The Pros and Cons of Renewable Energy Greenwashing
Super Bowls, Mining Companies and the Religion of Consumerism
Two recent developments have me thinking, once again, about greenwashing and the gyrations corporations make to appear socially responsible. The 2024 Super Bowl was touted as “climate-friendly” because the stadium was powered by solar energy.
Using renewables at such an incredibly high-profile event certainly has some up sides.
Most notably, those with vested interests in maintaining a fossil-fuel dependent energy system often argue that renewable energy isn’t sufficiently reliable. However, Super Bowl 24, the most watched television event in history, showed that renewables can work just fine even for energy intensive events designed to rake in billions of dollars for promoters and advertisers. If renewables are stable enough for the greatest spectacle of capitalistic advertising on the planet, they’re likely good enough anywhere.
The down side of powering a giant sports stadium with renewables is that it can gloss over the deeper, fundamentally destructive nature of events like a Super Bowl. There is no way to make a Super Bowl “climate-friendly” because the vast amount of emissions don’t come from the game or the stadium themselves, but rather from all the travel getting to and from the event and the massive amount of consumption resulting from high-profile, insanely expensive advertising.
A couple of colleagues have written really good pieces about this issue and I encourage you to read both. In an excellent piece by Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson, in HEATED, the authors note:
“[u]sing the word ‘climate-friendly’ to describe the Super Bowl is a recipe for complacency, whether intentional or not.
Make no mistake: There is no amount of solar power that could make the Super Bowl “climate-friendly.” That’s because the emissions from the Super Bowl do not come from the game itself. They come from absolutely mind-blowing number of private jets traveling to and from the game, and the mass-promotion of hyper-consumerism through advertising.
This isn’t just something I’m guessing at. According to one estimate from sports researcher Ralf Roth, approximately 85 percent of emissions from major sporting events come not from the actual game, but from the travel and lodging of fans, particularly fans that are traveling by aircraft. And Roth’s estimate does not take into account the massive climate impact of sports advertising: One estimate from programmatic ad platform Good-Loop estimates that in 2021, ‘Super Bowl advertisers generated around 2 million tonnes of CO2 through digital advertising … the same amount of carbon emissions produced by around 100,000 Americans in one year.’”
I highly recommend reading this entire HEATED article as it also calls out some of the more egregious greenwashing and consumer mania, from one ad telling us to “shop like a billionaire” to an actual billionaire using two private planes to attend the event.
In a piece titled the Stupor Bowl, Timothy Linaberry offers a hard-hitting analysis of the consumerist culture so blatantly promoted by this mega-event. He shares, “As Noam Chomsky once said, ‘One of the functions that things like professional sports play, in our society and others, is to offer an area to deflect people’s attention from things that matter, so that the people in power can do what matters without public interference.’”
Here's another aspect of this story that received very little coverage other than on NPR.
The massive solar farm that powered the Super Bowl is located on the Moapa River Indian Reservation, but all the electricity is shipped off-site; none of it powers the reservation. The farm consists of 621,000 shimmering panels with the capacity to power approximately 60,000 residential customers, or, one very large stadium. It is owned by Capital Dynamics, a global assets management firm with offices all across the globe. The tribe does earn revenue through land lease payments and purchases by solar farm workers from stores on the reservation. However, the Tribe is also utilizing energy assistance programs to try to help stabilize tribal members’ electricity costs. There are many factors involved in energy development on tribal lands and that bigger picture is beyond the scope of this piece but I wanted to hit on this added wrinkle.
In full disclosure I was raised by football-loving parents and I still really like the game. I’ve been a Seattle Seahawks fan since the very first year they came on the scene. Though I’m pretty low on the consumerism spectrum and don’t purchase things I see on TV ads, I recognize that my eyeballs on football games adds to their ratings and perpetuates the problem. Like so many of you, I wrestle with the conundrum of sitting within and sometimes perpetuating the very systems and cultural norms that I know must shift.
The No Good Awful of Mining and Game-Changing Business Leadership
The second example of greenwashing that caught my eye was news that the massive mining company Rio Tinto has committed to using renewable energy to power its mining operations in Australia. Rio Tinto’s rap sheet of environmental, public health, and human rights violations is long and well-documented. Using renewables to continue destructive extraction is like putting lipstick on a pig. It’s an effort to make it seem OK to keep ratcheting up fundamentally unsustainable industries and levels of consumption. I suspect that with the steady drop in the cost of renewables, Rio Tinto is also looking at decreasing production costs over time.
On a related bright note, Pandora, the world's largest jeweler by amount of products sold, has stopped using mined silver and gold and now only manufactures with recycled precious metals. The Danish company, known for its $65 to $95 charm bracelets, buys around 340 tonnes of silver and one tonne of gold every year. Using recycled, instead of newly mined, metals cuts Pandora's indirect CO2 emissions by around 58,000 tonnes annually and recycling uses far less energy than mining virgin materials.
Life with Livvy – So Fun
OK, so this is super fun. A year ago I was interviewed about Olive by some college kids doing a video project featuring the Herd U Needed A Home rescue which is where I got Livvy from. Well, the project has now been turned into a docu-series. Here is our clip. What a great job these young peeps did.