Forum / Flash Essay: FIFA vs. Technogenic Climate Change

• 
  strannikov

  Jul 31, 02:02pm

  A tedious exercise when taken up too frequently, informal flash essays dedicated to the advent of Technogenic Climate Change can assist in calibrating eyes one or two at a time to the planet’s tech-damaged climate with its tech-impaired meteorological and tech-altered hydrological systems.

  The argument and the logic in this essay are identical in spirit to those in an essay I posted in early April (four months ago, just as the 2026/2027 El Niño event was about to emerge): the names have changed here, since all are culpable in our various capacities.

  While I remain no science journalist, Technogenic Climate Change is one of the few “current events” I find compelling, and like many I was struck by the concurrence and sudden sequence of European heatwaves and wildfire outbreaks during and just after the World Cup play in North America.

  Because the essay is informal, few source citations are offered. The essay represents my English-to-English translation of what I have read, in terms of recent events reported from western Europe and within the limits of my provincial understanding of the sciences of climatology, meteorology, and oceanology (and of professional soccer). (LLMs consulted for fact-checking. Readers are asked to bear with formatting errors.)

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  FIFA versus Technogenic Climate Change

  Initial estimates place the total carbon footprint of FIFA 2026 celebrations at roughly eight million tons (8 Mt) of CO2 and CO2-equivalent emissions, accounting for international travel, accommodations, venue operations, broadcasting, logistics, food services, and associated infrastructure.

  FIFA 2026 offered the first World Cup in an expanded forty-eight-team format, entailing games played from 11 June to 19 July, a thirty-nine-day window. In order to scale national annual CO2 emissions to a thirty-nine-day period, we can say that FIFA 2026’s CO2 emissions roughly equaled those for the nations of Chile (annual ~77.8 Mt → ~8.3 Mt over thirty-nine days) and Czechia (annual ~77.7 Mt → ~8.3 Mt over thirty-nine days).

  Western Europe in May and June 2026 was treated to back-to-back heatwaves making life unpleasant for some and killing a few thousand citizens outright across the continent. France and England, among World Cup contenders, both sustained domestic heat stress in the May and June heatwaves. By the end of July, French statisticians estimated over fifty-seven hundred deaths domestically due to heat conditions, while in the aftermath of the World Cup series, wildfires began breaking out in France’s southwest. World Cup winner Spain, in addition to suffering through the May and June heatwaves, itself suffered from large wildfires once FIFA 2026 ended. Wildfires near Madrid have continued into the final week of July, as yet another massive (98,000+ hectares = over 242,000 acres) wildfire in France in the final week of July has entailed evacuation of roughly a quarter-million people.

  Recent events help contextualize global FIFA celebrations during what may prove to be the opening decades of Technogenic Climate Change (TCC understood as the cumulative climate outcomes semi-engineered through science, technology, and industrialization processes undertaken regionally and globally since c. 1750 CE).

  The next FIFA World Cup is scheduled for 2030. Before those festivities commence, the IPCC will have published most or all of its AR7 reports and summaries, consolidating measurements and data collected and analyzed since AR6 documents were published in or after August 2021.

  In late July 2026, no one can know what conclusions the completed AR7 assessment will have reached. While 2026 is proving to be yet another in a short string of exceptionally hot years, NOAA climatologists now anticipate that this year’s emerging El Niño will persist through the end of 2026 and likely through at least the first quarter of 2027: this suggests that however hot 2026 turns out to have been, the chances rise that 2027 will be even warmer and hotter (and, in places prone to wildfire, drier and more arid). 2028 and 2029 lurk in climate uncertainties for now. —so no, we cannot say with any certainty what climatic and meteorological conditions will ensue between now and 2030, regardless of how interim IPCC AR7 reports and summaries read when published in 2029.

  What we can legitimately ask in the interim is this: does a global FIFA celebration of such (or greater) magnitude justify another eight million tons (or more) of CO2 emissions in an era of successive record heat events and wildfire outbreaks? FIFA 2030’s emissions could well exceed those of 2026 unless substantive mitigation measures are adopted.

  Consider the sequence afresh. Avid European football enthusiasts awaiting FIFA matches in June and July were sweltering through the first heatwave in May. The June heatwave also was taken in stride as World Cup matches began, and so also the July wildfire outbreaks in both France and Spain were acknowledged with no great surprise.

  It is not the case that some eight million tons of CO2 emissions for FIFA 2026 events directly caused outbreaks of heatwaves and wildfires in France or Spain in May, June, or July 2026: rather, those thirty-nine-days of emissions themselves could well contribute to heatwaves and wildfire outbreaks years or decades from now and not necessarily within the borders of France or Spain. (CO2 emissions from wildfires, while chemically identical to those from fossil fuel combustion, are not equivalent in terms of the carbon cycle, particularly with respect to carbon absorption and sequestration.)

  Football enthusiasts worldwide may care to monitor local meteorological conditions and global climatological developments across the next four years in order to ask themselves—and to articulate for the rest of us who do not share their specific sports enthusiasm or fanaticism—whether FIFA celebrations in 2030 and beyond could justify spewing another eight million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. In terms of atmospheric CO2 persistence (as estimated by carbon-cycle models rather than measured directly): the IPCC has estimated that by 2056 almost half of FIFA 2026 emissions will remain in the atmosphere, while some thirty percent of FIFA 2026’s CO2 will remain in the atmosphere for centuries—with some twenty percent of FIFA 2026’s emissions persisting for millennia until removed through slow geological processes.

  Few would dispute that the World Cup enjoys global cultural, athletic, and even diplomatic value. Likewise, the basic argumentation offered above applies with equal rigor to interstate flocking to IMAX theaters for the latest in tech spectacles, to remote desert convocations of Burning Man festivals, to the entire calendar of NASCAR events, to practically all contemporary concert venues and all other sports franchises, teams, and events, to almost all international travel and much domestic travel, et cetera. It is not too early to question whether perceived emotivist benefits and economic activities continue to justify emissions on such scales as the climate consequences of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions begin to demonstrate. It is no longer too early to admit that the advent of Technogenic Climate Change begins to confront many of our cherished preferences and habits.

  Therefore, we can all hope that soccer fans and teams will weigh with due seriousness connections between ever-rising levels of carbon emissions and the incidence of drought, aridification, and wildfire outbreaks. These considerations alone should properly suffice: but if soccer fans cannot make a determination prior to FIFA 2030—and should worsening heat force matches to be postponed, relocated, or played under increasingly dangerous conditions—the sport may yet demonstrate clearly enough—if in spite of itself—the costs of continued high rates of greenhouse gas emissions.

  -END-

  (Parenthetic Postscript: I have not entered the dispute now raging between FIFA and UEFA over the status of World Cup matches in 2030. How or whether they settle matters before 2030 will contribute to levels of tournament CO2 and CO2e emissions in both the interim and beyond. I also note that the preliminary figure of 8 Mt CO2 emissions for FIFA 2026 already shows itself a conservative reckoning: CO2 emissions estimates released in the final week of July 2026 range from almost 9 Mt to almost 15 Mt, and the final reckoning could be higher.)

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