To grasp the fundamental unseriousness of self-styled climate saviors, look to the catastrophic damage the Global Citizen Festival unleashed on Central Park a week and a half ago.
Tens of thousands of concertgoers, in the name of saving the planet and the poor people on it, utterly destroyed the Great Lawn. [emphasis, links added]
That means, the park just confirmed, a big chunk of New York’s marquee free public space — the anchor of a densely packed, backyard-deprived borough — will be off-limits to millions of visitors for the fall season, nearly two months ahead of the normal winter closure.
For more than a decade, Global Citizen has been annoying those of us who use the park as our yard.
We do what we’re supposed to do: We live in tiny apartments, we don’t ride in cars.
Yet every year since 2012, just as the weather cools down, Global Citizen takes over the middle chunk of the park.
The Global Citizen concertfest is timed for United Nations General Assembly week. So during what is often the nicest-weather weekend of the year, in late September, the lawn is closed to the public.
But it’s not just that: All week, parkgoers must navigate miles of metal gates, dozens of equipment trucks, and on fest weekend, hundreds upon hundreds of parked or idling motor vehicles, vehicles that entirely take over the bridle path circling the reservoir.
The point of turning Central Park into an open-air, exhaust-spewing, truck-unloading dock and black SUV-idling lot for days on end, of course, is to “defeat poverty, demand equity, and defend the planet.”
Global Citizen is the ultimate in greenwashing: Your friendly neighborhood global bank, private equity firm, hedge fund, monopolist concert promoter, and tech company all have reps on the board of directors. Plus the Gates Foundation. …
Global Citizen has had trouble managing its danger-level, kettled-in Central Park crowds before.
In 2018, a false report of a gunshot nearly caused a stampede.
In 2020, the pandemic gave Manhattanites a reprieve from Global Citizen, and this year, it seemed torrential rain would.
On Saturday, Sept. 23, fest day, it rained all day. Hard. It did not stop.
Half of Global Citizen’s would-be attendees were smart enough to heed this signal from the climate gods and stay home.
The Adams administration and Global Citizen decided, though, that man would triumph over nature — even if that meant laying waste to nature and all the city dwellers who depend on our scant green space for respite.
As the Times reported, “The heavy equipment used to put on the concert and the foot traffic it attracted caused extensive damage,” with the Central Park Conservancy, which manages the park, pronouncing itself “very disappointed” that a third of the lawn is, in the group’s words, “fully destroyed.”
No worries, say the Global Citizen folk, they’ll pay for the damage, in addition to the reported $2 million fee they pay to hold the concert.
Sure, just like BP and ExxonMobil, when they annihilate something, they’ll just throw their money around, and all will be well.
Rebuilding the lawn, though, will require more intensive fossil-fuel activity, including more truck trips through the park.
And $2 million in a regular year can’t make up the lost value to the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who use the area near the lawn on any given weekend.
As Upper West Side Councilwoman Gale Brewer observes, “12 acres of public greenspace will be unavailable to New Yorkers until April 2024 or later, all to accommodate a one-day event.”
This loss means other parts of the park will be more crowded this fall.
But that is OK: Destroying the lawn resulted in “historic commitments for equity, the planet, food, and jobs,” the Global Citizen organizers say.
We’ve got to destroy the planet to save it.
Top photo via YouTube screencap
Read full post at NY Post
Global Citizens sounds like just more od the loose nuts we have running loose as bad as Extinction Rebellion Just Stop Oil and the Sunrise Movement