In 2023 the Australian indie-pop band Lime Cordiale tested a pair of electric tour vans, driving from Sydney to a festival in the Hunter Valley via gigs in Wollongong and Canberra. With gear stacked high and a map dotted with charging stations, the band got a promising, if imperfect, glimpse of their touring future. “At each gig, we’d have to convince someone to let us plug the cars in,” recalls the band’s guitarist and vocalist, Oliver Leimbach. As it transpired, they ran out of charge en route to the festival and had to call for a lift.
Lime Cordiale are part of a growing number of Australian musicians who are recognising the climate cost of touring and finding ways to lessen their impact. While no definitive emissions audit exists for Australia’s music sector, a 2010 study found the UK music industry produced about 540,000 tonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions annually. It’s estimated that a typical two-week, 15-stop tour in Australia produces about 28 tonnes of carbon emissions – the equivalent of an average household’s yearly output.
In 2015 the musician and Green Music Australia co-founder Tim Hollo summed it up succinctly: “We’re an industry full of forward-thinking, caring people and yet we have festivals strewn with rubbish, energy-guzzling studios and venues, and massive transport emissions.”
As musicians’ incomes continue to be decimated by the rise of streaming, touring is essential – but it’s also one of the most environmentally damaging aspects of the industry (and is, in turn, affected by the climate crisis). Overseas, Coldplay and Billie Eilish have taken steps to reduce the impact of their world tours, while Massive Attack’s battery-powered show in Bristol set a record for low-carbon emissions. In Australia artists including Angie McMahon, Barkaa, Jack River and Montaigne have joined Lime Cordiale in taking up the environmental mantle once worn by Midnight Oil, Paul Kelly, John Butler and Missy Higgins.
Oliver and Louis Leimbach, the sibling duo behind Lime Cordiale, grew up with hippy parents on Scotland Island, a community accessible only by boat in Sydney’s Pittwater. As surfers with an innate respect for the natural world, they played some of their earliest shows for the conservation organisations Sea Shepherd and Living Ocean.
After the black summer bushfires, the brothers bought a cattle farm on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, next to a family friend’s property they’d visited often as kids. Grounded by the pandemic, they spent nearly two years learning about regenerative farming and are now collaborating with the agri-tech startup Number 8 Bio to trial methods for reducing methane emissions. “People aren’t going to stop eating meat,” Oliver says. “So what can we do to change the process?”
But as travel restrictions eased, the band faced a dilemma: “Suddenly we were doing all this touring to make up for lost time, and we felt guilty. We’d just been calling ourselves environmentalists – you know, skipping out on the tractor for a day so we don’t use diesel – and then we’re just flying around the world.” Rather than simply stop touring, Oliver says the siblings committed to “tackle every single aspect we could to lessen our footprint”.
Since 2022 Lime Cordiale have donated $1 from each ticket sold on their Australian tours to environmental causes through Solar Slice, a ticket surcharge initiative created by Cloud Control’s frontwoman, Heidi Lenffer, as part of her Feat (Future Energy Artists) platform. So far, Lime Cordiale has raised more than $50,000.
The band travels by biodiesel bus in Europe and convinced their regular US bus driver to install a new generator and filtration system to cut emissions. Closer to home, they’ve found creative ways to engage fans in their mission, including having a mate in a whale costume crowd surf at shows to raise awareness for Surfers for Climate. Alongside producing a documentary about their climate journey, Leimbach says the band’s next aspiration is to stage a 5,000-capacity festival powered entirely by green energy: “We’re trying to put on the greenest show Australia has seen.”
Heidi Lenffer founded Feat in 2019 to unite the Australian music industry around a shared climate mission. Speaking to Guardian Australia from her home in the Blue Mountains, she recalls an epiphany sparked by listening to Radiohead’s Weird Fishes/Arpeggi on a long-haul flight while touring Cloud Control’s 2013 album, Dream Cave. “The song came on, and I remember thinking I needed to draw a line in the sand to address the cognitive dissonance of choosing a high-impact, high-emissions career amid a worsening climate crisis.”
After consulting the sustainability researcher Dr Christopher Dey, Lenffer learned about the carbon cost of touring – an insight that sparked Feat’s first major initiative: raising $7m, in partnership with Future Super and direct contributions from artists, to build the Brigalow solar farm in rural Queensland. With the goal of powering more than 11,000 homes for the next 30 years, Lenffer says Brigalow represents “a hardcore clean energy legacy we can stand beside and be proud of”.
Six years in, Lenffer says Feat now carries a “dual mandate” of “regenerating and protecting nature alongside decarbonising and cutting the emissions of our industry”. This includes Solar Slice’s contributions to Indigenous-led rewilding efforts in the Furneaux Islands in the Bass Strait. “I’ve never seen the government as a prime mover,” Lenffer says. “It’s a responder and the people have always been the wheel.”
This year Cloud Control reunited for a 15th anniversary tour of their debut album, Bliss Release, dedicating $1 from every ticket sold to a regeneration project on Lungtalanana/Clarke Island. The band also provided venues with a “green rider”, requesting measures including eliminating single-use plastics; and made small changes to reduce waste, including doing their own food shopping at each stop. (“We’re a pretty low-fuss band,” Lenffer says. “There’s no mixed seafood platter.”)
As part of Feat’s broader mission, Lenffer has shared a detailed green rider template with Laneway festival, including recommendations for eco-friendly suppliers and asking audiences to use public transport. “We’re hoping to influence artists at the highest level internationally,” she says.
In 2022 the Byron Bay-based metalcore band In Hearts Wake released a documentary, Green Is the New Black, chronicling their efforts to produce a carbon-neutral album and significantly reduce their touring footprint. Speaking to Guardian Australia straight from weeding on his northern rivers property, their frontman, Jake Taylor, says a respect for nature is “embedded in the themes of our work” and bemoans “the ashtray mentality” threatening local spots including Killen Falls.
The documentary, available for free online, follows the band as they dissect every part of their process, including ditching plastic pool toys from their shows and replacing non-biodegradable confetti with “leaf-fetti” made from hedge clippings and dried leaves. (While novel, Taylor admits the latter was “not sustainable in terms of people’s allergies”.)
“When it came out, there was virtually no one having these discussions,” he says of the film. “There was so much innocence around the exploration of it all, and less eye-rolling from people who weren’t on the same page.” In 2025 their ethos is simple: “We just do the best we can without being so militant that it’s not fun for anyone.”
In a report released by Green Music Australia in July, it was estimated that live music venues in NSW could save $1.53m annually and cut emissions by more than 70,000 tonnes if they implemented climate-friendly recommendations. “Anything that reduces your energy consumption is going to have a positive financial benefit and, in equal terms, reduce your emissions,” says Green Music Australia’s chief executive, Berish Bilander.
The report’s recommendations include buying renewable energy from government-accredited sources; building meaningful relationships with First Nations artists, staff and local elders and including them in discussions about sustainability; offering audiences incentives for using low-emissions travel; and supplying shared equipment, such as drum kits and amplifiers, to reduce transport emissions.
Green Music Australia has also piloted a “green venue” certification – the first of its kind in the country – which it hopes to roll out nationwide, enabling artists to map more sustainable tours through accredited venues.
All of the artists say perfection shouldn’t be the goal of climate action. “If you start boasting about something online, the first thing someone’s going to say is, ‘Well, how did you get over to Europe?’” Leimbach says. “Admitting you’re a hypocrite” is the best defence.
Lenffer frames the challenge in gentler terms. “We participate in a structure that is still weighted in favour of fossil fuel power,” she says. “You’re doomed before you start if you go in with a perfectionist mindset.
“You need to go in with a something-is-better-than-nothing mindset and then scaffold impact, step by step, from that starting point.”
