I am Anti-Wildfire!

Do wildfires emit greenhouse gases? You bet they do - and how.

According to the American Forest Resource Council, on average, one acre of burned land emits six tons of CO2 and other GHGs. Depending on the fire's severity and the type of brush, up to 100 tons of CO2 can be released into the atmosphere. This figure does not include emissions from fire suppressants. Somewhere in the area of 400,000 acres of California land have burned so far. That equals 2,400,000 TONS of GHGs emitted into the atmosphere in just the last 7 days.

I wondered how this figure compared to CO2 emissions from vehicles. According to the EPA, on their subversively complicated "Emission Facts: GHG Emissions from a Typical Passenger Vehicle" page:

127,721,000 is the number of cars on the road in the United States.
73,775,000 is the number of light trucks on the road in the United States.

This is a total of 201,496,000 cars and light trucks in the US. Multiplying that by 5.2 metric tons (the average used by the EPA of one vehicle's annual CO2 emissions) =

1,047,779,200 metric tons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere by cars and light trucks in the United States annually.

So, it does appear to me that wildfires are a significant source of CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases and the AFMC and tap-happy Senator Craig would agree on the specific point that forest fire management policy changes are necessary to any meaningful climate change policy. This is a pretty new concept to me because I never read about forest fire management as an important facet of global climate change policy. Even so, the fact that wildfires emit CO2 is hardly an excuse to not bother reducing our own CO2 emissions as Senator Craig has obliquely suggested. It's everyone's problem Senator, not just the trees'.

Just Call Him the Green Downer

Please please please just don't blame the messenger. This article in The Green Lantern in Slate is the Debbie Downer of all environmental articles if you're a sports fan. TGL has done the modeling and extrapolating math for us, so all I need do is regurgitate it and cut to the chase. I didn't double check any stats or math so take that for what its worth. I take it as gospel.) So according to the Green Lantern, how bad are sports for the environment and which are the worst?

Hosting a home game at your average NFL stadium pumps roughly 47.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, or about 1.35 pounds per attending fan. (Small garbanzos when you consider that the average citizen's daily carbon footprint is 64.81 pounds per day.) However, 47.6 metric tons is nothing compared to what it takes to get all those fans to and from the stadium - a whopping 232.84 metric tons under the most conservative of estimates! So it seems that the standard by which we should measure a sport's impact on the environment is not the greeness of the facility itself but the total number of attendees and how often they travel.

At least football is a short season, with the average stadium hosting 8 games per season. Baseball on the other hand, is far dirtier with the average stadium hosting 81 games every season, and fans schlepping by plane, train but mostly automobile to cheer on the home team at every game. MLB draws an average 2.66 million fans per stadium each season, compared to the NFL's 542,000 fans per stadium. Owch!

Both the NHL and NBA are greener by virtue of the fact that they have shorter seasons and are played indoors in smaller arenas, though obviously it takes far less energy to keep up a hardwood floor than an ice rink. The NBA draws an average 728,037 fans per club per season. The NHL draws 678,440 fans per club per season.

"(The Lantern didn't even bother to crunch the numbers for NASCAR; any sport that centers around vehicles that get four to six miles per gallon is obviously pretty far from green.)" This might be the most startling fact in the entire article (ahead of "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.") FOUR TO SIX MILES PER GALLON??????

So what's a sports fan with an environmental conscience supposed to do? How can we spectate guilt-free now that we know? The leagues themselves are listening to the public and trying to go greener with recycling programs and solar powered what not, but it appears that fan transportation ought to be the primary focus if leagues are serious about reducing the sport's impact on carbon emissions. Maybe there's an environmental group out there who will start organizing natural gas powered party buses to and from sporting events. This would minimize environmental impact and maximize tailgating so its a win for everyone! It might also get a drunken driver or two off the freeways. Another idea is for leagues to work together with public transportation to get the majority of fans to use mass transit. Or take the Fenway Park approach and have so little parking available that the public has to use public transportation.

And maybe NASCAR can race kangaroos or wheelbarrows instead of cars. Just a thought.