Interesting food for thought in a recent piece in Slate titled Are the Yankees bad for the environment?

Actually, Slate's conclusion is much the same one I came to in my LOTOJA post a little over a month ago: the vehicles we use to get to and from events — whether as participants or spectators — likely have a greater impact on global warming than all the energy required to operate a sports venue.

A football stadium that seats approximately 78,000 fans, for example, will consume about 65,000 kilowatt hours of electricity and 35,000 cubic feet of natural gas on game day. In the United States, where roughly half of our electricity still comes from coal, each kilowatt hour of electricity produces an average of 1.55 pounds of carbon dioxide. Natural gas is cleaner per unit: Each cubic foot emits 0.12 pounds of carbon dioxide. Putting on a big-time pigskin game thus ends up pumping around 47.6 metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere—or just 1.35 pounds per fan. For comparison's sake, the average American's carbon footprint is 64.81 pounds per day.

So, gathering 78,000 fans in one relatively compact place seems pretty efficient, right? But keep in mind that a stadium of that size will have something like 19,000 parking spaces. Let's be charitable and assume that all the fans drive standard cars and light trucks, which get an average of 21 miles per gallon. Let's also assume (again, very charitably) that each fan travels 29 miles round trip from home to game, the same distance as the average American's daily commute.

Using the standard Energy Information Administration figure of 19.564 pounds of carbon emitted per gallon of gas, then, all those cars spew out 232.84 metric tons of carbon dioxide. And that's surely a massive underestimation, given that many fans drive hundreds of miles in tailgate-ready RVs to pull for their beloved team.

So what's my point? Simple: the things we do everyday provide the best starting place for changing behavior and lessening our impact. Enjoy the occasional big event … as long as you are conscientious about regularly reducing your carbon footprint.

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