José, can you see?: González hopes to minimize his CO2 footprint on his current tour. Photo by Frederik Egerstrand

José González

The acoustic Swede goes green.

by Anthony Layser

At some point green went from being a mild-mannered color to a slick marketing big shot with a corner office on Madison Avenue. The inescapable buzz word is obsessively bandied about in the media and slapped on seemingly every widget rolling down an ever-growing assembly line of “environmentally friendly” products. From cars and soap to Starbucks and even the Today show, everyone is claiming to be green.

So it was far from revolutionary when José González announced in early January that his spring tour—at World Cafe Live Saturday—would be green. The Swedish singer/songwriter’s classically influenced guitar work and soft introspective lyrics are an obvious fit for a reflective, socially aware audience. But to tour is to travel, and to travel is to burn petroleum, and that begs the question: How can such an endeavor be green?

Enter the nonprofit Reverb. Founded in 1998 by Guster singer/guitarist Adam Gardner and his environmentalist wife Lauren Sullivan, the organization’s mission is not only to educate and engage musicians and their fans on environmental topics, but to also implement systems by which the waste created during touring can be significantly reduced. It’s by no means an easy task, as anyone who’s seen the billowing exhaust of a tour bus or witnessed the aftermath of a devoured backstage catering spread can attest. But that hasn’t kept artists like the Beastie Boys, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Panic! at the Disco and Norah Jones from lining up to enlist Reverb to make their upcoming tours more environmentally conscious.

“It will usually start with a band member who will go to their management and say, ‘We’ve got to go green,’” explains Brian Allenby, Reverb’s manager of education and operations. “Then the management will come to us and say, ‘What can we do?’ We’ll put together what we call our menu—basically a list of options.”

These options are usually dependent on the number of vehicles and the size of the venues. For instance, Reverb reported that on a recent Dave Matthews Band tour their efforts resulted in 53,000 gallons of biodiesel fuel being substituted for traditional diesel fuel.

For an artist like González—whose caravan wouldn’t exactly qualify as a fleet—there are other options more befitting a smaller club tour, including the use of reusable water bottles and biodegradable catering products. A 50-cent add-on to the ticket price covers these costs, and venue operators rarely balk at the implementation of Reverb’s menu.

“Venues are used to weird hospitality requests, but I don’t think ours is that weird,” says González. “We’re not asking for bottles of water from the other side of the world. Our hospitality list is asking for very minor concessions, so we can not only cut our waste, but raise awareness by going green ourselves.”

A major part of Reverb’s aim is neutralizing carbon emissions through the purchase of CO2 offsets. By monitoring venue energy use, ground transportation, flights and hotel accommodations, the organization is able to formulate a tour’s CO2 footprint.

Once they have this footprint, a corresponding number of carbon offsets is purchased from a company (their primary provider is an outfit called Native Energy) that facilitates clean renewable energy projects. The logic is that these projects can reduce atmospheric CO2 enough to allow the tour to have net of zero emissions. In addition to the artists, concertgoers are also encouraged to purchase offsets in order to reduce their own carbon footprint.

But not everyone is sold on the tidy philosophy of carbon offsetting. Guardian columnist and environmentalist George Monbiot has famously compared the practice to the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences in the Middle Ages. Because renewable energy’s impact is projected and largely intangible, Monbiot sees CO2 offsets as a way for purchasers to appear green while continuing to produce carbon emissions guilt-free.

He’s not alone in these worries. A number of articles over the last year have examined the fuzzy accounting of carbon offsets, exposing a lack of clarity in the process and a potential for fraud. In other words, with no monitoring system in place, it’s extremely difficult to determine if offsetters are doing what they promise.

As far as Reverb is concerned, musicians will always roam from town to town, and hangups about carbon offsetting won’t slow their efforts to combat touring’s dirty side.

“José has to fly from Sweden. The bus has to travel from venue to venue,” says Allenby. “We’re just trying to do the best we can to identify and address ways to reduce the CO2 footprint.”

Stanley Laskowski, an adviser and lecturer for Penn’s Master of Environmental Studies Program and member of National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology, also sees organizations like Reverb as serving a positive role despite uncertainty over how best to address the problem of carbon emissions.

“It’s a very complicated issue, but I think it’s laudable that they’re trying to do something like this,” says Laskowski. “There’s possibility of things not working as represented, but being aware of travel and how much carbon touring uses is always a good thing.”

Meanwhile, don’t expect González’s involvement in social causes to lead the singer to pontificate about going green between songs. His demure approach couldn’t be further from the effusive environmentalism currently displayed by advertisers. However, González does aspire to raise awareness in his own humble way.

“Art is a very limited tool,” he admits. “Just because you have nice melodies and a good voice doesn’t mean your views are right, but it does have the power to shed some light on an issue and get people talking.”

And we all hope that discussion will go beyond marketing platitudes and lead to some real solutions.

José González