How Football Fans Can Solve Global Warming

Over the weekend we spent a couple of hours straining our eyes reading two lengthy New Yorker features on a laptop screen. One was by Malcolm Gladwell (you know, the “Tipping Point” guy with the funny hair-do) about how football causes hideous brains injuries the men who play it–even high school kids–leaving legions of wrecked lives behind. He argues that as a spectator sport with a propensity for destroying the lives of its participants, football is essentially similar to dogfighting. Except, of course, it’s human lives in the case of football. We had the Broncos-Patriots game on in the background, so there was no lack of immediacy (or irony) in the experience of reading it.

The other story was one we were re-reading, actually–a feature from last year by Elizabeth Kolbert about Samsø, a small island in Denmark where people became obsessed with the collective challenge of getting all their energy from renewable sources. “It became a kind of sport,” according to one local. The ten year exercise proved transformative:

When it began, in the late nineteen-nineties, the island’s forty-three hundred inhabitants had what might be described as a conventional attitude toward energy: as long as it continued to arrive, they weren’t much interested in it. Most Samsingers heated their houses with oil, which was brought in on tankers. They used electricity imported from the mainland via cable, much of which was generated by burning coal. As a result, each Samsinger put into the atmosphere, on average, nearly eleven tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Then, quite deliberately, the residents of the island set about changing this. They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using.

The residents of Samsø that I spoke to were clearly proud of their accomplishment. All the same, they insisted on their ordinariness. They were, they noted, not wealthy, nor were they especially well educated or idealistic. They weren’t even terribly adventuresome. “We are a conservative farming community” is how one Samsinger put it. “We are only normal people,” Tranberg told me. “We are not some special people.”

We Americans are also “only normal people.” Which is why like football — our monkey brains are designed to find it exciting when the biggest, strongest guys in the tribe vie for superiority. Our spin on this primitive thrill has evolved into a national institution and a big business. But it’s now becoming uncomfortably clear that this particular sport is really not a decent harnessing our collective energy. No more than dogfighting is, really–and as Gladwell points out, that was 19th century institution in the US.

Set side by side the stories raise a question: Is it possible to harness the vast collective energies that we apply to undertakings like football, and apply them to the preeminent challenge of the 21st century–namely, seeing to it that we don’t set off a climatic warming cycle so severe that, in scientist James Lovelock’s words, “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable”? Because, even though few people are impolite enough to put it in such stark terms, the scenario Lovelock describes is a temperature rise in the range of six degrees centigrade. And that’s a plausible or even likely outcome if we stay on our current emissions path. Even higher stakes than which big guy pummels the other unconsciousness, if you really start thinking about it in game terms…

Arguably, the two biggest challenges with respect to global warming are infrastructural and psychological. On the former element, Kolbert quotes a Swiss scientist who’s involved in a Samso-like project:

“The difficult thing is what I call ‘constructed Switzerland.’ You in America could call it ‘constructed United States’—the buildings and how they are built, but also where they are built and, even more important, the roads, the railroads, the lines for energy, for wastewater, and so on. It’s not economically feasible to replace everything in one instant.” But since infrastructure should in any case be replaced at the rate of roughly two per cent a year, if the project is approached incrementally, it’s a different task. Then, Imboden said, “it suddenly is feasible.”

Solving the infrastructural part of the challenge is indeed feasible–but not if we approach it like the national challenges of the past half century or so. It’s not like going to the moon, where 99.99% of people stand on the sidelines and cheer while hero scientists and astronauts do amazing things. No, it’s feasible probably only if and when it becomes a national sport. That is, we have to learn to get emotionally involved with this drama of figuring out how to live well on much less energy from much cleaner sources. As Samso shows, that can happen.  Who knows, it might even start displacing other games whose times have passed.