Pearl Jam's Stone Gossard on CI Live

I’m excited about this. I’ve never done an online chat before, that I’m aware of. So this is something new for me. Just looking over the initial questions, I’m intrigued and very happy to be involved.

I met Peter Seligmann almost 8 years ago through a very good friend of mine here in Seattle, and I got to know CI by talking with him. We spent time together diving, and I got to know more about CI and how it operates. I was impressed by their scope and overall strategy in terms of identifying and protecting environmental hotspots.

I thought this was the right approach in terms of a pragmatic approach to conservation. It’s proactive and politically smart. Because of this relationship, CI helped us do our very first carbon offset for the 2003 tour, which you can read more about on the CI website. The size and scope of work CI does is tremendous, and I’m proud to have them be one of the nine organizations that we’re supporting in our carbon portfolio strategy.

What we’re dealing with is not an exact science in terms of getting an exact carbon footprint, but it’s really a rough estimation, and we’re always fine tuning. We’ve estimated conservatively – that is, every fan driving by him or herself about 10-15 miles to reach a concert. So we’re trying to cover more carbon than we’re actually emitting.

Those individuals who are following the band can take steps on their own to figure out if they’re doing a lot of travel that year and calculate and offset their individual carbon emissions.

We may be able to double cover it.

There are lots of things I could do, and I do some of them. One of those things is ride my bike as much as possible. If I have to go to the office or the studio, about 90 percent of the time, unless it's raining, I’ll ride my bike.

I try to remember to turn off the lights when I leave the house. I make sure the heat is off when I’m out. Those are big.

Some things that I hope to do in the long run is buy a more energy efficient refrigerator and water heater. Those are two big users of electricity. Even though Washington State gets most of its electricity through hydro-electric power, in the long run I’d like to support any companies that are making more energy-efficient products.

Everyone has to balance out what their job is – it will require a certain amount of carbon output. Where you can make inroads is in becoming more energy efficient if you can. If you can’t, a carbon offset or doing something to counteract the carbon you’re emitting is a great way to go.

This particular project with CI – replanting native species in what was degraded Ecuadorian rain forest is one component of Pearl Jam’s offset. We’ve also invested in Green Tags through Bonneville Environmental Foundation and also through Honor the Earth. These allow people to pay a premium to bring more clean, renewable energy online to the grid.

There are a variety of other organizations doing a variety of things to promote clean, renewable energy or restore degraded lands with tress. These are bold, great opportunities with which you can begin to address your carbon issues.

Thanks, Luke. Yes we do try to make the most of our travel. It’s to our own financial advantage to make our tour as efficient as possible in terms of gas burning and getting to the next location as quickly as possible. We’re always looking for other ways to be efficient on tour with our energy use.

One of the ways we’re reducing our bus and truck diesel is to use biodiesels, which I have been told cuts emissions significantly. We buy the biofuels from individual farms and folks, all bought here in the U.S., rather than imported from long distances.

I think the polarity that is expressed through the media in terms of the differences between the right and the left are exaggerated. People in general love a good fight. I think the science behind global warming is well documented and well proven on smaller scales. Certainly if you add excessive carbon to an enclosed environment – when exposed to sun, it will retain more heat.

On a larger scale, the Earth’s systems are vastly more complex, but are a smaller version of this. Even if there is natural warming as part of the Earth’s own function, if we’re adding to that warming with our excessive carbon, we’re exacerbating the situation.

A common sense approach is by looking at how much industries are putting carbon into the atmosphere. It’s smart money to imagine that this impact is not going to be negligible. We in fact are affecting, if not adding, to an already warming planet.

Thanks, Jasmin. Beyond bicycling, which is my main mode of transport, I don’t have a hybrid car, but I recently purchased an all-electric Tesla motors EV2 roadster. Combined with the renewable hydroelectricity power it cuts the emissions dramatically. And yes, we include all the European tour emissions as part of our carbon offset portfolio.

Thanks, Sharin. I met with my hometown mayor in Seattle and praised him for organizing other mayors around the country to commit their cities to reducing their greenhouse gases to at or below the level called for in the Kyoto Treaty on Climate Change.

So, make sure you’re local mayor has signed on to the declaration, which is now signed by nearly 300 mayors across the nation. Also, you can help identify greenbelts, wetlands, and mangroves in your area to protect and restore. These are great places to store carbon while also protecting and restoring biodiversity, as well as protecting coastal communities against the expected increase in severity and frequency of major hurricanes and storms.

We haven’t sold a lot of tickets in the South lately, so it’s been difficult to organize a tour that gets us there.

My good friend at CI, Michael Totten, has informed me that we’ve lost half the mangroves in the world. These are nature’s fantastic way of protecting coastal environments from storm surges and hurricanes. Looking into wetlands and mangroves in New Orleans would be a great place to start in terms of that particular environment and the natural features that define it.

Thanks for the kind comments, Eric. Great to hear you’re out there making a difference. If you are traveling in a van and trailer and doing local clubs I suspect your carbon footprint is relatively minimal. Being smaller, it can be acknowledged in full or part at a lower cost, whether by offsetting it through the kinds of groups and actions PJ is doing, or others that you may be aware of locally. Awareness of your emissions footprint is the first step to seeing ways you can take action, even if modest at the outset.

This is a great question. I think it’s one of the compromises we have to make. We as a band love the artwork and the physical package of our CDs. We’ve designed our own packages and poster artwork from the beginning.

At the same time, shipping CDs across the planet requires an enormous amount of energy and therefore releases quite a bit of carbon.

We are moving toward a market where many more people will buy records without the artwork – or the artwork can be displayed online. This is a good point. We certainly are selling a lot more records through iTunes, so some percentage of our fans are getting the record without the artwork.

But we hope to still make it available to those who really want it. It’s a big part of how we hope to present the music.

No, I wrote a lot of little riffs when I first picked up a guitar. That went away. But my first song in a band was "Come on Down," and I wrote the lyrics and music. That was on the first Green River album, and you can get it through Subpop Records. It was my first ripping off of Iron Maiden.

CI is a fantastic resource for helping people figure out opportunities to reduce their carbon footprints. Visit www.conservation.org/whatyoucando for a list of ideas, or check out their carbon calculator at www.conservation.org/carboncalculator, which allows you to figure out what your footprint is.

I’ve been leading this strategy in terms of addressing our carbon in the band. The band has been cooperative and excited about learning about our carbon footprint with me. But one of the processes that every business or organization will go through that wants to address this is how to get other people into it and how to express it so that they feel its urgency.

This has been a great experiment for me to learn about the complexity and what some of the issues will be for any individual who tries to motivate their business or organization to address its environmental impact.

It’s not a perfect science and you have to take your opportunities when they come.

Andy, it’s a complex problem requiring many answers at many levels. In the portfolio Pearl Jam assembled we tried to showcase nine different groups, each doing things differently, that we have found taking actions at the local, state, regional, national and international levels, and ranging from shifting to climate-friendly efficiency products, buying green power and biofuels, preventing deforestation, restoring degraded lands to absorb carbon.

This includes not just personal actions, but changing public policies. In our own state of Washington, we are supporting Initiative 937 which will increase renewable energy sources to 15 percent of their supply by 2020.

So we need to support good policies that make it easier for our personal actions and market choices to be climate friendly.

You’re already way ahead of the curve walking 35 blocks to work! Congratulations. I think the next place for individuals to make an impact is in their ability to join groups and to organize multiple people’s energies toward specific carbon-related cause.

Join CI Online for these kind of opportunities.

I doubt that we’re the worst in terms of awareness, although I don’t know that to be true. We are not the most inefficient, but we’re the biggest users of energy. We have the most voracious appetite for energy.

But California and New York use 50 percent less energy than the rest of the nation – a combination of higher standards for appliances, buildings, and vehicles as well as incentives from utilities for buying greener appliances. Each household in these states is saving $1,000 a year.

This shows how much room there is to get better nationwide.

Ultimately, that’s the million dollar question. Is there a formula for spending money that allows people to know that they’re having a direct, one-to-one impact on their carbon footprint. That’s the reason why Pearl Jam did a carbon portfolio strategy – because I haven’t felt comfortable with a single answer to this question.

But 25 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation and land-use changes – such as slash-and-burn farming, soil degradation and loss, road building, and urban sprawl.

There’s no perfectly accurate way to put a specific dollar amount on a carbon footprint, but CI is doing fantastic work in terms of keeping carbon in tact, on the ground, and restoring degraded areas that will in the long run absorb lots of carbon.

This is a great place to start. So hell yes, send some more money!

The very first thing we did as a band was a collaborative effort with Soundgarden, when they were still a band. We worked with Cascade Land Conservancy to protect a piece of land -- some hundred acres or so -- in the Lower Cascade Mountains. It was a piece of land up for a mining contract.

We created a permanent easement so that the land wouldn’t be mined. We had a personal connection to the forest there; some of us had been up there visiting the natural hot sprints and just fell in love with the area. That was back in 1992 – our first large-scale effort to do anything. And it was only $40,000-$50,000 to protect this land.

That was the beginning of what I hope to be a lot more concerted and focused efforts to make a positive impact with some of Pearl Jam’s financial success.

Jeff Ament was the art director of that particular photo shoot. I’m not exactly sure what he was getting at there. To my mind, it felt like a tribal bonding and communing with nature, but others may have interpreted it differently.

Well, that’s a great point and good question.

I think ultimately the article by Tierney and a similar piece in the LA Times are both cynical by their nature and imply that if it isn’t a perfect strategy then they (hypocritically) say it shouldn’t be done. PJ believes we should create as many mechanisms as possible, and enable capital to flow to innovations that are less damaging to the climate and more beneficial to the Earth. And we hope our actions are just the opening salvo to many more demonstrations, proving there are myriad ways to make our actions less impacting on the Earth.

I do believe there is lots of hypocrisy and cynicism out there, and I also recognize that there will be lots of carbon actions offered that may not really work, so it’s critical people scrutinize any actions that are proposed to make sure they are achieving real carbon savings. The bottom line is that climate change is a serious problem, and people can take actions that also drive public policy changes.

You should look for each specific candidate’s position on issues of global warming and the environment. Use your own resources to question and find answers. Pearl Jam’s carbon portfolio also is a great resource. Go to www.pearljam.com

It’s been a blast, being able to chat with all of you as well as Michael Totten and the folks from CI Online.

CI is a fantastic resource for all things environmental and I applaud their worldwide efforts in doing so much for our small, fragile planet. They are addressing this issue by supporting projects with multiple benefits – they help mitigate climate change while protecting biodiversity and helping communities.

The response has been amazing today, in terms of the number of questions asked. I’m absolutely inspired to do this again at some point. Let’s talk again after I get back from Europe!