We must temper our sport obsession to counter climate change

-       Robert McLean

Australia’s obsession with sport, be it surfing or one of many football codes, must be tempered if we are to stand any chance of countering climate change.

Australia is a physically big country and on most days, and particularly on the weekends, thousands of people are travelling, mostly by plane, to all corners of the nation in pursuit of their favoured sport.

Recently a leading U.S. climate scientist encouraged his counterparts to fly less is they were to “walk their talk” as they went about their business of encouraging others to play their part in helping the world reduce its carbon dioxide emissions.

So, here we are at a point where we have almost exhausted the  world’s carbon budget (the amount of carbon we can emit if we are to have any chance of staying two degrees below pre-industrial temperatures) and having already seriously encroached on that number, it seems we have only until early 2035 before we crush the 840 gigatonne budget.

Flying around Australia, and the world, to pursue what is little more than a pastime, is careless, irresponsible, and a blatant example of how we continue to indulge in and prioritize energy-rich private wants ahead of public needs.

In what is just one more example of how we have had our morals, values, and respect for all the species who share our Earth seriously corrupted, the Australian Football League (AFL), with the endorsement of our Prime Minster, Malcolm Turnbull, is planning a football match in China, played for premiership points that, in economic terms alone, will cost a huge amount (a friend suggested $30 million).

That raw economic cost is just the tip of the iceberg and if we were to add the environmental costs (and they can be measured in dollars), it simply becomes indefensible, just as is the case for some many other “travelling” sports, among them the racing of motor vehicles.

Governments have, for centuries, given the masses “circuses and cake” and sport being of the former, and as  serious and intense as it  might well be, it is nothing more than a distraction, causing people to imagine it as the “main game” when the “big dance” is really somewhere else and something else – it is humans waltzing the world into a difficult position; a position from which it will have difficulty in recovering.

The consuming idea that we expand our sports has broad support and yet takes no account of the social, economic, or environmental costs and ignores what will be needed if we are to endure the unfolding catastrophic climate changes.

Rather than spend richly on the extrovert’s view of the expansion and commodifying of sport, we should be taking a more introverted view and turning inward to spend with equal enthusiasm on building up, reinforcing, and creating local, on the ground sporting networks and resources that will strengthen local communities and bind them in a way that will hopefully make them impervious to the certain assaults that will erupt as our climate continues to change.