Hail Mary for the Climate

By Gabe Lareau

 

Amidst March Madness 2023, the U. of I. women’s basketball team sat idle. On the tarmac, waiting to fly to the Big Ten Tournament, their plane couldn’t take off. It wasn’t the weather; the only reason the aircraft couldn’t fly was because it was nearly empty.

Several Illinois Hoops Band members on board — including myself —were voluntold by the flight crew to move to the back to even out the plane’s weight distribution. After a quick reshuffle, the charter flight was ready for its one-hour journey to Minneapolis. Every person had a row to themselves. Some rows were still completely vacant.

The next day, when I walked into Minneapolis’ Target Center, it boasted a shiny new basketball court made especially for this one-week occasion. As is standard during every March Madness, branded paraphernalia were rampant. T-shirts, towels, chairs, wallpaper, banners, and postseason-specific warmup shirts were manufactured for thousands of fans traveling across the Midwest. All of this to celebrate the culmination of a near-30-game season where, for each game, television crews and equipment were transported, food was catered, floors were shined, and countless planes took off to see a ball go through a net.

Nearly two years later, in January 2025, I attended an in-conference men’s basketball game between my beloved Fighting Illini and the University of Southern California. The Trojans, in their inaugural season as a member of the traditionally Midwestern Big Ten Conference, had flown nearly 2,000 miles to play two conference games. Some back-of-the-television-contract-math calculates that the roundtrip emitted over a ton of carbon dioxide (CO₂). Meanwhile, just a few miles from the USC campus, multiple fires raged, claiming nearly 40,000 acres of land, $30 billion in damage, and 28 lives. We observed a moment of silence for the victims.

At both of these events in Minneapolis and Champaign, waiting for the games to start, I thought about all of the energy that humanity puts into sport — keeping hockey rinks cold, manufacturing thousands of custom soccer balls for the World Cup, flying half-empty planes two states over. If you love sports as much as you hate climate change, you’re probably thinking exactly what I thought: “That’s a lot of carbon.”

 

 

On the metaphorical Basketball Court of Sport Greenhouse Gas Emissions (BCSGHGE), an emission can be assigned one of three values. Those in the sustainability business call these “scopes.” Determining scope, just like assessing how much a basket is worth, depends on where it comes from and how difficult it is to control. The environmental impact generated by spectators flushing toilets isn’t equal to an entire flight; each differs in scope.

Scope 1 emissions are your layups, those closest to home, easiest to make and carrying the smallest impact. “These have to do with the stadium — your waste, your water, your energy at the stadium,” said Katie Gavitt, Assistant Manager of Operations, Member Services, Communications & Events at the Green Sports Alliance (GSA). “Scope 1 and 2 emissions are more direct.”

Scope 2s, inside the arc at around 15 feet, are a little harder to control but manageable enough if you’re willing to put in the work. How the stadium’s power is generated or how much of its recyclables are actually recycled would fall under this category.

And then there are Scope 3s, your three-pointers out to your half-court shots: The opposing team’s travel, fan travel, and the way supplies are delivered to your stadium — all things that you can influence but remain ultimately out of your control. “These are really hard to track because it’s all indirect,” Gavitt said.

That considered, calculating every ton of CO₂ caused by sports is likely impossible. It’s undoubtedly astronomical. For scale, the emissions related to soccer, the world’s most popular sport, are estimated to clock in at 30 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, about the same size as the country of Denmark, according to the Carbon Literacy Project.

Tonight’s contest at the BCSGHGE, capacity 8 billion, is the global game of the century: the Climate Solutions vs. the Fossil Fuelers. While the Solutions boast a strong defensive front, proficiently blocking Scope 1 layups and Scope 2 15-footer shots, the Fuelers are the best Scope 3-point shooting team in the world. They’re also up by a considerable margin, with only a few minutes to go. The fate of sport itself, and the world, depends on this matchup.

How so? Costs are mounting. Every year, more matches are rescheduled to escape the day’s heat, or canceled altogether out of concern for both athlete and spectator safety. More moments before games are being spent in silence to remember victims of climate-related natural disasters.

During the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, temperatures routinely rose above 90ºF. “It was simply too hot for these athletes to perform there,” Gavitt told me. “They were passing out. They weren’t used to the humidity, which makes a difference when you’re in an endurance race.” The International Olympic Committee (IOC) elected to move the race walk and marathon to cooler northern Sapporo. The decision was for naught. The women’s marathon was delayed and took place in 86ºF heat with 65% humidity; 17% of the field did not finish.

The reason the world has invested so many of its resources into finding the most effective way for a team to hit a ball with a stick or kick it across a line is because sports are beneficial. They promote healthy minds, bodies, and practices. Competition, too, paradoxically, brings communities together, on global and local scales. Professional teams are a boon for cities and bring in billions of dollars annually.

Also, people just like them. In an increasingly polarized country, 61% of Americans identify as following one sport or another. Because getting 61% of Americans to agree on anything is miraculous, it’s no wonder that Pope John Paul II (purportedly) said, “Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important.”

What’s more, sports have the flexibility to show the world how to tackle climate change, functioning as semi-independent states in a country. They’re overseen by governing organizations — the NCAA, MLS, NBA, etc. — but how individual teams run their operations is mostly “up to the states.” And teams don’t have to navigate democratic red tape; they’re free to maximize impact with less hassle. If the will is there, sports can implement climate solutions quickly and efficiently: The most unimportant of important things helping solve the most important of important things.

 

 

Re: if the will is there: “Who’s gonna be the person who is getting s–t done?” is the first question Gavitt asks potential GSA members.

The GSA was an early pioneer in getting sports and sustainability on the same team. Founded in 2010, it started out with only a few members local to its native Pacific Northwest. The Seattle Seahawks, Portland Trailblazers, and Vancouver Canucks were early adopters.

Today, its bench is deep. In 2024, 263 organizations hailing from every major professional and collegiate league held GSA memberships. To do so, the Chicago Cubs, the Denver Broncos, ESPN, and even the Indianapolis Motor Speedway all had to provide examples of sustainability initiatives and shell out the $1,000 annual fee. That $1K — couch change in the executive suite — provides access to a sustainability network to which the GSA is the hub. The Alliance works like a small town Casey’s: If you need to find the right person fast, chances are they can point you in the right direction.

However, the GSA doesn’t issue any regulations. Members are not required to meet any sustainability standard. There are GSA members whose sustainability initiatives begin and end with waterless urinals. They will obviously not make the impact of a GSA member running on 100% renewable energy.

Tackling Scope 3s, the significant emissions, largely goes un-marketed and unpursued by teams. Fans are left to conclude that the only way to help the environment is through small, individual changes. Consider “Zero Waste Games” — a popular phenomenon that has become something of a misnomer. The idea is that everything in the arena — half-eaten hot dogs, crushed beer cans — will be put back to use or biodegrade into the natural environment. A 100% diversion rate is a tall order.

Still, the concept has noble motivations. Waste Management estimates that the decomposition of trash generated at events from the “big four” American professional sport leagues — MLB, the NFL, NHL, and NBA — emits approximately 35,000 metric tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere every year. That is equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas output of 6,000 cars.

Zero Waste Games are green marketing tee-ball, easily integrating the “fun” of recycling into the fan experience. The U. of I. rolled out a giant green bin to multiple football games in 2023 and 2024, and Michigan State made “Scrap Sparty,” a statue of its mascot fashioned from reclaimed metal, to promote sustainable football games.

And yet, they’re being outplayed by a common rival. The University of Michigan, as part of its “Planet Blue” sustainability program, claims “nearly” all of its food and beverage packaging at football games can either be composted or recycled. Its goal is to divert 90% of game-day waste from the landfill. In 2023, the University of Tennessee diverted 44,950 pounds of recyclables from landfills — a record that it challenged Michigan to beat in a “Recycle Bowl.” The maize and blue came up short, but still impressively recycled just over 40,000 pounds. By contrast, Illinois averages about 1,000 pounds of recycling at each of its Zero Waste games, and Michigan State achieves a diversion rate of 12% to 15%. This is what those in the sporting business call a “blowout.”

However, the waste pendulum swings far. It’s standard practice in professional sports, especially Major League Baseball, for each game to have its own specific promotion. Thousands of bobbleheads, jerseys, hats, posters, and sunglasses are branded and given out to fans during the regular season purely as incentive to attend — the kind of hyper-consumerism environmental activists say is unsustainable.

And there are things that fans actively enjoy wasting during the game. After 20 years of its popular “dollar dog night,” the Philadelphia Phillies canceled the promotion after a 2022 food fight resulted in thousands of wasted franks.

Reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions can still be impactful — recycling and reducing food waste are both extremely efficient greenhouse gas mitigation strategies. They can also be precursors to larger things. Early in the GSA’s existence, after partners in the Pacific Northwest were established, “The next people who came on board were the Philadelphia Eagles,” Gavitt said. “They wanted to join because they had realized that the toilet paper they were using was detrimental to the eagle habitat.” Since then, the Eagles have become environmental paragons, diverting 99% of their waste and generating a third of their power from built-in solar panels at their home stadium, Lincoln Financial Field.

Other stadiums have started to follow suit, drawing up their own plays on how to cut down on Scope 1 and 2 emissions. Unbeknownst to me when I visited in 2022, Minneapolis’ Target Center had thatched its 20,000-seat arena with a green roof 13 years earlier, a huge energy-saver and emissions-cutter. Down the street, U.S. Bank Stadium, the gargantuan $1 billion home of the Minnesota Vikings, was the first professional stadium to achieve LEED Platinum status. Atlanta’s Mercedes Benz Stadium not only also claims that title, but produces enough solar energy to power nine home games each season.

Then there’s the appropriately named Climate Pledge Arena, the net-zero-carbon home of the NHL’s Seattle Kraken and WNBA’s Seattle Storm, marketed as the “most progressive, responsible and sustainable arena in the world.” That was only possible because Climate Pledge Arena wasn’t built, but renovated, using far less material.

Unfortunately, retroactive renovations on existing arenas aren’t in vogue when teams, or entire countries, are looking for new playing venues. The 2022 FIFA World Cup spawned seven brand new stadiums, a new metro system, new airport, and hundreds of new hotels just for the one-month tournament — a costly endeavor, both environmentally and fiduciarily. The oil-rich Qatari government spent $220 billion on the World Cup and emitted the equivalent of 5.4 million tons of carbon dioxide, in part by air-conditioning roofless venues in the middle of the desert.

American sports, too, have a fervor for new facilities as unquenchable as their lust for championships. Whether in the name of “a better fan experience” or an increased competitive advantage, teams just keep pouring money, and concrete — and, therefore, emissions — into stadiums.

Despite the NFL and MLB both existing for over a century, more than half the teams in each league use stadiums that were built in the 21st Century. In the NBA, just one arena — Madison Square Garden — was built before 1990. While some of these upgrades were necessary, many were done in the name of over-extravagance. Newer MLB stadiums feature manta ray tanks, pools, and goofy home-run sculptures. The Las Vegas Raiders’ brand new Allegiant Stadium has a nightclub.

Sports’ emissions don’t start and end on gameday, either. The Tampa Bay Times reported in 2018 on a college football “facilities arms race,” citing how in a five-year span, “Power Five schools spent more than $800 million” renovating or constructing just football facilities, oftentimes excessively. Illinois’ Smith Football Center has a bowling alley. Professional teams top even that. At the Jacksonville Jaguars’ practice facility, every urinal is equipped with sensors that assess individual athlete hydration.

As for sports’ Scope 3 emissions — anything that involves a third party like fan travel, media travel, and deliveries — they are, according to Gavitt, “a very hot topic right now. That’s because they’re all indirect.” Because stadium deliveries involve third parties, it’s not each team’s direct responsibility to make sure that the supply chain is run sustainably, Gavitt told me. Still, teams are caught in a double bind —held responsible for emissions beyond their control, but which are nevertheless attributable to their business.

The immensity of Scope 3s can be hard to grasp and even more difficult to calculate. Consider sports’ largest contributor to global climate change, by far: travel. David Goldblatt, contributing to Play the Game, estimated that MLB fan travel emitted between 1.5 and 2 million tons of CO₂ equivalent (tCO₂e) annually. Assuming that the NFL and NBA emit similar quantities of greenhouse gases, then those three leagues dump around 6 million tCO₂e into the atmosphere every year just from fan travel. There is little teams can do about that.

“It’s hard to ask for behavior change,” Gavitt said. “People go for the most convenient route. The only thing that teams can really do is incentivize. For the San Francisco Giants, fans get free public transit two hours before and two hours after a game.” As for team travel, the most road-weary professional clubs are located in the Pacific Northwest. Geographically isolated from most other teams, the Seattle Seahawks will fly nearly 30,000 miles during the 2024-25 season; Major League Baseball’s Athletics, 100,000 miles; the Portland Trail Blazers, 130,548 miles during their 82-game NBA season. For a team that plants three trees for every successful three-pointer, the Blazers would have to make about 589 every game to offset their travel.

In a world where sustainable aviation is decades away and carbon offsets are far from an exact science, the solution may be to travel less or over closer distances. Or both.

“Every league has divisions and most of these divisions are correlated geographically,” Gavitt said. “These teams play each other more often. Each league has tried to figure out, ‘How do we make these trips shorter and keep them within the same vicinity?’ so it’s not so crazy throughout the season.”

This increased compartmentalization approach to team travel has proved effective. During the COVID pandemic, the NBA moved to a “bubble” system at Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Fla. Every team flew in and stayed there for the entire season, saving thousands of tons of emissions. However, in part to make up for COVID, both professional and collegiate leagues have since relapsed. During the 2023 season, MLB shifted its schedule so that every one of its 30 ball clubs will play each other at least once. In the 162-game schedule, 52 games will be played intra-divisionally, a steep drop from what used to be 76 played against close geographical rivals.

As for collegiate sports, “all the sustainability people seemed to be pretty pissed when UCLA, USC, Washington, and Oregon got added to the Big Ten [in 2022],” Gavitt told me. “Their footprint is going to be so much larger than what it’s been.” The acquisitions set off a ripple effect, making sustainability as much of an afterthought as the conferences’ names. Northern Illinois University football is now a member of the Mountain West. The Atlantic Coast Conference added three new schools, including the University of California and Stanford.

“I don’t think sustainability was brought up in great length in those discussions would be my guess,” said Marty Kaufmann, Executive Senior Associate Director of Athletics & Revenue Operations at the U. of I. “I was not in the room for those discussions, but in all of the feedback and updates that I’ve received, it was not brought up.”

When the Big Ten expanded to its second shining sea, the league didn’t just create a sustainability problem, but logistical and competitive headaches as well. “Every traditional Big Ten team will make just one trip out west,” Kaufmann said. For example, Illinois volleyball played Sept. 27 at Oregon and Sept. 28 at Washington. The West Coast teams are the ones shouldered with most of the travel burden — a cost paid in both carbon dioxide and performance on the court.

As of January 2025, the UCLA men’s basketball team had already traveled over 7,000 miles to New York, Nebraska, and Maryland during the regular season. According to Bruins head coach Mick Cronin, his team is feeling road weary. “Good luck west going east,” Cronin told USA Today. “Ask me UCLA’s record east of the Mississippi in their last 20 years because, when I got the job, I looked it up for scheduling purposes. It’s under .500.

“We’ve seen the Eiffel Tower, er, the Statue of Liberty, twice in the last three weeks while we were landing. We also saw the Capitol building. And we still got to go back. And then we’ve got to go back for the Big Ten Tournament.”

Cronin won’t have to wait much longer for his team to see the Eiffel Tower. In 2028, the Big Ten Tournament will be held in Las Vegas.

 

 

The global sports industry can still make a comeback. The gameplan: Significant scale-backs. The excesses of wasteful promotions, league expansions, outdoor air-conditioned desert venues, and urinal sensors, framed as “necessary” competitive advantages or fan experiences, will need to be the first roster cuts.

There are some small signs of life. In 2023, FC Barcelona announced its intention to increase team travel by rail, instead of flying. The 2024 Paris Olympics, unlike the 2022 World Cup, used 95% existing or temporary venues to host its games. The process required some creativity, which paid massive dividends — fencing bouts were held at the breathtaking Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées, the equestrian events in the gardens of Versailles.

Systemic solutions are starting to be implemented in both the governmental and private spheres, too. “The U.N. has just come out with ESG laws — environmental, social, and governance,” Gavitt said. “Every company with a certain number of employees has to report on how much waste, how much energy, and how much water they’re putting in the Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.”

ESG-required transparency is already changing policy. Of all sporting organizations, Formula 1’s ESG brief stands out. Reporting a goal of net-zero emissions by 2030 is one of sport’s more ambitious, and F1 has made significant strides in increasing EV battery capacity and the development of “synthetic fuels.” Of course, it is doing so by partnering up with the likes of Exxon Mobil and BP, but its shrinking carbon contribution doesn’t lie.

The world’s largest economy, the United States, has not ratified ESG laws and is unlikely to do so in the future, especially under its current administration. However, California, the world’s fifth-largest economy and home to 19 professional teams, has adopted ESG laws. “The teams in California are forced to do a lot of these things which make sense — they’re doing much better with sustainability,” Gavitt said.

As for organizations without sustainability practices in place, a little education can change behaviors and herald more extensive efforts. The U. of I. now has a color-coded trash bag system: Black bags don’t get sorted with recyclables. “In the past, we would pick up trash in black plastic bags. I don’t think any of us knew that it wouldn’t get sorted and all go to the landfill,” Kaufmann said. “I think if we can continue to get more efficient and work sustainability into our everyday operations more, that would be great. It’s not that difficult.”

Just ask Forest Green Rovers FC, an English football club with sustainability integrated into its brand. The club serves only vegan food at its matches, has a pitch that recycles rainwater, is entirely powered by renewable energy, and offsets every fan’s travel. Renderings of its new planned stadium, Eco Park, feature the stadium surrounded not by parking lots but lush greenery.

The Rovers are outliers — relatively small-scale and sustainability-obsessed. But “they combine all of it,” Gavitt said. “They are the answer to what a sustainable sporting future looks like.” They have rapidly implemented changes that take other teams years to complete and that other world governments, with vastly more resources, have yet to accomplish.

Equally important, athletes have been making demonstrations of climate solidarity. Chloe Kim, one of snowboarding’s biggest names, testified at the 2019 U.N. Youth Climate Summit. A 16-year old British cross-country runner named Innes FitzGerald turned down an invitation to the 2023 World Cross Country Championships because it required her to travel to Australia. “I would never be comfortable flying in the knowledge that people could be losing their livelihoods, homes and loved ones as a result,” she wrote in a letter to Athletics Weekly.

Athletes are some of the most sought-after spokespeople in the world and have the capacity to change how their sport confronts public issues. In just five years, the NFL went from spurning Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the National Anthem to allowing social justice messages to be displayed on players’ uniforms and behind endzones.

Whether those mottos, which can be as vague as “End Hate” and “It Takes All of Us,” are reflections of an effective attitude shift or the racial justice equivalent of greenwashing is up for debate. The parallel ironies with environmental justice, though, are hard to overstate. The turf for Super Bowl LVIII featured the message “End Racism” next to an endzone for the Kansas City Chiefs. That same game was marketed as the greenest Super Bowl ever, which thousands flew to see in private jets.

Nevertheless, sports do not exist in a bubble. Every decade has a moment in sport that has thrust a larger issue into the spotlight: Jesse Owens winning gold and breaking the color barrier at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; democracy prevailing over communism in the “Miracle on Ice” in 1984; Mike Piazza’s September 2001 home run for the New York Mets helping a nation heal from its greatest tragedy.

If the same can be done for climate change, with organizations taking meaningful action and athletes continuing to speak out, then global sports can emerge as climate leaders in a world that desperately needs them. At the BCSGHGE, the planet is trailing badly with time running out, but defeat is not inevitable.

For proof, ask any fan: “Do you believe in miracles?”

About the Author …

Gabe Lareau graduated from the University of Illinois with his B.A. in English in May 2024. Originally from Moline, Ill., Gabe currently works on the communications team for the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County.

This piece was written for ESE 498, the CEW capstone course, in Spring 2024.