerable. Those wordsmithing the “sustainability initiatives” for the tour clearly have their eye on the PR ball, here, with the statement pledging that Coldplay will “draw down any unavoidable emissions according to the Oxford Principles for Net-Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting.”

As stated in that document, “best practices” will “minimize the need for offsets in the first place”; “use offsets that are verifiable and correctly accounted for and have a low risk of non-additionality, reversal, and creating negative unintended consequences for people and the environment”; and be transparent at all points in the process.

To meet that bar, the band has its work cut out for it. And the world will be watching.

Crowd-pleasing Coldplay are not the only ones trying to tackle the considerable carbon footprint of concert tours. Billie Eilish (pop music’s own “climate queen”), The 1975, and Savages drummer Faye Milton have all been active in rallying their fans to climate action, reports Euronews.

Milton’s “No Music on a Dead Planet” campaign, which has plans to make noise at COP 26, is raising money through a collection of ethically sourced t-shirts, including one graced with a reworking of the cover for Joy Division’s iconic 1979 album Unknown Pleasures. The original cover depicts radio emissions issuing from a “rotating neutron star” (in black and white, the surreal image looks like a narrow tower or peninsula of mountain ranges extending out into a relative calm sea). The 2021 version offers just a sea of flat lines, symbolizing, in the words of the website, “the eternal silence of a dead planet.”

Equally determined to keep music alive on a living planet, and arguably miles ahead of Coldplay in its efforts, is the British trip-hop band Massive Attack.

Just days after Coldplay announced its hiatus from touring in November 2019, Massive Attack partnered with the University of Manchester’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, providing researchers there with reams of data on the ecological footprint of its own concert tours. Released last month, the Tyndall report demands an “urgent and significant reassembly” of the music industry, writes Pitchfork.

It calls for “the immediate elimination of private jet use, a switch to electric transportation for concerts and festivals, and, by 2025, phasing out diesel generators at festivals,” as well as standardized “plug and play models for venues” to cut down the carbon footprint produced by carrying equipment around the globe.

The report authors urge artists to keep their carbon footprints in mind from the beginning. “Super-low carbon needs to be baked into every decision,” they write, factoring in “routing, venues, transport modes, set, audio and visual design, staffing, and promotion.”

Massive Attack frontman Robert “3D” del Naja urged promoters to step up, noting that “it can’t be left to artists to continually make these public appeals,” writes Pitchfork.

Flagging the upcoming COP 26, del Naja further urged the U.K. government to wake from its ongoing stupor in the face of the climate crisis, framing the imperative to aid the music industry as an economic as well as an ecological matter.

“Fossil fuel companies seem to have no problem at all getting huge subsidies from government, but where is the plan for investment in clean battery technology, clean infrastructure, or decarbonized food supply for a live music sector that generates £4.6 billion for the economy every year and employs more than 200,000 dedicated people? It simply doesn’t exist,” he wrote in a statement.

As for how Massive Attack is stepping up itself, Pitchfork writes that the band is testing six “emissions reduction modules” on its upcoming European tour. It will also partner with green industrialist Dale Vince and his company Ecotricity “to improve the U.K. energy grid’s renewables capacity, to train event staff to generate and run sustainable operations, and to introduce vegan food options to venues.”