Flying to Football Games: Climate Change?

[nsr]

I expect that any efforts by individuals to reduce climate change/carbon footprint etc are completely meaningless as long as big corporations and less than pleasant governments (that'd be all of them, I suppose) don't give a toss what happens beyond the next financial year or the next election.

[doulikefish]

Just offset any flying to football matches by killing a cow.Thats one less of them farting a hole in the ozone layer to balance it up

[Barry Ferguson's Hat]

If you ignore something for long enough it will go away.

[lanky_ffc]

On ‎17‎/‎10‎/‎2018 at 15:46, nsr said:

I expect that any efforts by individuals to reduce climate change/carbon footprint etc are completely meaningless as long as big corporations and less than pleasant governments (that'd be all of them, I suppose) don't give a toss what happens beyond the next financial year or the next election.

Whilst that is true, those companies would argue that there is still an onus on us as individuals as they're only meeting demand for their products.

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change

 

Can't really disagree with the OP's logic, but where do you draw the line? Should we never go on holiday or travel with work? Complex issue which we seem to just be kicking the can down the road with.

Edited October 19, 2018 by lanky_ffc

[7-2]

On 17/10/2018 at 15:46, nsr said:

I expect that any efforts by individuals to reduce climate change/carbon footprint etc are completely meaningless as long as big corporations and less than pleasant governments (that'd be all of them, I suppose) don't give a toss what happens beyond the next financial year or the next election.

How about the likes of UEFA and FIFA introducing ridiculous tournaments and expanding existing ones to help coin it in and justify their expense account and existence grow the game. The green aspect of the increasing amount of international travel created is never mentioned funnily enough. 

[Rab B Nesbit]

1 hour ago, 7-2 said:

How about the likes of UEFA and FIFA introducing ridiculous tournaments and expanding existing ones to help coin it in and justify their expense account and existence grow the game. The green aspect of the increasing amount of international travel created is never mentioned funnily enough. 

You are example to all of us 7-2. Stay at home on the sofa watching Jeff and Merse ...  

[Honest_Man#1]

2 hours ago, Rab B Nesbit said:

You are example to all of us 7-2. Stay at home on the sofa watching Jeff and Merse ...  

Crazy how wound up you get with people watching football on TV. Blood pressure must be through the roof.

[vikingTON]

You were all over the Junior forums last season before your team went Senior complaining that you didnt want them to move as you didnt want to pay £18 to get into a game especially if it was the mythical "Tuesday night in Elgin" and here you are 5 months later complaining about people flying to games.
You come across as a complete fud to be honest.

I disagree. He’s laughably self-righteous as well as being a complete fud.

[Rab B Nesbit]

3 hours ago, Honest_Man#1 said:

Crazy how wound up you get with people watching football on TV. Blood pressure must be through the roof.

Come on HM you know by now I don’t get my blood pressure up about anything ...  

[Miguel Sanchez]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/46205331

But that's just one way in which Flamini believes players can have an influence not only on the pitch, but "off it too".

"We have responsibility to the fans and the younger generation who are following us on social media, so it's important for us to stand up for causes which are important," Flamini told BBC Radio 5 live's Afternoon Edition.

"Football players are more than athletes. They are also people who can influence the next generation and it is a necessity for us to take the lead."

 

[GordonS]

On 17/10/2018 at 15:46, nsr said:

I expect that any efforts by individuals to reduce climate change/carbon footprint etc are completely meaningless as long as big corporations and less than pleasant governments (that'd be all of them, I suppose) don't give a toss what happens beyond the next financial year or the next election.

If the wealthiest 10% of people in the world lived the same lifestyle as the average European - which is a pretty good lifestyle - it would reduce annual GHG emissions by one third.

The biggest sources of emissions are transport (most of which is individuals moving around), agriculture (individual food choices) and energy (most of which is electricity, heating and cooking for domestic use).

It would be nice if we could just get a few corporations to cut their emission, but most of it is individual.

On 17/10/2018 at 19:18, doulikefish said:

Just offset any flying to football matches by killing a cow.Thats one less of them farting a hole in the ozone layer to balance it up

Cows don't fart GHGs. They burp them. (FWIW this wee factoid is often a good proxy for how much someone knows about climate change.)

And one person's transatlantic return flight produces as much GHG emissions as a year of average meat consumption. 

[GordonS]

On 19/10/2018 at 11:23, lanky_ffc said:

Whilst that is true, those companies would argue that there is still an onus on us as individuals as they're only meeting demand for their products.

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change

 

Can't really disagree with the OP's logic, but where do you draw the line? Should we never go on holiday or travel with work? Complex issue which we seem to just be kicking the can down the road with.

You draw the line at the amount of emissions required to meet the Paris agreement, for starters.

Flying for work is mostly unnecessary. It gets talked up but the truth is most business flights are an ego trip. 

Yes, it affects holidays. Tourism is responsible for about 8% of global emissions, a big chunk of that is flights, and is growing at 5% per year. You can't have every family flying abroad every year and not f**k up the planet. Those Californian wildfires? That's just scratching the surface of what we'll see in a few decades' time.  A return flight between London and New York is equivalent to 3-4 months of emissions by the average person in the UK, which is already about three times too high . Flying is an appallingly harmful activity, there's no way to benefit from renewable energy and it puts the emissions right where you don't want them. It's a tough fact and a lot of folk around here don't want to know, but it's 100% true no matter how anybody feels about it.

The issues aren't all that complex. The more GHGs we put into the atmosphere, the worse the consequences. 

[Jason King]

I assume Gordon only cycles to games then or plants 500 trees every time he goes in the car to Elgin on a Tuesday night.

[Northboy]

Someone has just told me that breathing creates vast amounts of CO₂.  As a committed environmentalist I think we need to consider banning it.

[banana]

6 hours ago, Northboy said:

Someone has just told me that breathing creates vast amounts of CO₂.  As a committed environmentalist I think we need to consider banning it.

You jest, but this is the same line of thinking from a sect of 'Progressive' lunatics who are against humans 'breeding'.

They are of course a subset of  those 'Progressive' handwringers who despise humanity and existence.

[The Nightfly]

.

[Barry Ferguson's Hat]

The ultimate irony being that 'Bergkamp' means 'Aeroplane' in Dutch.

[Monkey Tennis]

On 15/11/2018 at 20:15, banana said:

You jest, but this is the same line of thinking from a sect of 'Progressive' lunatics who are against humans 'breeding'.

I definitely think some humans shouldn't breed.

[Roker Rover]

On 10/16/2018 at 18:04, GordonS said:

This might go down like a lead ballon, but here goes anyway. Bear with me, it is about football.

An IPCC report a couple of weeks ago set out what would be required to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees, and what the differences would be between warming at that level and 2 degrees. It’s pretty stark reading. What’s worse, we’re nowhere near on course for holding at even 2 degrees - we’re heading for 4 degrees or worse by the end of the century.

That may seem a long way away, but it’s within the expected lifetimes of kids being born in Scotland today. They’re looking at living in a world in which the current homes of 150 million people are under water. Goodbye southern Florida, farewell Mekong delta, adios Bangladesh. Wide swathes of Africa and the Middle East will be uninhabitable, dislocating hundreds of millions of people. Famine will be regular, threatening the lives of billions. Conditions at home will be much less severe, though we’re still looking at regular floods and droughts, and more damaging storms.

One of the most harmful activities we do that produces CO2 is fly. You can go vegan, instal solar panels, get cavity wall insulation, cycle to work, recycle all your waste, stop buying shit from China, all that stuff, but if you fly regularly or far you’re still contributing significantly to the growth in atmospheric CO2 that is causing climate change.

So should we still be flying to the other side of the continent for a game of football?

Scotland took about 3,000 fans to the game in Slovenia last year. Based on return flights from Edinburgh to Ljubljana via London, that’s over 1,100 tons of CO2. In a car that gets 50 mpg it’s the equivalent of driving 5.7 million miles.

There were 80,000 Celtic fans in Seville for the UEFA Cup final in 2003 - there really were, I was one of them and there were easily as many without tickets as with. Assuming direct flights from Glasgow that’s 52,800 tons of CO2. According to the UK government calculation of the social cost of carbon - an estimate of the cost of the damage - that caused about £1 million of harm.

There were 125 Champions League matches last season, 205 Europa League matches and there are about 150 competitive internationals on average each year in Europe. That’s 480 matches. Assuming a very, very conservative average of 500 travelling fans that’s 240,000 return trips. What would be the average flight distance, 2,000 kilometres? That would be 960 million flight kilometres. That’s a looooot of carbon, it doesn't include other internationals like the Nations League and I think I’m pitching on the low side

More than half of the flights I’ve taken as an adult have been for sport. Dublin three times, Bologna twice, Cardiff, Barcelona, Malaga, Frankfurt, Geneva and Rome. I think I need to chuck it.

You might not be willing to make any changes to prevent catastrophic climate change, and if so, thanks for reading this far. But if we think climate change is our responsibility, isn’t flying for football games one of the first things we stop doing? Climate change is being caused by people in rich countries, like us. If the wealthiest 10% in the world - which includes a lot of the people reading this - reduced their emissions to that of the average European, greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by a third overnight.

People don’t like to hear this stuff, but facts are facts whether they’re welcome or not and the facts are unarguable. What are we willing to sacrifice to prevent destroying the lives of hundreds of millions of people and doing untold damage to the natural environment?

Its all well and good using football as the reason but what about say a music concert? My Daughter and thousands of others flew to Croatia and Madrid for those. Plus if people did not go away to football matches they would probably use the cash to go on a city break or an extra holiday instead. Add to this that people going away for a football match will me minuscule compared to pepol flying for holidays and business then its a pretty pointless argument.

Are you suggesting we ban the world cup, the Euros and the Champions league on environmental grounds?

If you really want to reduce emissions from air travel then tell everyone to stop having a summer holiday.

PS - I have  personally visited six countries so far this calendar year and have seen football matches in 4 of them and I don't feel overly guilty. The football was not really the main purpose of my visits.

Edited November 18, 2018 by Roker Rover

[GordonS]

24 minutes ago, Roker Rover said:

Its all well and good using football as the reason but what about say a music concert?

This is a football forum, not a music forum. So that would be whataboutery.

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Add to this that people going away for a football match will me minuscule compared to pepol flying for holidays and business then its a pretty pointless argument.

 

That's a standard reaction against doing anything that benefits the environment - it's small, so why bother. It's not really an argument.

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Are you suggesting we ban the world cup, the Euros and the Champions league on environmental grounds?

 

<<sigh>>

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If you really want to reduce emissions from air travel then tell everyone to stop having a summer holiday.

 

Point me in the direction of a forum for summer holidays and I'll get right on it.

It's also standard deflection; "don't pay any attention to what I'm doing, look at that guy over there!"

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PS - I have  personally visited six countries so far this calendar year and have seen football matches in 4 of them and I don't feel overly guilty.

Good for you. There's probably over 500 people dead in California because of a wildfire. The wildfire season in California is 84 days longer than it was in the 1970s, and rainfall, which has been reducing since then too, was only a fifth of the average this autumn. That's the prime cause of this disaster. We all contributed towards that. And it's a mere aperitif for what's coming next.

You can feel however you like about the consequences of your choices, I just hope you are aware of them.