The Offshore Wind Opportunity | Debating Solar Geoengineering | Larry Fink’s Blind Spot

Plus: The Most Unsustainable Olympics? Professor Martin Müller On Making Mega-Events More Sustainable

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Current Climate.

China has overtaken the U.K. as the world’s leader in offshore wind after adding nearly 17 gigawatts of capacity in 2021 alone, bringing its total capacity to 26 GW—nearly half the world’s total of 54 GW. It's a sign of the world’s most populous country’s increasing energy needs, which Beijing is currently largely supplying via fossil fuels, including coal, which contribute to China’s ranking as the world’s largest carbon emitter. Such a fast pace of renewable energy growth in the country offers hope for a less coal-dependent energy future.

Other stories I’m highlighting this week discuss scientific opposition to solar geoengineering, an offshore wind farm in the U.S. that could be a catalyst for further projects of that kind, and a critique of last week’s BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s open letter to CEO about stakeholder capitalism’s role in fighting climate change.

In Climate Talks, I talked to Martin Müller, associate professor at the University of Lausanne Institute of geography and sustainability, about whether events such as the forthcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing can ever be considered sustainable.

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The Progress

The U.S. Department of Interior has approved New York’s first offshore wind farm: a project by Ørsted Offshore North America and Eversource Energy. The two enterprises are entering the construction phase for South Fork Wind now that they have received the proper permits—a deal that will begin operations in 2023 and that could be a harbinger of things to come. 

Bentley, the Volkswagen-owned British luxury automaker known for its powerful 12-cylinder engines, will invest £2.5 billion ($3.4 billion) to convert to a fully electric product lineup by 2030, with the first EV expected by 2025. 

The Challenges

The National Weather Service’s Bay Area branch described last weekend’s fire activity in California as “stubborn” and “surreal,” suggesting that “the long term drought is acting like a chronic illness where even recent rains and cold winter [weather] isn’t helping to keep fires from developing.”

You may be aware that abandoned oil and gas wells continue to leak methane, but some sources leaking this potent greenhouse gas can be found much closer to home—inside the home, in fact, as Stanford University researchers observed that natural gas stoves also leak unburned methane into the air. 

Climate Talks

Coverage of the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics has so far touched on topics such as spyware, human rights violations, and also sustainability. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) says that “carbon neutrality”—ensuring that for every quantity of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, an equal amount is extracted from it—is a goal of Beijing 2022. A few days ahead of the Olympic cauldron’s lighting in the Chinese capital, I talked about it with human geographer Martin Müller, who has researched the sustainability of mega-events, and the Olympics specifically, in a recent paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

The Beijing Olympics’ use of fake snow has some concerned that these will be “the most unsustainable” Olympic Games ever. Is it too early to make that assessment?

It's too early to understand the impact and, in order to make such comparisons, we need some historical data that is actually comparative. There are many conflicting claims about the sustainability of the Olympic Games. The organizers claim that each iteration of the Olympic Games is the greenest ever. And then there are critics who say it is the most unsustainable ever. So how can we compare the sustainability of the Olympic Games? That was the origin of our study.

In Beijing’s case, it might be hard to [assess that] even in the future, because one issue that we are struggling with, in these Games in particular, is that of transparency. For Olympic Games [that took place in 1992], it was hard to find data, but we did it. For Beijing 2022, it's even harder.

What has the IOC done to keep track of the Games’ sustainability efforts?

They had an ambitious effort that started in earnest with Vancouver 2010 [that included] measuring many indicators at different points in time before and after the event. They only did it in Vancouver and in London. In Sochi, it was only done half-heartedly and then they stopped it with Rio. That was in principle a good effort [but] they stopped it for various reasons, one being that it was really almost too ambitious and too large a data gathering effort. Since then, [the process has] been replaced by whatever the host wants to report on, but that's not independent reporting in any sense.

In almost all of the other aspects of the Games there are very strict guidelines: what accommodation needs to look like, what catering needs to look like, what the Olympic Village needs to look like, and so on. And they don't have something for what is arguably the most important aspect of the Olympic Games.

The model you developed in your study indicates that the sustainability of the Olympics Games has decreased in the past decade compared to those held 20 or 30 years ago—which seems counterintuitive, considering enhanced awareness of the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit the impact of climate change. What are the factors that drive this trend?

Despite promises and even resolutions by the International Olympic Committee to limit or reduce the size of Games, they have been unable to do this. Many more people are coming to Olympic and Paralympic Games than 30 years ago, the venues have become larger, and also, they've not been able to reduce the number of new buildings in use—those are some of the main drivers that are behind this. Many of the interventions that have taken place are often very targeted small interventions that sell well as a spectacle, but there are few very fundamental interventions that have taken place for the Olympics. They're not rethinking the model itself.

Behind the International Olympic Committee, there are the international federations, the sports federations that decide on the rules for each sport. They also get to ask or specify the criteria for what the venues or the equipment look like, and part of that is also driving the increasing size and building of venues, because often they won't accept the compromises that come with existing venues, which perhaps are not top notch in every aspect. Also, income from ticketing goes directly to the organizing committee, and you also get more money from sponsors if you have exposure to more people. Those are some of the issues that make it difficult to really make meaningful change.

It sounds like mega-events need to drop the “mega” to be sustainable. But what about businesses whose income stream partially or entirely relies on organizing medium or large events, what should they keep in mind when thinking about the sustainability of what they’re planning?

If by dropping the mega you mean reducing the size, I think that is inevitable if there's any honest claim to sustainability, because essentially big infrastructure and flying around the world is not compatible—at least for the moment—with long term sustainability.

The trend needs to go towards smaller events that are more relevant to the communities that host them. Travel [is the component that] has the most impact and, in a way, it's the hardest to address. If you have an event that needs [to be reached via] air travel, then you're in the offsetting game, and of course, offsetting is problematic for many reasons. Digitalization could be one avenue, but we've also seen the limits of that during the current pandemic, because events simply have components that are very hard to digitalize.

There are no silver bullets here that I could propose. It’s about seriously reviewing many of the things that we take for granted. And that in itself also creates, economically speaking, winners and losers. There are vested interests, and the events continue as they are because some people are making lots of money out of it.

Martin Müller’s answers were condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.

On The Horizon

Brightline, the only private passenger rail company in the U.S., could begin construction of its high-speed train from Las Vegas by early 2023 as U.S. regulators start reviewing an extension that would connect it to a Los Angeles suburb.