Fossil fuels are ruining everything I love
A lifelong sports fan wrestles with oil and gas partnerships.
Welcome to Planet Days, a green newsletter for a greenwashed Planet.
If you’re new to Planet Days, every other week I try to send out a three-minute read on what it means to go green — ranging from topics on air-conditioners and lawns to electric vehicles and trains.
I promise this is my last baseball post for a while, but I just couldn’t help myself.
What do you do when your first love and mortal enemy join forces?
It’s a predicament I faced this month when my beloved Cleveland Guardians announced its new corporate partnership. From now through 2026, the professional baseball franchise will have a new jersey patch that features the logo of Marathon Petroleum Corporation.
“With our Ohio roots and just over a decade separating our founding’s, we think it's fitting to be the Cleveland Guardians inaugural jersey patch sponsor,” said Marathon’s Senior Vice President Brian Partee. “While we can both be proud of our past, it’s the future we’re most excited about, including this partnership.”
Partee, however, fails to acknowledge the downsides of that future, one that Marathon has helped usher in. By extracting, refining, and exporting oil, Marathon contributed to the release of countless tons of greenhouse gasses, warming the Planet and making this month’s record heat waves more frequent and intense.
And by displaying the company prominently on a jersey, the Guardians give Marathon a stamp of approval, normalizing its product and how it conducts business.
That conducting of business is key. Energy companies like Marathon have largely misled the general public about the grim reality of their product, pulling out every trick in the book to continue oil and gas’s reign.
Despite these tactics, we have still mostly taken seriously Big Oil’s commitment to clean energy. Perhaps it’s our human flaw to want to give second chances and the benefit of the doubt, however undeserved. But now, as the Planet roasts and burns and the industry continues to drag its feet, we’re starting to realize our mistake.
“I have for years held space for the oil and gas industry to finally wake up and stand up to its critical responsibility in history,” Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who brokered the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, wrote this month in Al Jazeera. “But what the industry is doing with its unprecedented profits over the past 12 months has changed my mind.”
In the last year, Big Oil raked in nearly $200 billion in record profits. Instead of reinvesting those dollars into renewable energy, however, these companies directed much of that money to its shareholders.
On the surface that makes sense: A profit-seeking company cares about its shareholders more than anything else. But the problem is that Big Oil continually touts green energy investments, without putting its money where its mouth is.
The Guardian just reported that this year alone BP scaled back its emissions goal, ExxonMobil slashed funding from a significant low-carbon project, and Shell failed to increase investments into renewables (despite all but saying it would).
Big Oil is not the only problem, though. It's this capitalistic system where spoils (in this case, sponsorships) go to the highest bidder, regardless of moral code. How do you think the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX got the naming rights to Miami Heat’s arena?
I’ll end with an anecdote about another team I love, the Cleveland Browns.
For years, the Browns’ stadium bore the name of FirstEnergy, a utility company that literally orchestrated a bribery-and-kickback scheme that bailed out dying coal plants and gutted clean energy standards.
In 2022, several years after the scandal was first unearthed, the Cleveland City Council passed a resolution calling for FirstEnergy to relinquish its stadium naming rights. A year later, the Browns finally ended its stadium deal with the company, though failed to acknowledge any reason.
It’s great that the stadium is no longer named after a dirty and crooked utility company. But it also sucks that it took over three years and “one of the most egregious anti-climate corruption cases of the decade” to get there.
As fellow Ohioans Rascal Flatts would say, that is What Hurts the Most.
SMH! Very bad choice on their behalf, hopefully you can other fans can voice their concern but unfortunately when it comes to money people lose a lot of their morals.