Tim Walters loves football but argues we need less of it.
During the balmy afternoon of Monday, Feb. 23, inside the student lounge of Okanagan College’s Salmon Arm campus, the English professor and researcher shared with an attentive audience a public presentation on his ongoing work related to the climate cost the Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s (FIFA) upcoming World Cup.
Taking place from June 11 to July 19, the event is being hosted by 16 cities, two in Canada (Toronto and Vancouver), 11 in the U.S. and three in Mexico. FIFA anticipates more than five million people will be attending the tournament, and claimed as of Jan. 14 that it had received more than 500 million ticket requests.
While FIFA host cities like Vancouver face a myriad of challenges, including accommodation, Walters’ concerns are more big picture. He argues this year’s World Cup will be the most polluting in the history of the event. By his “conservative” estimate, the event could be responsible for about 70 million tons of C02 emissions. Contributing to this figure are numerous factors, from public and private flights, to infrastructure built for the events to merchandise sold, to the six billion people who FIFA expects will be watching the 4-6 games played per day, for 39 days, on television and other devices. It’s estimated those television/streaming views alone will contribute 40 million tons of emissions.
The 70 million figure also takes into account emissions produced over the previous two years of games (roughly 865) leading up to the World Cup.
“It doesn’t really to make any sense to just focus on the final of the tournament (the World Cup), because if we’re imagining a world in which there was no World Cup versus one in which their is one, the qualifiers do exist and have happened and millions and millions of people have been to see them and have flown there.”
Recognizing these emissions numbers as “vast and abstract and difficult to get your head around,” Walters has employed what’s called the 1,00o-ton rule to provide a figure he hopes will get people to pay attention.
“In order to get people to care about these numbers… I’m sort of proposing that this is a way we might think about it. That having this tournament, the way we are choosing to have it, is going to kill 70,000 people.”
“I humbly propose that is too many people.”
The 1,000-ton rule estimates every 1,000 tons of fossil carbon burned results in one future premature death. Using this formula, Walters said each World Cup game will be responsible for 670 deaths.
“Customarily, when people are talking about the carbon impact of something, they like to say ‘this is the equivalent of a billion cheese burgers’ or a car driving a trillion miles, or it’s the same carbon emissions as Denmark… or whatever,” said Walters. “None of those really seem to have resonated with people. The numbers just seem so big… So maybe if we started thinking about these things in terms of the actual connection to human deaths, for one reason or another, that would change the way that we think.”
Walters argues FIFA’s environmental efforts and claims around being carbon neutral have all been examples of “green washing” – marketing tactics to portray the organization as something it is not.
”If FIFA’s goal was to reduce their carbon emissions associated with the World Cup, it would be small tournaments in small countries that don’t really require a lot of infrastructure construction,” said Walters. “Unsurprisingly, what FIFA has done is absolutely the opposite of that at every turn.”
Walters has been sharing his concerns with FIFA’s climate-compromising contributions through writings shared on Play the Game, Sporting Intelligence, The Guardian and elsewhere. This April, when the 76th FIFA Congress is hosted in Vancouver (April 30) Walters plans to launch his Extra Time Initiative, with a website advocating for a “reduction in the amount of football that’s being played.”
“It’s horrible for the environment but it’s also horrible for players,” said Walters, explaining football players are playing a third more games than they were five years ago.
Asked if the 1,000-ton rule, and the estimated future death tolls, won’t also be too abstract for general public consumption, Walters said he didn’t know, but none of the other things tried have worked at getting people to care.
“I teach a course here, it’s called Narratives in the Climate Emergency, and basically every year since we have known for sure that emissions, general emissions are going up, we’ve produced more and more emissions, so the big kind of debate in the social science community is, how do you talk about this issue in a way to get people to care about it…” replied Walters. “It’s only been about four or five years we’ve been able to connect it pretty accurately to deaths, specific deaths, and if that doesn’t do it, I don’t know what will… So I don’t know. I hope so.”
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