From naming Beyoncé and her handbags responsible for the extinction of the rhino to equating meat-eating with paedophilia, Morrissey rarely holds back his opinions. The former Smiths frontman and fiercely anti-meat animal rights activist has added climate change campaigner Al Gore and Live Earth 2015 founder Kevin Wall to his list of targets, in a bluntly worded open letter about the hypocrisy of serving meat and dairy at the climate change-focused event.

“Serving meat and dairy products at an event to combat climate change is like selling pistols at a gun-control rally,” Morrissey wrote. “Your responsibility is to alert people to a crisis, not sell out to the vendors responsible for it.”

In the letter, promoted via animal rights organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) and published in full on Rolling Stone’s website, he urged Gore and Wall to ensure the music-led event about climate change goes fully vegan: “I don’t mean offering a vegan option – I mean not serving animal products at all. Otherwise, the event will make no sense – it’ll be ‘greenwashing’.”

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Morrissey, well-known for his vegetarianism, only performs at venues when they commit to striking meat items off the menu for the night. He is due to play Madison Square Garden in New York in June – after campaigning for a vegan menu during his show – and called a meat- and dairy-free menu a “moral duty”.

“Since you can’t miss the fact that meat consumption is killing the planet – your own sponsor organisation, the United Nations, states this – and since venues can and will cater vegan food for events, if you choose to serve animal flesh at Live Earth, you’ll be making a mockery of the very concept of the event, in which case it should be renamed ‘Dead Earth: We Contributed!’.”

Live Earth 2015 has been announced as a series of live concerts held over 24 hours on 18 June, in venues across six continents. Gore and Wall were also involved in the first Live Earth gigs, when more than 150 acts performed in 11 locations on 7 July 2007.

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Peta, which supported Morrissey’s letter in a blogpost on its site, has launched an online petition to encourage Gore and Wall to secure vegan-only menus at all venues hosting this year’s Live Earth concerts. According to BuzzFeed news, Peta representatives have also been asking Live Earth’s organisers to commit to the meat- and dairy-free menus via email.

Live Earth’s organisers are yet to publicly respond to the letter, at the time of writing. Read Morrissey’s letter in full, below: