Can a Super Bowl be climate-friendly?

Sporting events cutting carbon, the cocoa crisis, and sweet solutions

GOOD NEWS

The Super Bowl is a massive extravaganza of sports, music, and for those watching on TV, advertisements. Worldwide, sports and sporting events emit as much as a medium-sized country -- so it’s encouraging to hear that all the electricity that ran Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas a week ago last Sunday came from a 621,000-panel solar farm in the Nevada desert. The Las Vegas Raiders have a 25-year contract with NV Energy, the company that owns the solar farm, CBS News reported.

The Paris Olympics plans to halve the carbon footprint of previous Olympics using the “avoid, reduce, offset” model. “By targeting every source of emissions and rallying all the parties involved, Paris 2024 hopes to show that another model exists,” the games’ website explains.

Is cutting their direct carbon footprint really enough to call big sporting events “climate-friendly,” though? I don’t think so, and neither does Emily Atkin who writes about this issue in her newsletter HEATED, which I highly recommend. The biggest source of emissions for the Super Bowl doesn’t come from the game itself but from the absolutely mind-blowing number of private jets traveling to and from the game. And then there’s all the purchases that are promoted through the advertising; I don’t think there’s been any calculation of that carbon footprint.

So, what do we do when solutions aren’t perfect?

When it comes to responding to climate action, you see how easy it is to immediately zoom in on how insufficient that one action was. But if you stop to think about it, every action by itself is insufficient; and focusing exclusively on what’s not being done can be discouraging.

So my position is this: we can applaud and celebrate what people are already doing right and we can also advocate for the more that’s needed at the same time. We don’t have to choose one or the other, and we can use what’s already being done as an example to encourage even more positive change.

NOT-SO-GOOD NEWS

Last week was Valentine's Day. Can you imagine it without chocolate? Studies show that rising temperatures could wipe out a third of cocoa production worldwide by the middle of this century, and climate change is already impacting cocoa crop yields.

Just last week, cocoa futures hit a record high. The weather in the Ivory Coast and Ghana – the two West African nations that produce 60 percent of the world’s cocoa – has been particularly soggy this year, leading much of the cocoa crop to spoil due to rot and disease.

Cocoa is mainly cultivated by smallholder farmers, many of whom will face hard choices as cultivation of the crop grows more difficult. “Cocoa farmers facing critical decisions may start looking to higher-altitude regions where the weather is more favorable for cocoa cultivation, or some may decide to leave cocoa cultivation altogether,” Kerry Scanlon Daroci, cocoa sector lead at the Rainforest Alliance, told CNBC.

Chocolate is one of my personal staples - my chocolate stash is only second in size to my yarn stash - so I take this news very personally!

WHAT YOU CAN DO

If you love chocolate like I do, the Climate Basecamp has just the campaign for you this month. They’re asking people to reach out to their favorite chocolate brand via email or on social media and urge them to add a “Chocolate is Threatened” label on their packaging. This will raise awareness of this problem and the climate change that is causing it.

This might sound like a very small ask; but research has shown that simply labelling things – including cigarette packs on the risk of cancer, gasoline pumps on the risk of carbon emissions, and even burritos on the sustainability of their ingredients – can shift people’s perceptions and increase the chances of behaviour change.

To help you get started, Climate Basecamp has put together an easy look-up tool with a list of chocolate companies and their social media channels here. Watch Rainn Wilson, aka Dwight Shrute, describe the campaign here.