Listen, the world’s quickly going to shit because we humans can’t stop burning fossil fuels and as a result, soon enough more people are going to have beach front property. Unfortunately, our love of metal and huge tours contributes to that planetary downward spiral.
According to a recent study shows metal had the fourth largest carbon footprint as a genre and some of our favorite artists were largely to blame. Conducted by Fractl for Payless Power, the study analyzed the tour dates of some of last year’s biggest tours across six genres. By looking at tour dates, calculating distances between stops, and keeping in mind that a tour bus averages about 8 miles per gallon and a flight contributes 53 pounds of carbon dioxide per mile.
What researchers found was that the top metal tours were responsible for 11,012 metric tons of carbon dioxide from flights and 554 metric tons of carbon dioxide from tour buses and land travel. According to their data, the average distance traveled per metal tour was 658 miles, with an average number of shows hovering around 47 dates.
While looking at metal emissions, researchers found that Hatebreed was the biggest culprit, with 1,212 metric tons of CO2 from flights/61 metric tons of CO2 from driving. Bring Me the Horizon (1,178/59), Slipknot (1,127/57), Megadeth (1,118/56), and fascinatingly enough Gojira (1,114/56) rounded out the top five tours with the largest carbon footprints. Other bands on the list include Metallica (804/40) and Iron Maiden (762/38).
Conversely, the five lowest contributors to our planet’s eventual demise were Tool (438/22), Rammstein (429/22), Anthrax (423/21), Animals as Leaders (364/18), and Alice in Chains (293/15).
A lot of the reason why some tours are likely more detrimental to the environment than others is their routing. If distances are kept to a minimum between stops, you can ensure that your fuel use is as efficient as possible.
And while metal’s got a lot of work to clean up its act, at least they’re not as bad as EDM, which was responsible for 24,829 metric tons of carbon dioxide from flights and 1,250 metric tons of carbon dioxide from tour buses and land travel. And that was only for an average of three more shows than metal tours, which is wild.
If you want to see more about how bands and their tours can directly affect the environment, be sure to check out the study’s results over at Payless Power. With all of today’s tour announcements making the rounds, here’s hoping we can all find better solutions for travel so this year’s shows don’t continue to fuck up the planet.