According to the Guardian, a bunch of long-past-their-sell-by-date musicians have been mobilised by Brian Eno, who used to prance about in a spandex psychedelic body suit for a living, to protest about climate change. Eno is the founder of a green NGO called EarthPercent, which turns donations from the music industry into grants for green organisations that lobby for the policies that have created Britain’s crises. In a stunt last week, 211 pop stars put their names to a letter drafted by Eno to Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Miatta Fahnbulleh, urging them to reject the proposed development of North Sea oil and gas. But what has it got to do with them?
“As artists, we have become starkly aware of the fact that our livelihoods often depend upon the reliability of safe weather conditions and stable energy costs for live events,” the letter states. Yet most of those artists – many of whom haven’t really been a thing since the 1990s – also owe their industries to oil and gas. What would recording artists of the past have ever been without the vinyl chloride and vinyl acetate of records, the polycarbonate of CDs, and the polyethylene terephthalate of cassette tapes? (All these substances were produced from hydrocarbons.)
And what kind of rock and roll is dependent on “safe weather conditions”? Did none of the 211 play at the Glastonbury Festivals of the past, which were neck-deep in mud? And “stable energy costs”? The face value of a ticket to the same festival last year was £378.50. In 1990, the same ticket was £38, or £94.79 in 2025’s money – that’s a fourfold increase. But don’t tell me that music is an energy-intensive industry. According to the internet, the festival’s entire array of speakers requires a peak of 650 kilowatts. And so, even were that power to be supplied by the most expensive source of electricity commissioned by the Government – floating offshore wind – at a price of £216.49 per MWh, even were each speaker in that array pulling its peak demand 24/7 for three full days, that electricity would cost £10,131 wholesale. In per capita terms, that’s about seven pence per punter at the 140,000-capacity event.
Perhaps these figures are too difficult for the drug-addled minds of pop stars past and present to comprehend. Given the evidence of the argument, and the willingness of people who do not struggle to put their names to it, these pampered, preening princes enjoy a profound moral as well as cognitive deficit.
