A problem at the heart of Formula One
Max Verstappen wins again. The teams often whisk men and machines from one glamorous location to the next by air. All of that involves spewing out plenty of carbon.
As long as viewers or sponsors didn’t care—and for decades most did not—then the sport could race along unheeded. The trouble is that viewers are starting to want their games not to be guilty pleasures. Sports, increasingly, are expected to be green as well as fun.
F1 understands that it needs to change. Liberty Media, its American owner, said in 2019 that the competition would reach net-zero emissions by 2030. Back then, a promise to achieve something more than a decade later probably seemed easy to keep.
With the clock ticking, what are the chances? At first glance, not good. Any big sporting event produces lots of greenhouse gases. Football’s governing body, FIFA, said emissions from the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, including fans’ travel, amounted to 3.6m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e).
The real total may have been higher, but even FIFA’s sums put the World Cup’s emissions close to the annual total of the Democratic Republic of Congo. F1, which is much smaller and excludes fans’ travel from its calculation, says its emissions in 2019 were 257,000 tCO2e. The 5.5m people of the Central African Republic produce less.
Most sports pay lip-service to greenery, vowing to cut back on plastic straws or to switch old light bulbs for LEDs. F1 is doing more, and has made progress on developing a carbon-neutral fuel. One team, McLaren, is using recycled carbon fibre for parts of its cars’ bodywork.
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