Speech in the Glade

A mass email sent out by Canadian climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe reminds us that on a worldwide basis, sports and sporting events emit as much carbon as a medium-sized country. But the electricity that ran Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas for last week's Super Bowl came from a 621,000-panel solar farm in the Nevada desert. CBS News reports that the Raiders have a 25-year contract with NV Energy, the company that owns the solar farm.

The Paris Olympics plans to halve the carbon footprint of previous Olympics by 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, according to the games’ website. 

But the carbon footprint of big sporting events doesn't come solely from the games themselves.  Think of all those 100,000-seat college football stadiums every Saturday, with probably 50% of the fans driving personal vehicles to attend. The biggest source of emissions for the Super Bowl come from the astounding number of private jets that travel to and from the game. One jet flew all the way in from Tokyo just for Taylor Swift to attend the game.  

It's easy to become discouraged when talking about solutions to climate change, especially when you focus on how insufficient any one action is. But if you stop to think about it, every action by itself is insufficient; and focusing exclusively on what’s not being done is counter-productive. We can applaud and celebrate what people are doing right, and we can also advocate at the same time for what more is needed. 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.

Meanwhile, climate change is threatening 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 may start looking to higher-altitude regions where the weather is more favorable for cocoa cultivation, or may decide to leave cocoa cultivation altogether.