There's no such thing as a “climate-friendly” Super Bowl
Plus, a round-up of climate highlights from the game.
It’s time to have a conversation about the word “climate-friendly.”
Like a football in the Super Bowl, it gets thrown around a lot. In recent months, journalists have used the word “climate-friendly” to describe reusable Stanley cups, carbon-neutral Apple Watches, and aviation powered by biofuels. It’s been used to describe investments in companies that have pledged to go net zero. And it’s been used to describe ice cream made with milk from cows fed special burp-reducing feed.
If you watched the Super Bowl this year, apparently, that was “climate-friendly” too—or at least, the most “climate-friendly” the Super Bowl ever been. That’s because, for the first time, the host stadium—the Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas—was powered entirely by renewable energy. Specifically, it was powered by the Arrow Canyon Solar Project, owned by local utility NV Energy.
The vast solar farm and massive batteries powering the stadium weren’t the only green highlights at the big game either, as CBS News reports:
The stadium's roof is made of a sustainable plastic material that allows in about 10% of daylight but blocks all solar heat, so it takes less energy to cool the building. The grass field is moved outdoors on a rail system to get natural sunlight rather than using energy-intensive growing lights. And everything from grass clippings to food scraps and cigarette butts are composted or converted into other forms of energy.
These actions by Allegiant Stadium and NFL Green are worth talking about, as they have the potential to become a powerful talking point in the energy transition culture wars. Just imagine: the next time you hear the claim that renewables don’t work—that fossil fuels are necessary to prevent the Dark Ages—you have a relatively easy and relatable counter. “Didn’t you watch the Super Bowl? Looked fine to me!”
Related reading: Show this to anyone who says renewables are unreliable
But as important as it is to recognize strides toward a sustainable future, it’s equally as important to guard against complacency. And using 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.”
What’s more, that estimate from Good-Loop only measures the carbon emissions of the ad impressions at the Super Bowl. It does not measure the carbon emissions of the products sold. This would be near-impossible to do, since you can’t really trace specific purchases to commercials people saw. But there’s a reason corporations pay $7 million for 30 seconds of Super Bowl ad time: because the Super Bowl is, at its core, an opportunity to get people to buy things. And buying things is a main driver of the climate crisis.
Think about all those Super Bowl commercials. Out of everything you saw, what do you remember most? For me, it’s an infectious jingle from an e-commerce company called Temu—a company that reportedly sends more than a million packages around the world every day, and refuses to disclose any information about its climate impact. The commercial, which I saw at least three times during the broadcast, told me that I should “Shop like a billionaire.” But there’s a reason billionaires emit 1 million times more greenhouse gases than the average person on Earth. It’s because they shop. Like billionaires.
So don’t let the excitement of a 100 percent renewable-powered stadium drive you into a state of delusion about what’s actually happening. The Super Bowl is still a massive climate pollution event. For it to become truly “climate-friendly”—aka, not adding any emissions into the atmosphere—it will have to change in ways that most people are not ready to think about.
Anyway, here are some other climate-related updates from the big game, courtesy of Arielle:
Lahaina football coaches and players did the coin toss
The Super Bowl opened with a reminder of the cost of the climate crisis. Players and coaches from the Lahainaluna High School football team served as honorary coin toss captains, a nod to the perseverance of the team in the wake of the August wildfires in Maui that devastated their community.
Those wildfires were the deadliest fires in recent U.S. history, killing 100 people, displacing 5,000 others, and costing an estimated $5.5 billion. Climate change exacerbated the conditions that led to the fires, including hurricane-driven winds and dry conditions. So even though the NFL didn’t mention the climate crisis, its consequences were vividly present.
One of the world’s worst plastic polluters aired a commercial about reducing waste
While we love seeing Kate McKinnon on our screens, we didn’t love seeing her star in a sneaky greenwashing ad by Unilever. The ad for Hellmann’s mayonnaise encouraged people to reduce food waste by adding mayo to their leftovers, using the slogan, “Make taste, not waste.”
It was an ironic sentiment, given Hellmann’s parent company Unilever is one of the most wasteful companies in the world. According to a recent Greenpeace report, Unilever produced 698,000 tons of plastic in 2022 alone. That plastic packaging—from brands like Hellmann’s, Dove, Vaseline—often ends up in the ocean, our food supply, and our bodies.
The majority of Unilever’s pollution is from plastic sachets, or single-use packages usually used for condiments, cosmetic samples, and even detergent. Companies market plastic sachets in developing countries as a cheaper alternative to full-sized products. But those countries also bear the brunt of plastic pollution from those sachets—which aren’t recyclable or biodegradable.
Unilever promised to phase out its plastic sachets two times: in 2010 and 2019. According to one company president, the sachet design is “evil because you cannot recycle it.” However, despite those promises, Unilever has continued quietly lobbying against laws banning the single-use sachets in Sri Lanka, India, and the Philippines, a Reuters investigation found. Three years after their pledge, Greenpeace reported that Unilever was on track to sell over 53 billion plastic sachets in 2023—a number equal to 1,700 plastic sachets per second.
Chevron told viewers that their fried foods were solving the climate crisis
Every year, fossil fuel companies look for a way to use the Super Bowl to their advantage—from convincing viewers there would be no football without oil to sponsoring football teams. This year, none of the major fossil fuel companies shelled out $7 million for an ad on national TV. But social media greenwashing was still fair game.
In an ad posted to Instagram and X, Chevron told Super Bowl viewers that their “favorite fried game day foods can fuel a lower carbon future.” Using cooking oil for fuel is “one of the many game plans we have to help us advance to a lower carbon future,” the company added.
The ad was classic paltering—telling a small truth without context to mislead consumers about the true nature of its business. Because it’s true: Chevron recently paid $3 billion for a company that produces biodiesel. But the ad failed to mention that the company also produced a record 3.1 million barrels of oil per day in 2023, and made $21.4 billion last year primarily from oil and gas.
Taylor Swift's private jet emissions took center stage
You didn’t think we could report on the Super Bowl without mentioning Taylor Swift, did you? The star took at least one, but potentially two private jets from Tokyo to Las Vegas to watch boyfriend Travis Kelce help the Kansas City Chiefs win their third title—an action which one climate scientist called “shockingly insane.”
Later this week, Swift will fly across the Pacific again—this time to continue her Eras Tour in Melbourne, Australia. The roughly 29-hour trip could burn up to 8,800 gallons of fuel and emit 90 tons of carbon dioxide, according to the Washington Post. That’s a lot of carbon emissions for one person, especially since the average American releases 15 tons of carbon in one year.
Swift has been under intense scrutiny for her private jet emissions in recent years, thanks to flight trackers like Jack Sweeney’s @SwiftJetNextDay. In response, Swift has threatened to sue the University of South Florida student, claiming through her rep that she buys carbon offsets. She also quietly sold one of her two planes.
But though Swift may not publicly own her contributions to global warming, she has already experienced the deadly consequences. During a concert in Brazil last summer, one of her fans died from heat stroke during a climate change-fueled heat wave.
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Glad that you hit the positives to. As you all know, far too often, climate journalism is all about tut-tuting minor things while missing major ones (Hey, Big Oil), and only focusing on the negative. You came at the story from multiple directions too -which is great.
Excellent newsletter today. well done.
Thanks as always for your stellar and interesting reporting. Absolutely, that Temu ad was alarming on so many levels. To counter the maddening narrative of cheap goods, they should be required to link to Annie Leonard's great work on the "Story of Stuff." Cheap goods are anything but cheap.