Climate Change Denial

Guest blogger, Terence Blacker decries the ‘Ozymandian’ stupidity of holding the 2022 World Cup in air conditioned stadiums in Qatar, one of the world’s hottest  countries and FIFA’s feeble greenwashing of its stupendously destructive choice of host country.

If the delegates currently attending the global climate conference in Mexico need any reminding of the magnitude of their task in the face of human stupidity and hubris, they do not have far to look. At another meeting of a distinguished international body, the decision has been made to hold the most needlessly energy-wasting sporting event that the planet has ever seen.

As a symbol of the confusion and hypocrisy which surrounds the questions of climate change and energy conservation, the Qatar World Cup of 2022 will surely take some beating.

Qatar is not only one of the hottest countries in the world, but, as was announced last week, football’s greatest tournament is to be held during its high summer in June and July, when temperatures are between 40 and 50 degrees centigrade. Any kind of outdoor activity is impossible, so that, unless you are an immigrant worker (40 Nepalese construction workers died from the heat over six months in 2006), you will need to be inside.

Qatar may be small but, when it comes to profligate use of energy, it punches well above its weight. According to the recently published Living Planet Index, its per capita consumption of the world’s energy resources is higher than that of any other country, with the exception of the United Arab Emirates. Oil and gas usage in Qatar increased by 310 per cent between 1999 and 2009.

The response to these dubious claims to fame from international football’s ruling body, Fifa, has been to invite Qatar to go on a massive energy binge. Twelve new stadia will be built. There will be training grounds. The infrastructure to support an influx of between one and two million fans will be created. The venues will all be air-conditioned, reducing the outside temperature of 40 degrees to 27 degrees, even when the roof is open to the sun. Spectators will enjoy cool air projected from the back and neck of every seat. Similar facilities will be supplied to training grounds and, one assumes, to the buildings where visitors will spend their time when football is not being played. In fact, most of the country will have to be air-conditioned.

Then, when it is over, the stadia will be dismantled and shipped to different parts of the world where they will be re-erected. The true hypocrisy here lies not in the sheer idiocy of this organised spree of wastefulness, but in the way it is presented. A month-long, air-conditioned World Cup is, we are told, good for the planet. The Qataris, knowing that there is no fool like a green-washed fool, included in their plans the promise to use photovoltaic panels, situated in the desert, to power the stadium’s cooling systems. These will be carbon-neutral venues, it is claimed.

To put it mildly, these plans have caused surprise among scientists. Air-conditioning famously requires a vast amount of energy, even in temperate climates. The idea that solar energy can power cooling systems in a number of large stadia, reducing the temperatures from 40 degrees to 27, would seem to belong in the realm of dreams.

There are other niggling little problems. Air-conditioning units do not only use an inordinate amount of energy. They emit greenhouse gases – HFCs – which are incomparably more powerful than carbon dioxide. Then there is the small question of the construction process. The stadia are built. They are air-conditioned for a month, and then taken down, shipped across the world and re-erected. What happens to the millions of solar panels sitting out in the desert remains unexplained.

A perfect, tragic example of man’s arrogant belief that he can build his way out of trouble – save energy by accelerating his use of it – the Qatar World Cup is the global equivalent of someone leaving all the lights and heating appliances blazing away in a house, and claiming to be green because there is a wind turbine on the roof.

It is a mad Ozymandian desert folly. In Mexico, they should look on the works of Fifa, and despair.

Terence Blacker is an author, critic, social commentator and tree planter. He writes a twice weekly column for The Independent

This article was originally published in The Independent link and has been reproduced with the permission of Terence Blacker.

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George Marshall adds- I wrote a piece for Climate Denial back in 2006 (see Football Pants) observing that the declaration that the 2006 World Cup in Germany would be ‘carbon neutral’ conveniently ignored the thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted by people flying to attend. I suggested that, like addicts, FIFA had a remarkable capacity to create self serving definitions of their own problem behaviour.

The same criticism can be made of this event but, try as hard as I can, I can’t find any metaphor that adequately describes how insane this new ‘green’ World Cup seems seems at a time when scientists  are confirming that their worst case climate predictions  may have been too low. So what next, the world ski championships in Brunei (which, let’s not forget, has the world’s largest indoor ski slope)?

I must admit that I got a slight wry smile when  found that the company installing the solar panels is Albert Speer & Partner founded by the son of Hitler’s favourite architect. I fear that you have to look at Papa Speer’s plans to flatten Berln to build a vast capital for the Nazi empire to find hubris on a similar scale.

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A further comment: according to a FIFA consultant’s report, the total carbon footprint for the 2010 World Cup came to 2,753,250 tons of CO2 equivalent, an eight-fold increase over the previous World Cup in Germany. As noted above, the vast majority of this was due to air travel. So the footprint of a ‘green’ sporting event exceeds the entire emissions of many small developing countries  including Burundi, Congo, Djibouti,  Mauritius, Bhutan Bahamas,  Grenada and Guyana.

How does one scientific report generate two entirely contradictory stories and headlines? This is a perfect example of how information on climate change is filtered by the newsmedia and distorted to fit the politics and worldview of their readers.

The report on temperature data was released by the UK Meteorological Office on 26th November to try and generate some discussion during the disastrously muted Cancun climate negotiations.

This is how The Guardian, the UK’s leading liberal environmentalist newspaper reported it:

I cropped the website image to include a typical juxtaphotisian (see my last post). Above the headline is a banner advert  promoting the Barclays ‘Fantasy Investment Portfolio’- as ever the climate news is enveloped with messaging reassuring us that everything is fine with the growth economy.

The Guardian based its headline on just one aspect of the report:  “that sea surface temperatures were higher than initially thought because of a change in the way the temperatures were measured”.

And here is how the Daily Mail, a right leaning anti-environmentalist newspaper reported exactly the same  Met Office report on the same day.

The Daily Mail does not deny that temperatures are still increasing (though it hardly goes out of its way to point this out) so draws solace and a headline from evidence that there has been a slight decline in the rate of temperature increase- it then labels this an ‘admission’ (as though wrung out of the Met Office through interrogation) that “will be seized upon by climate sceptics as evidence that man-made global warming has been overstated”

The stories are so different because the newspapers had already prepared their storylines before they even opened the report. The Guardian enthusiastically embraces catastrophic climate change stories, especially when framed as “you thought it was bad- actually it’s even worse”.  The Daily Mail’s stance is that climate change is being exagerated for political ends. It does not deny the problem but actively seeks out storylines that emphasise distortion and unreliability of the data.

The different editorial lines of the newspapers show the fragility of human belief in climate change and the way that people’s pre-existing worldviews intervene and mediate in their processing of information about climate change.

Thank you Jack Pritchard and Clayton Lavallin for sending me these.