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Boiling Point
ICYMI: “Baseball, Brought to you by Oil and Gas”
00:24:09
Bill McKibben is an acclaimed environmental activist and journalist, and the co-founder of 350.org. As spring training gets underway, Sammy and Bill discuss fossil fuel advertising at Dodger Stadium, and how oil and gas industry “sportswashing” is taking advantage of America’s national pastime.
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- [00:01]
Bill McKibben
This is an LA Times Studios podcast.
- [00:07]
Mary Knoff
Hi listeners, my name is Mary Knoff, along with Jonathan Shiflett. I'm one of the producers of Boiling Point. In case you missed last week's episode, Sammy Roth has moved on from the LA Times to start a new chapter in his already very impressive reporting career. We'll be airing a few of our favorite episodes from earlier this year over the next couple of weeks. And then on October 30th, we're launching Smoglandia, a six part series about the history of smog in Los Angeles, hosted by Pat Morrison and produced by the Boiling Point team. Today's episode is one that I love. It's called Baseball, brought to you by Oil and Gas. It's about how fossil fuel companies have managed to infiltrate America's favorite pastime by advertising during home runs and sponsoring certain games. Felt appropriate since the World Series is right around the corner later this month. Hope you enjoy.
- [00:55]
Sammy Roth
From the Los Angeles Times, I'm Sammy Roth. This is Boiling Point. Sometimes writing about climate change means interviewing scientists about a heat wave. Sometimes it means visiting solar farms in the desert or investigating oil companies. Sometimes it means showing up early to a Dodgers game.
- [01:31]
Bill McKibben
Ask the Dodgers to stop using 76 as their sponsor.
- [01:35]
Sammy Roth
As far as I know, this was the first time climate activists had ever protested an American sports team over a fossil fuel industry sponsor.
- [01:44]
Bill McKibben
We are here today to send the.
- [01:46]
Sammy Roth
LA Dodger owners a petition wirelessly.
- [01:49]
Bill McKibben
In a little bit, I'm gonna wait for the motorcyclist to pass.
- [01:54]
Sammy Roth
That was climate activist Zan Dubin standing on a street corner just outside Dodger Stadium last fall as fans drove past on their way to the ballpark. Dubin and supporters of the Sierra Club Angeles chapter urged Dodgers owner Mark Walter to end a longtime advertising partnership with oil giant Phillips 66. They trumpeted a petition with more than 20,000 signatures calling for the team to, quote, stop giving cover to producers of climate chaos. The most powerful voice at the protest belonged to Alicia Rivera, an organizer with Communities for a better environment. That Phyllis 66 is contributing to the pollution and the degradation of our environment. Rivera noted that five oil refineries are clustered in LA County's South Bay and that one of the highly polluting facilities is owned by, you guessed it, Phillips 66. If you've been to Dodger Stadium, you've probably seen the giant orange and blue 76 gasoline ads all over the stadium. Phillips 66 is the company behind 76. Climate activists want to see the ads go away forever. But would that really make a difference in the fight against climate change? Or are these protesters wasting their time? Oh, hey, Bill, how you doing? Good to see you. Bill McKibben is a contributing writer at the New Yorker and co founder of 350. Org. He's one of America's leading environmental writers and activists. Let's hear what he thinks. Bill, thank you very much for being with us on the Boiling Point podcast.
- [03:34]
Bill McKibben
Samy, what a pleasure to get to join you.
- [03:37]
Sammy Roth
I think that probably a lot of folks listening to this will know your work. You helped lead the opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline. You've been arrested in climate protest at the White House, at various banks that fund fossil fuel projects. You've written a number of books over the years. Why is it, given all that you've done, I'm so curious that you decided that this cause of trying to get 76 to stop advertising with the Dodgers. Why is that something that you wanted to attach your name to and to promote? I'm so curious, why that?
- [04:12]
Bill McKibben
Well, a bunch of reasons. One, I'm a sports fan, a baseball fan, so I take seriously the role of sports in our culture and understand its importance. But two, it makes me angry to watch the fossil fuel industry, which we know for now four decades, has been carrying out a massive campaign of disinformation and obfuscation to keep us from taking action on the most serious problem our species has ever faced. To see them attempt to paper that over and cover it up by pretending to be engaged in the good things in this world, art and music and sports, sponsoring the festivals and the museums and the ball games, that just annoys the hell out of me. And third, the Dodgers in particular. This is a team with a proud history back here on the East Coast. It takes its name from the people dodging the trams and subway cars or streetcars of New York City. And the idea that it's been co opted by the fossil fuel gang is just a little too much for me.
- [05:34]
Sammy Roth
For those who don't know the history, the Dodgers, before playing in Los Angeles, they got their start in Brooklyn and literally the name the Dodgers, it was people trying to get to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and they had to get out of the way of the streetcars going by to get to to Ebbets Field. My grandfather grew up in New York rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers and I don't know if he literally ever had to dodge the streetcars, but that's the story that people had to do that. And you mentioned art and music and other institutions and I want to circle Back to that and different types of fossil fuel industry campaigns. But talk more specifically about baseball and about the Dodgers here. I'm a big sports fan, too. Dodgers baseball and the Dodgers in particular. I'm actually wearing one of my Dodger shirts now as we're talking, as I frequently do, as I've written about this, and this effort to get Phillips 66, the company with the 76 gasoline chain that has been a sponsor of the Dodgers, the most prominent sponsor ever since Dodger Stadium opened. As they've written about this campaign, one of the common responses I've gotten is, well, why does this matter? Who cares what the billboards are at Dodger Stadium? Even from people, some of them, who care about climate change. People have asked me, well, what does it make a difference what the billboards say at Dodger Stadium? Go focus on passing policy or getting politicians have elected mind. Does it matter?
- [06:49]
Bill McKibben
Well, I mean, if you were doing it, if any of us were doing it to the exclusion of getting policies passed and working in elections and things, that wouldn't make sense. But you've been covering every bit of policy going through Sacramento that there could possibly be for years with a finer lens than anybody else. And I've obviously been working on all these sort of things for years. It's just that this is a part of the fight, the effort to greenwash, or I guess in this case you'd sort of say sports wash. Climate change is just one more facet of this kind of dismal story through which we're living. Let's remember the outlines of that story. I mean, I wrote the first book about what we now call climate change, what we then called the greenhouse effect, back in 1989. It was called the End of Nature. Cheerful title. And I wrote it because we were getting clear and unambiguous warnings from the scientific community about what was going to happen if we didn't stop burning fossil fuel. And right there at the start, it felt like we were going to take this seriously. The Republican President of the United States, George H.W. bush, said, we will fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect. A year or so later, the fossil fuel industry banded together to build this architecture of deceit and denial that's kept us locked for 30 years in a completely sterile debate about whether or not global warming was real.
- [08:24]
Sammy Roth
For those who have heard the expression Exxon New that's what you're talking about.
- [08:27]
Bill McKibben
This is what we're talking about. Exxon was the biggest company in the world then. They had great teams of scientists and Their product was carbon. So of course they were going to find out what was going on and they did. Their scientists predicted with stunning accuracy what the temperature would be in 2020. They were spot on. And as the Times reported many years ago, Exxon executives believed they're scientists and started building their drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming. But they didn't tell the rest of us. Instead they told this lie. And that's cost us the thing we needed most dearly. Time. We're now at a point where, where climate denial of the classic sort is hard. I mean Donald Trump maintains it, but beyond that it's difficult because there have been too many fires and too many floods. Now I think really we're engaged in what you might call solutions denial. What the fossil fuel industry would like you to believe now is that we can't do anything about this. It's going to take decades, whatever. Despite the fact that as California has proved in the last year, you can day after day after day generate 100% of the electricity that you need from the sun and the wind and water.
- [09:47]
Sammy Roth
I was just looking up the statistics the other day. Even during the parts of the year where there's not as much sun or electricity, demand is higher. I mean in 2023 it was close to 60% of California's electricity came from climate friendly sources over the course of the entire year. And I think what just about 25% of new vehicle sales in California were zero emission, mostly plug in hybrid or battery electric vehicles. I those are pretty big numbers.
- [10:12]
Bill McKibben
The number that gets me and that I'm sure gets the fossil fuel industry too. Mark Jacobson at Stanford told me at the end of the summer, that year, on year from 2023 to 2024, California was using about 30% less natural gas to generate electricity than they had just a year before. That's a big enough number to actually take a bite out of our climate future if we were able to spread it. And that's the last thing the fossil fuel industry want. Their job is to slow things down. It's why they spent money on the Trump campaign and it's why they spend money at Dodger Stadium at Chavez Ravine too.
- [10:51]
Sammy Roth
Go into that deeper. I mean those big 76 signs above the scoreboard and all of these other teams, I mean the Cleveland Guardians have Marathon Petroleum patches on their jerseys and there's other teams that have these advertisements, you know, plastered across their stadiums. What is the effect of that? I mean, why, I mean why are they Bothering to spend that money, what does it do to our collective psyche?
- [11:13]
Bill McKibben
I guess, I mean, if you think about most advertising, especially for things like oil and gas, it's not touting the benefits of the product. Everybody knows gasoline's gasoline. I mean, we know what it does. It's all the same. Whatever. It's trying to just continually build this idea that it's necessary, that it's a key part, a normal part of the world around us instead of what it really is now, which is the most dangerous thing Earth. So that goal, to identify with the things that we love is just an effort to appeal to some deep part of our brain. So it should end. I mean, I. Look, I'm as nostalgic as anybody else I grew up in. I'm a Red Sox fan. And there's the giant Sitco sign that hangs over Fenway park, greatest ballpark in the world.
- [12:16]
Sammy Roth
I'm not sure I'd agree with that statement, but continue.
- [12:19]
Bill McKibben
It's, you know, to reach his own. And. And, you know, I. So I understand the kind of nostalgic connection that people feel to all these things, but really, these are now symbols of a kind of gross destruction. And it's high time just for our own sanity, if nothing else, that we rid ourselves of them in the places where we go to forget the world a little bit. Remember, baseball is, I think, particularly a particular case here because I never had much money as a kid. I grew up in what we called the bleachers in Fenway park has some of the most famous bleachers that there are. You sit on a bench and you used to pay a couple of bucks for a seat there in the bleachers. More than a couple of bucks now.
- [13:24]
Sammy Roth
Yeah. Especially above the Green Monster.
- [13:29]
Bill McKibben
To right field. From the Green Monster.
- [13:31]
Sammy Roth
Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.
- [13:34]
Bill McKibben
We called them the bleachers because you bleached yourself out in the sun. There was no overhang, no protection. You were just out there drinking beer and sitting in the sun, which was fun. It's less fun when the temperature starts hitting in Boston, 95, or in California when the temperature starts hitting 105 or 110 or 115 or whatever the hell it's going to hit. Now. I can't even imagine.
- [14:05]
Sammy Roth
I mean, this idea that the oil and gas companies, the fossil fuel companies are using sports and using these kind of beloved venues, and, I mean, you mentioned museums and art earlier and these different sort of beloved institutions to spread their sort of gospel into American life. That's not a new concept, is it? Right because there's a history here with tobacco as well.
- [14:27]
Bill McKibben
Yes, absolutely. NASCAR used to be the Winston cup, right? I mean, it used to be cigarettes all the time. And finally we decided we weren't going to do that anymore.
- [14:41]
Sammy Roth
You know, Bill, for a young person like me, it seems so obvious that we don't have tobacco advertising. I mean, I've never had to put up with looking at that. How did that come about? I mean. I mean, how did we even manage that one?
- [14:53]
Bill McKibben
Well, let's just take the sports example that comes closest to mind, which was stock car racing. NASCAR leased its racing rights to RJ Reynolds, who had Winston cigarettes until 2003, when finally everybody was just like, you know what? Even here at nascar, we're not going to do this anymore. And that was all part of that moment when we were suing the tobacco industry because the health care costs that states were having to bear, when TV and movies were stopping, showing actors just smoking all the time and glamorizing the whole thing, when cities were starting to prohibit smoking in bars and restaurants, on and on and on. It was a full court offensive to try and make people understand that what used to be normal no longer could be. And I think that's a perfectly good analogy for gas and oil. You know, when I was a boy, we did not know about the greenhouse effect. It was really 1988 when Jimmy Ensign opened the public discussion on global warming.
- [16:09]
Sammy Roth
His famous testimony to Congress, you know, the greenhouse effect is here, et cetera.
- [16:13]
Bill McKibben
Exactly. Right before then, there was something innocent about the car era that was part of America. You know, Los Angeles was. This was the. This. This was the Beach Boys. This was completely understandable why they'd be in the ballpark with you. But it's not understandable anymore because these guys are knowingly wrecking the planet, and they're using their political influence to game the system so they can keep their business model alive past the point where scientists have told them to cut it out.
- [16:47]
Sammy Roth
So you see there being a similar path with fossil fuels as there were with with cigarettes. Lawsuits like the one California and other states have filed against the industry for damages, public pressure campaigns like the ones being waged, you know, on a small scale with Dodger Stadium, but on a larger scale elsewhere. Things like that eventually just reach a tipping point where it's eventually seen as sort of, you know, just inappropriate to have these advertisements and allow this propaganda.
- [17:14]
Bill McKibben
The only difference is, Sammy, that this one needs to be global.
- [17:18]
Sammy Roth
Well, I mean, I think this one needs to be bigger because fossil fuels are A lot more ubiquitous and central to our daily lives than cigarettes ever were.
- [17:26]
Bill McKibben
RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris, when they got, you know, when they got damaged in this country, decided that their new business model was going to be to sell cigarettes to people in China, which they've done successfully. And truthfully, that's what the fossil fuel industry is trying to do too, is they ramp up exports of LNG to.
- [17:47]
Sammy Roth
Asia and things that's liquefied natural gas.
- [17:49]
Bill McKibben
The difference here is that the secondhand smoke comes back in a matter of days, warming our planet, too. You're right. Philip Morris killed us one person at a time. Exxon takes us out one planet at a time. So it's an even bigger deal.
- [18:05]
Sammy Roth
I think that one thing that I have found reporting on this stuff for quite a while now, and tell me if you agree or disagree with this assessment, I'm really curious for your take, is that climate change is such a big problem. It's so big that it's just, it's easier for people to wrap their minds around by simplifying it into one or two different ways that they can think about, here's what we should do about it, or here's how I should approach it that, you know, when I write about people campaigning to get the 76 logos out of Dodger Stadium, the reaction that I frequently see is, well, why are you, why are you writing about that? Or why are you working on that instead of focusing on a carbon tax or nuclear energy or rooftop solar or, you know, I just, I constantly get this reaction of why are you focusing on this one thing instead of this other thing?
- [18:53]
Bill McKibben
Let me say two things. One is, in the end, there's only a couple of responses that are big enough, that scale fast enough to make a real difference in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. I think by far the most important of those is the rapid deployment of renewable energy. And as a large part of that, one of the things that we have to do to allow that to happen is to break the political power of the fossil fuel industry that's trying to keep us from doing that. That's the battle that's going on. Look, 30 or 40 years from now, we're going to run this planet on sun and wind because it's very cheap. But if it takes us 30 or 40 years to get there, then the planet that we run on sun and wind is going to be a broken planet. So the job of movements, of people, of crusading newspapers, of whatever else, is to try and force that spring a little bit so that it happens before the Gulf Stream shuts down, before we lose the last glaciers in Greenland. On and on and on. I'm not going to tell you that getting the 76 logo out of Chavez Ravine is as important as who the president is. But I am telling you that it is an important part of this deep, deep battle that will figure out whether or not we have a planet to live on or not.
- [20:20]
Sammy Roth
So if you're someone who wants to get the 76 logos out of Dodger Stadium, what do you do about that? I mean, is it when you're driving down the street and you see a 76 gas station, do you get squeamish and skip it and go to the Chevron down the block, or do you do something else?
- [20:36]
Bill McKibben
Boycotting gas stations and things is very hard. Boycotts are extremely difficult to carry out in the best of times. Really, the only person, almost the only person who ever really carried out an effective consumer boycott was Cesar Chavez and table grapes in California in the 1960s and early 70s. The reason that he was able to do that was mostly because grapes go bad in two weeks. So he had a lot of leverage. Gasoline's been. You know, that oil has been sitting underground for 100 million years. It's fine. It's hard to outlast these guys. So I think that the pressure needs to be mostly cultural of the kind that you're applying. They need to understand that when. They need to start sensing that when people see their logo, they get angry instead of happy. And I think that's the message that we need to try and keep sending those companies and sending it through the. You know, in this case, through the baseball club. If the Dodgers hear enough grief about it, at a certain point, they'll just say, you know what? We better find somebody else who's making something else that's not destroying the planet to stick their signs up on. On the ball field. And that's a. That's not going to save the world by itself, but it's one more step in an important fight.
- [22:06]
Sammy Roth
I gotta be honest with you. Once I started writing about this, now I can't unsee it. Like, I used to go to Dodger Stadium and not even think about the 76 logos. Now it's like, I've taken the pill from the Matrix. It's like, oh, God, every time I look, it's like, there it is. I went to the. You know, I went to a playoff game in October, and it's like, oh, look, the rally towel today, sponsored by 76. I never would have noticed that before.
- [22:29]
Bill McKibben
I think the slogan's got to be find a brewer, not a refiner to sponsor the Dodgers or something, because that's just sad.
- [22:39]
Sammy Roth
Bill McKibben, thank you very much.
- [22:41]
Bill McKibben
Thank you.
- [22:51]
Sammy Roth
As it happens, just a few weeks after that protest At Dodger Stadium, Phillips 66 announced it would be closing its LA county oil refinery in 2025. As California shifts from gasoline to electric cars, there's been no indication the 76 ads at Dodger Stadium are going anywhere, at least not yet. But the refinery closure, that's a big deal. Consider it a sign of the Times. Thank you for listening to Boiling Point. I'm your host, Sammy Roth. My producers are Mary Knoff and Jonathan Shiflett. Sound design and original music by Jonathan Shiflett. Elijah Wolfson is our editor. Denise Callahan is our studio manager. Ben Church is our production manager. Nick Norton is our engineer. Special thanks to LA Times Studio president Anna Magzanian, President and Chief Operating Officer of the Los Angeles Times, Chris Argentieri and Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Times, Terry Tang. Boiling Point is executive produced by Darius Derekshon and created by me, Sammy Roth.
- [24:12]
Southern California Edison Announcer
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- [25:14]
Mary Knoff
Don't slip Big Oil lobbyists are working hard to roll back climate and clean energy progress to keep their profits soaring and California hooked on their dirty, expensive energy. We can't afford to slip on Big Oil's slick PR and lobbying keep California moving forward with affordable clean energy and transportation. Learn more at don'tslipca.org paid for by California environmental voters.