If every vote matters in elections, win or lose, and if showing up for the importance stuff matters likewise —or actively refusing to and going on strike instead— does every buck we spend, and a lot of the other decisions we make in less ballyhooed daily life matter too? I’d say yes: economics (in narrowest to widest definition) underlies everything.
A few possibly-illuminating links, or maybe not… you decide.
Every fall hundreds of football teams ranging from high school to professional compete every weekend. This billion-dollar industry provides entertainment and jobs for thousands of people across the United States. Thousands of people gather to watch these games in stadiums or on television making it one of America’s most popular sports. Even though football provides so many benefits for our economy, it has major negative environmental impacts that are often overlooked.
Football events produce a large carbon footprint through the energy consumed, trash generated, and transportation.
Big events like the Super Bowl require a tremendous amount of energy to take place.
The 2012 Super Bowl hosted in Indianapolis used roughly 15,000 megawatt hours of electricity. This is enough electricity to power nearly 1,400 average homes in the United States for one year.
This amount of electricity consumed does not include the electricity used by the 111.3 million people that watched the game on television. This number increased to 115.5 million people for this past year’s Super Bowl. The excess amount of electricity used is not only for the Super Bowl. On a typical game day in Dallas, their AT&T Stadium consumes roughly more electricity than the whole country of Liberia….
The amount of trash generated at football events
is a major contributor in harming the environment. The Tennessee Volunteers [for example] generate over 21 tons of waste per game. With college football teams playing about 7 home games a season, that results in roughly 147 tons of waste generated per season for Tennessee.
And extrapolate to a professional game from that. … and to the whole US college season… and the whole professional football season...
[Another] major contributor to football’s carbon footprint is transportation.
During the football season teams are traveling across the United States weekly to play games covering thousands of miles throughout a season. The NFL has even hosted games in London and Mexico City ... to try to make the sport more popular worldwide. A majority of the traveling occurs by plane increasing the negative impact on the environment.
The players aren’t the only need for transportation because all their equipment must be transported as well.
Then you have to take into account all the fans that are traveling [to see their teams play]. To put in perspective, the Los Angeles Rams will travel approximately 37,072 total miles this 2016 season. The top 10 teams traveling the most miles in the NFL this season can be seen below…
Every major carmaker has plans for electric vehicles to cut greenhouse gas emissions, yet their manufacturers are making lithium-ion batteries with some of the most polluting grids in the world….
In 2011, while the rest of the movie crew was busy with setting up the day's shoot, 29-year-old Emellie O'Brien was busy digging through the garbage. As she was separating the recyclables from the compost items, another crew member came over and asked what she was doing. "This is my job," she said. "I'm here to oversee the show's environmental impact."
The other crew member had never heard of such a thing. "You must be some kind of earth angel," he said.
The movie never saw the light of day, but the name stuck. In 2013, O'Brien started Brooklyn-based Earth Angel, a company that helps ensure that movie and television productions are green by offering waste-management and sustainable-sourcing services, as well as environmental impact reports. O'Brien claims that productions that use her services can save from $60,000 to $100,000 on waste reduction. Earth Angel has worked on the sets of commercials, televisions series, and 13 feature films--including movies like Black Panther, The Post, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and Ghostbusters.
After graduating from NYU's Tisch School of Arts in 2011, O'Brien started working in the film industry and was "appalled" by the waste epidemic on set. She thought there must be a better way…..
And so on.
There are several sticky wickets to dealing with this whole topic, of course.
One is that essentially every one of these appetites, desires, gratifications, lusts and addictions has been INCULCATED into the Us for over 2 generations by the global commercialist interests that have made the Us the voraciously consumerist, satisfaction-obsessed, impulse-reactive (reactionary?) culture we are today.
For a little research, skim through The Neural Correlates of Passionate Engagement in Football Fans, 2017 (from Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ISSN: 1749-5016, 1749-5024) via medscape.com.
Then muse a little about Concussion —Will Smith’s 2015 film about Dr. Bennet Omalu pioneering the realities of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in professional football against massive pushback from the pro ball biz— being a “disappointment” at the box-office and snubbed by the Oscars. There are a lot of football fans (short for “fanatic”, yes, really) in Daily Kos, some of whom feverishly trashed a 2014 diary of mine suggesting that there are some good econopolitical reasons to rein back on that passion, with links to medical research included.
Clearly, along with everyone else, even progressives and liberals intent on fixing the world pretty much anywhere in it —and anyone anywhere who figures they’ve got discretionary flex in what income they got— nevertheless are not exempt from having been skinnered into obsessions that heavily influence us in how, said MotleyFool in May 2018, average Americans spend our paychecks. Or from national perspective, how MentalFloss found in Sept 2017 How Americans Spend (More of) Their Money on discretionary stuff:
Beer on Independence Day: $1 billion ⧫ Lighting up fireworks: $800 million ⧫ Lighting up (legal) marijuana: $6.9 billion (“Sales are projected to increase to $21.6 billion by the year 2021,” according to Arcview Market Research.) ⧫ Cheetos, Doritos, and Funyuns: $4.8 billion ⧫ Bags of ice: $3 billion ⧫ Aesthetic cosmetic surgery: $13.5 billion ⧫ Cosmetics: $62 billion ⧫ Getting nails done: $7.47 billion [PDF] ⧫ Getting hammered: $223.5 billion (According to the CDC, this includes the cost of lost workplace productivity, health care expenses, law enforcement expenses, and impaired driving accidents.) ⧫ Binging at food trucks: $2.7 billion ⧫ Chewing tobacco: $5.93 billion ⧫ Chew toys: $32 million ⧫ Purchasing fake degrees: ~$100 million (More than 100,000 fake degrees are sold each year in the U.S., at approximately $1000 a pop.) ⧫ Graduation gifts: $5.4 billion ⧫ Fantasy Football: $4.6 billion ⧫ Watching the Patriots-Falcons Super Bowl: $14.1 billion ⧫ Eating pizza: $32 billion ⧫ Eating supermarket hot dogs: $2.4 billion ⧫ Valentine’s Day jewelry: $4.3 billion ⧫ Lottery tickets: $80.55 billion ⧫ Going to bars: $20 billion [PDF] ⧫ Hitting nightclubs: $1.9 billion ⧫ Popping Himalayan Viagra: $5 to 11 billion (Yarsagumba, or caterpillar fungus, is a parasitic fungus made by ghost moth larvae. This “Himalayan Viagra” has been considered an aphrodisiac for millennia. Numbers reflect global sales.) ...
and that doesn’t even really count how much retail therapy/impulse buying we do, often without even noticing it.
Which leads to the second biggest sticky wicket:
Every place we may cut back discretionary spending on political or health or other basis, people’s jobs are affected.
Ordinary working stiffs just like us.
A big reason progressive econopolitical change is difficult is because it’s easier to tell our politicians “stop allowing this to go on” and “start getting that happening”, than it is to figure out how to build up healthy businesses, and get people job-trained to work in them, and get job-placement services geared up to make the connections between worker and hirer, and protect communities from economic collapse that destroys school systems, social services, neighborhoods, families, and lives, and exposes them all to toxic exploitation because of sheer survival desperation.
Few things make conservatives out of moderates or RWNJs out of conservatives —or make liberals into conservatives, skipping right past moderate what with not passing go and definitely collecting no $200— than to threaten their livelihood.
However, so few people are gonna give up their addictions and wastages at any noticeable rate merely for the sake of shrinking their REAL carbon-printfoot, or for protesting their favorite industry’s sluggish environmental improvement, that we probably don’t have to worry about dis-employing too many people in those industries.
Really the hardest question is what we’re willing to stop enriching with our few individual-wallet bucks, knowing we’ll see no personal impact for the better. ...isn’t it?