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Oil Sports

Like Soap Operas, only when you’re watching this week’s marquee match up® brought to you by our friends at BPExxonMobilShellConocoPhillipsChevron where “what’s a little feel good fossil fuel propaganda between friends?”

Well, the UCLA Emmet Institute on Climate Change & the Environment conducted a survey:

Many major league sports teams in the U.S. have sponsorship deals with some of the companies most responsible for the polluting products fueling climate change. But how many exactly?

This survey of 2024 sponsorships across six major league sports leagues in the U.S. reveals more than 60 recent deals with high-polluting companies. This includes sponsorship deals with oil and gas companies—most of them Big Oil’s household names. It also includes deals with lesser-known utility companies that generate electricity from fossil fuel-burning power plants and sell fossil gas directly to consumers. Not every team plays this way. This survey also highlights some that have chosen a different path.

LAT follows up with an easy-to-understand analogy:

If you’re wondering why this matters, I could tell you about research suggesting that fossil fuel companies, much like tobacco profiteers back in the day, pay off the owners of beloved institutions, including our favorite teams, to cleanse their dirty images — and lull us into forgetting that their noxious products are causing hotter heat waves,more intense wildfires and growing water scarcity (not to mention regular old deadly air pollution).

I could tell you about the research. Or I could ask you to imagine going to watch the Sacramento Kings — or the Giants, or the 49ers, or LAFC — and seeing a cigarette advertisement above the scoreboard. Or a gun ad.

Unimaginable, right? So why is Big Oil propaganda considered acceptable?

At some point, the shift in consciousness about banning fossil fuel ads will break through into legislation. It really has to. Though big statements are waiting to be redeemed for PR gold, public outcry won’t be enough. Because we may wince at the violence on the field/ice with the same grimace that we wince at these ads, allowing for both. As we consume that media – that’s what we’re doing – designed to make us think about some things rather than others, the next thing happens in our brains. Acceptance or rejection. Allowing the infringement of advertising does not allow for ambivalence. Marketers have thought of that, too. Ask me how I know.

Or better yet, start to notice the ads. In a different way.

Image via

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If it has sentience

it’s being used to protect us? Now that is thoughtful:

Imagine a medical-advice chatbot that lists fewer diseases that match your symptoms, because it was trained on a narrower spectrum of medical knowledge generated by previous chatbots. Or an A.I. history tutor that ingests A.I.-generated propaganda and can no longer separate fact from fiction.

Just as a copy of a copy can drift away from the original, when generative A.I. is trained on its own content, its output can also drift away from reality, growing further apart from the original data that it was intended to imitate.

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature, a group of researchers in Britain and Canada showed how this process results in a narrower range of A.I. output over time — an early stage of what they called “model collapse.”

Apparently, visual artists have been attempting to poison the models for a while now, to the point where they can’t tell the difference between a cat and a cow. Turns out even in Plato’s Cave you need people who know things.

But using itself to replicate itself is, shall we say, projecting deformity.

Hapsburg AI, indeed.

Image: Based on research by Ilia Shumailov and others.

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A target on your front

Georgia misses out on billions to cut climate pollution (sic?), the headline blared. Metro Atlanta failed to secure federal dollars to slash its emissions:

Last year, with the help of a $3 million federal grant, the state of Georgia began developing its first-ever plan to cut emissions of planet-warming gases. With funding from the same Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program, metro Atlanta drafted a climate road map of its own, too.

The plans were submitted to the federal agency this spring. The hope was to snag a slice of the $4.3 billion the EPA was offering, part of one of the federal government’s largest-ever grant opportunities for curbing heat-trapping pollution.

Let’s peek inside that first-ever plan, shall we? I wonder why the feds didn’t reward for these forward-thinker-lookers:

Peach State Voluntary Emission Reduction Plan

Oh.

Maybe that’s just the title and the plan is really much more aggressive inside, given the stakes not to mention the detestable traffic in that photo:

Strategy 1: Electrify Transportation Sector and Adapt to Mode Shift                                                                                                            Strategy 2: Improve Energy Efficiency and Promote Electrification
Strategy 3: Increase Availability and Use of Renewable Energy
Strategy 4: Improve Waste Diversion and Landfill Management
Strategy 5: Promote Use of Alternative Fuels
Strategy 6: Refrigerant Management
Strategy 7: Advance Conservation and Sustainable Land Use

The media report, and no doubt public officials, characterizes the rejection of federal funds to support this laughably obtuse plan as a ‘snub.’ I mean, where to start? This would have been decent plan had it been pursued in 1982, visionary perhaps. But now? Promote the use of alternative fuels? The absence of the words ‘mass transit’ is a damning indictment by the plan’s second chart, Figure 2, which indicates that the largest percentage of Georgia’s GHG emissions (38%) come from transportation.

Games played by non-serious people. Meanwhile, those voluntarily miserable drivers keep enjoying the scenery.

Les miz, indeed.

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My way, part two

The post below was kind of a set up, because there are so many things like that, and so many things like that are related climate change.

For example, why so many people continue [broken record alert] to buy expensive cars and live so far from work despite the misery eventually produced by both, not just at present, for a very long time now. And yes, these two things are prime exacerbating factors driving climate change and making it worse, inducing despair in those who cannot fathom giving up large vehicles or exurban living and rage against suggestions they consider it. See also, over-crowded ‘lakefront’ developments, especially in the American south, with accompanying overpopulation of large boats and jet skis. If the taste for these things is no longer based on pleasure or necessity, we must unpack. Bourdieu is very helpful here.

Another one – how climate patterns influence where people live and work:

Among the mass migrations in U.S. history: after the Second World War, people left cold Snow Belt states in the Northeast and Midwest for the warmth of the southern half of the country. Americans are still moving south in large numbers, but new research documents some growing appreciation of colder parts of the country due to climate change.

Marketplace’s senior economics contributor Chris Farrell has been looking into this. He spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: All right, just remind us, 1950s and ’60s in particular — it was from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt.

Chris Farrell: That’s right, there were a combination of factors. Millions of retirees, they were just fed up with the cold. They went for the warmth and recreational activities of the Sun Belt. Defense companies rose alongside military bases in the region. Established northern industries looking for cheap, nonunion labor shifted operations south. Agricultural businesses boomed, thanks to new farming techniques. So if you take a step back, David, newcomers were attracted by the region’s low cost of housing, the growth in job opportunities, low taxes and warm weather. And the widespread adoption of new technologies like air conditioning made the hot climate bearable.

So…. to bring it all together, that was broadcast on a radio program. What if you were listening to that report on your commute in your large automobile? Does it spark… anything? Bueller?

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Comme d’habitude

Pierre Bourdieu on taste, as luxury vs. necessity:

The true basis of the differences found in the area of consumption, and far beyond it, is the opposition between the tastes of luxury (or freedom) and the tastes of necessity. The former are the tastes of individuals who are the product of material conditions of existence defined by distance from necessity, by the freedoms or facilities stemming from possession of capital; the latter express, precisely in their adjustment, the necessities of which they are the product. Thus it is possible to deduce popular tastes for the foods that are simultaneously most ‘filling’ and most economical from the necessity of reproducing labour power at the lowest cost which is forced on the proletariat as its very definition. The idea of taste, typically bourgeois, since it presupposes absolute freedom of choice, is so closely associated with the idea of freedom that many people find it hard to grasp the paradoxes of the taste of necessity. Some simply sweep it aside, making practice a direct product of economic necessity (workers eat beans because they cannot afford anything else), failing to realize that necessity can only be fulfilled, most of the time, because the agents are inclined to fulfill it, because they have a taste for what they are anyway condemned to. Others turn it into a taste of freedom, forgetting the conditionings of which it is the product, and so reduce it to pathological or morbid preference for (basic) essentials, a sort of congenital coarseness, the pretext for a class racism which associates the populace with everything heavy, thick and fat. Taste is amor fati, the choice of destiny, but a forced choice, produced by conditions of existence which rule out all alternatives as mere daydreams and leave no choice but the taste for the necessary.

Doesn’t quite explain why people eat chickfila who don’t have to – or does it?

Full text

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Not adding up

In fact, it is adding up. Way too up:

Google has reported that, since 2019, its emissions have grown by 48 percent, an enormous increase that reflects the vast amounts of energy used by artificial intelligence.

A.I. models run a huge number of calculations in short order, taxing computers and driving up energy consumption. “As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands,” Google said in its report, released Tuesday. The surge in emissions puts the tech giant further away from its ambitious goal of zeroing out carbon footprint by 2030.

Google is not alone. Microsoft, which is also integrating A.I. into its products, has seen its emissions jump by 30 percent since 2020. It too has a goal of reaching net zero emissions by the end of this decade.

In its report, Google said that it is adopting practices that could dramatically reduce the energy needed to train an A.I. model. It also said that it is using A.I. to tackle climate change in three key ways: by guiding drivers along more fuel-efficient routes; by helping city engineers adjust the timing of stoplights to speed the flow of traffic; and by providing advanced flood warnings to people in more than 80 countries.

Still, the climate impact of A.I. is considerable. Google and Microsoft now have larger carbon footprints than Slovenia.

The marketing hype around A.I. that is far outstripping its current utility also perfectly elides its most profound impact: the electricity required for supercomputing. This gluttonous energy need is hard to overstate – making it very difficult to comprehend – and should be among the primary concerns about A.I., on par with its nefarious effects on news/entertainment, creative pursuits, and surveillance.

So, Siri, is A.I. scary, or just frighteningly impractical?

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content /kənˈtɛnt/ • adjective

Whether adjective (in a state of peaceful happiness), verb (soothe), or noun (a state of satisfaction), the appropriate use and pronunciation of ‘content’ is  /kənˈtɛnt/

Ahem. This is known. Don’t be suckered into micro-sizing your efforts into a generic descriptor thereof.

Along the same lines, it should also be apparent that people only need to be as corporate and sanitized as they agree to be.  While in times of deceit this might be construed as a revolutionary act, self-deceit about the meaning and matter of it all can be as devious as any other form. Remember all the space afforded you, the dark nights and struggles before yours that produce the light that warms you now, that allows you to see. There’s a gem of a reminder by Susan Neiman in the NYRB, reassembling the thinking of and about Frantz Fanon:

tribalism is the simplest form of social organization. It takes an act of abstraction to become a universalist; to see the possibility of common dignity in all the weird and gorgeous ways human beings differ is an achievement we’ve forgotten how to celebrate.

Allow yourself to pull away from tendencies not your own.

Image: Author photo, Hudson River sunrise.

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Considering the odds

Weird convergence on how we distinguish work vs. labor that slices into entirely new territory when merged with sports gambling:

There is a way to make money, or at least not lose money, gambling on sports, and people who do it. That work involves crunching numbers, diversifying risk, seeking out small inefficiencies; it is, more or less, a job. A friend I spoke to for the story made a bunch of money betting the under on steals for various defense-deficient NBA guards. It’s not glamorous, it’s not juicy, it provides no mondo paydays. It’s barely fun at all. Again: it’s work.

Sports gambling apps do not want people to gamble like that. What they want bettors to do is put money on parlays. Apps push them in that direction constantly, even offering “no-risk parlays” to whet a prospective gambler’s appetite for the harder stuff. When I mentioned slot machine gambling to Dr. Fong, he immediately mentioned the same-game parlay. It’s an inevitable winner for casinos that also looks and feels good for the casual gambler.

In Addiction by Design, Schüll talks to slot machine designers about the process of making an effective slot machine. (They’re all from Australia, for some reason.) They tell her that it’s mostly a matter of feeling—finding a way to build in enough winning to maintain hope in the player, but also enough losing to make it profitable for the casino. It’s pretty nauseating; reading about otherwise sane people succumbing to sophisticated Skinner Boxes is dispiriting, and terrifying.

Here is one way that could all look: You watch a game with the app open. It gives you a personalized stream of quick, ever-changing, algorithmically generated bets. It also tracks what you will bet on and what you won’t, and then adjusts to create something akin to a personalized slot machine; the idea is to create an experience that feels good to you. If you are even a little bit inclined toward problem gambling, this will bury itself deep, and it will take your money; it will all be, as it currently is in 30 states, legal. And you can play like this until the government or a medical professional intervenes, or doesn’t. Everyone with any skin in the game—every business interest that sees its fans as a renewable resource—wants that to exist.

Turnip-truck green mixed with $$$-green produces no great good but a whole lot of parting.

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Never so much in common as this

Reminiscent of the fabled National Debt clock, Bloomberg Green sports a running, parts per million CO2 counter that clicks up and down at various speeds depending on, well, you can check it out.

Despite some with fancy hats acting interested in horse racing, versus others in famine-plagued refugee camps, there is a great bit of unanimity of experience in our current moment. Some dissonance concerning the effect of heat on the Miami Grand Prix notwithstanding, the inability to escape the unusual effects of global warming unites us all, on a way. Not the good kind, yet still, unity toutefois.

One of the questions is whether this great common crisis may elicit in us urgency for collective action that serves the greater good. And yes, cynicism circles the globe twice every morning before hopefulness pours its first cup. But this forced grouping of everyone with everyone else no matter your station under the banner of This Is Happening kicks our profit-maximizing distraction seeking onto a side street. And you know how people like to browse.

There are many things to see. Maybe you consider picking up something special – like something for someone everyone else.

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Apropos-eclipse

Making up things to fight, an interesting use of creative energy – if round is what you like. As we go in circles, we should at least tend the energy fires that are burning behind this particular chase.

God love the MBAs ( someone needs to), but every endeavor is not in need of being maximized for profit. Without the need to be philosophically opposed to financial gain, a re-alignment is in order, especially while we still know those words. Maybe a list of activities deserving special dispensation above net yield is in order – or maybe a reconsideration of ‘net’ and ‘yield’. Proposed exemptions:

Fire protection, water, public safety, health care.

But if we blaspheme bracket these, the human and physical infrastructure underlying them quickly follows: transportation, education, housing, food… the entire edifice of maximizing gains begins to crumble as soon as we grant agency to locking down any of its particular aspects. But we should still consider this! Again, while we can. That sounds like a scare tactic but the degree to which we have internalized the corporate ethos of business should terrify us – and does when/if we step back from it.

And again, it need not be the full socialismso, just set some standards and stick to them.

And if we need to do away with the internet because it’s not profitable, that’s fine. Things were okay before, and in terms of ‘net effect’ it’s really not helping.

Just something to consider when the light goes dim for a few minutes on Monday.