So...for those of you who don't know me, or haven't figured it out, I'm a HUGE fan of the band Rammstein. You know, those crazy German guys from the movie xXx who are known for their crazy pyrotechnic concerts? The people who made Du Hast? yeah, those guys. People back in the day, they were obsessed with Elvis or the Beatles or Queen, I'm obsessed with the crazy German metal guys who like to light everything on fire, including themselves and each other.
And I got to finally see them last month down in Philly. Which I mentioned in my last article. But as I've been watching replays and experiencing post concert depression despite going down to a tropical paradise in South Carolina a week later, and especially after watching part of last week's San Antonio concert, which had a closed roof, causing the entire stadium to get hazy, I had a thought. I started thinking, gee, this can't be good for people to breathe in, and perhaps this concert is polluting the environment. I mean, it kind of is. And given I have come out against greenhouse emissions to the extent I have, believing, like many on the left, that we need to curb emissions in order to save the planet, I really had to ask, how much are these concerts polluting stuff and is it worth it?
So I started doing the math. I found out that Rammstein uses 265 gallons of fuel per show for their pyro. Which...actually doesn't sound half bad, considering what kind of show they put on. For reference, your typical car can carry around 12-15 gallons on average (although statistics seem to vary quite a bit), and typically get 25 miles per gallon. So your typical car can go somewhere around 300-400 miles per gas tank, which would mean from Philly where I saw the concert, you could theoretically drive down to Roanoke Rapids, NC, which is a pretty decent distance. And of course, you're talking roughly 20 cars give or take doing this. So that's a bit of a drive. For one person, you're talking about 6625 miles, which is enough to travel across the country and back by car.
Of course, more than 20 people enjoy a Rammstein concert. These concerts can sport crowds anywhere from 25,000 (my Philly concert was actually relatively tiny given their current tour) upward to 100,000. Say 50,000 on average. Well, at that rate, we're talking per person enjoying the concert, each person using 0.00053 gallons of gas. Which means each person would be able to, if they used that gas to drive, go 0.000212 miles, which amounts to each person going 1.11936 feet, or roughly 13 inches.
That said, the actual fuel costs of a Rammstein concert, while much more than an average person's given the duration of the event, actually are the equivalent of each and every person in the stadium adjusting their car once while trying to parallel park. It probably was exponentially more harmful to the environment for everyone to travel to and attend the concert, than the concert itself was. The logistics required to set the concert up was also probably far more intensive on the environment than the concert itself. And I'm sure any other band would likely have at least a good percentage of those environmental costs in those circumstances.
That said, are Rammstein concerts harmful to the environment? Well, any event that causes that much fire and spews that much smoke into the atmosphere is probably causing SOME pollution. In context, does it actually cause that much pollution? No, not really. Everyone's collective daily commute to work (yes, it always comes back to work for me) causes many many MANY times more pollution than this beautiful monstrosity of a concert. So I feel like I can watch them set giant baby carriages on fire (yes, they literally did that) relatively guilt free. At the very least it's not any worse than any other concert all things considered.
So should we ban Rammstein concerts? no, hell no. But I could see a carbon tax being a good policy to deal with this kind of pollution. You wanna fly over a giant stage from Europe and blow 265 gallons of fuel putting on the greatest live show I've ever seen? Go for it. But, I do think that paying an economic cost for doing so would possibly be a good idea. All things considered, the overall impact would be so little given the scale of the concert and the amount of money changing hands already to make it happen that it would barely factor in.
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