Live 8 was certainly a success for Pink Floyd, even if the effect it has had on the lives of the 60,000 – 150,000 Africans who have died because of extreme poverty since Paul McCartney and U2 first took to the stage on Saturday afternoon in London’s Hyde Park has been pretty negligible. Sales of Echoes, Pink Floyd’s ‘best of’ compilation, have grown by some 1,300% in the last two days. The Who have seen a similar, but smaller, rise in sales, as have various other artists who came together to rally for the Make Poverty History campaign once Bob Geldof had come calling. (Although The Libertines haven’t benefited – Pete Doherty’s awful, Elton-John-assisted take on “Children Of The Revolution” perhaps becoming an Emperor’s New Clothes moment, as sales of Up The Bracket and their eponymous album from last September plummeted by 50% in the days since. I would imagine that Mariah Carey’s new single is doing less well than she would have hoped, too.)

But, as you should know, Live 8 wasn’t about upping the sales of millionaire pop stars who already own more swimming pools than they need (although Pink Floyd have announced that profits from this surge in their record sales will be donated t charity [Dave Gilmour also donated his Mayfair house to charity a few years ago, it should be noted – this isn’t a tokenistic or one-off gesture]); it was about raising awareness of a campaign attempting to equalise the disparity in wealth between the Western World and the Third World, about trying to force the hand of the world leaders who will be gathered at Gleneagles in Scotland from tomorrow as part of the G8 summit.

Musically the bills at the various concerts may have offended indie fans due to the populist bias, but Live 8 was never going to be about esoteric or underground acts, it was about making as big a splash as possible, and that means REM, Coldplay, Green Day, Madonna, Bryan Adams and The Who. It was about 200,000 people singing the breakdown to “Hey Jude” at nearly midnight. U2 and Macca opened the Hyde Park show with a fantastic version of “Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” (a song, lest we forget, that The Beatles never played live), and from then on in it seemed like the big-hitters knew what they were doing. There is a reason REM are enormous, a reason Coldplay are enormous, a reason Elton John and Madonna and Robbie Williams are enormous, and it is because they all know how to play to a mass crowd. It was evident from the way Keane and Razorlight threw themselves into their performances that they are aware of this too, and that they are perhaps hoping for a bit of the fortune that followed U2’s Live Aid performance 20 years ago.

The lack of African artists on the bill was highlighted by Damon Albarn (the blackest man in Colchester, possibly, at least now he’s animated) – Youssou N’Dour got to sing along with Dido at Hyde Park, before the pair of them were whisked off to somewhere else (Paris? Eden? I forget) so that he could sing along again. To be fair their version of “Seven Seconds” was awesome, but I can’t help but feel that he was rather wasted in the shadow of Dido’s asthmatic chirpings on “Thank You”. There were African artists on show at the Eden Project in Cornwall however, but footage during the day suggested that they were playing to a small (minute, compared to the 200,000+ at Hyde Park) audience, and, as beautiful as Eden is as a venue, it did seem as though it were both a tokenistic gesture and as if they were shoved to the very corner of the country almost to keep them out of the way of the limelight.

Live 8’s vocal proponents seem to have focused very much on African poverty, but the G8 summit is addressing World Poverty – there are people in South America, Asia and Indonesia who are just as poor and in danger as people in Africa, and Live 8 made it seem as though no one gives a damn for them. This is not right. It is also not right to think that merely by wearing a white band around your wrist and attending a free concert you are doing something worthwhile, because these are tiny gestures that amount to very little in the scheme of things. Live 8 cannot put an end to poverty around the globe anymore than Chris Martin can by writing “make trade fair” on his hand in magic marker, but it can at least encourage people to start to think about issues.

Consensus was that the parallel concert in Paris attracted much less public interest than the flagship event in London or the gigs in Philadelphia, Berlin and Toronto, but given Jacques Chirac’s current ambivalence (!) towards world politics in general this is perhaps not surprising (leader reflecting country, perhaps). The mass media coverage that the event garnered in the UK may not have been replicated everywhere, but if just one in ten of the people who did hear about it, wherever they are, have been prompted to do something for a good cause that they otherwise would not have done then it has been a positive. It may not be all we can do to help, but doing something, however small, is always, always preferable to doing nothing.

But the point of Live 8 is the G8 summit, lest we forget, and the G8 summit is not just about addressing the subject of World Poverty; of equal, if not more importance is the subject of climate change, an increasingly pressing and stressing issue which will affect everyone on the globe, rich or poor, African or American, as well as the globe itself, in even more lasting and profound ways than poverty. Most of the negotiations of aid and debt relief have already taken place behind closed doors, the decisions already made. Realistically Live 8 has come too late to affect that debate. The environment has no figurehead, no Bob Geldof, no U2 or Coldplay to play an awareness-raising concert. The environment has no cathartic images of starving children with distended bellies and flies swarming at their mouths to rend our hearts into action. Silicon wristbands do not benefit the environment. The environment is our world. We are the environment. George W Bush has not signed the Kyoto Agreement and he is unlikely to make concessions towards reducing harmful emissions and continued depletion of fossil fuel stocks despite the fact that continued consumption is likely to send the planet spiralling into serious, present danger within 50 years. America is a nation built on freedom and that includes the freedom to consume. Unfortunately the freedom of us to consume may well affect the freedom of our children to live.