The Olympics Are Self Destructive

The 2010 Winter Olympics will be starting in Vancouver in just a few months. Many groups have been protesting against the Olympics for several different reasons. Some are concerned that the Olympics are evicting Vancouver's poor. Others are concerned that the Olympics are being held on stolen native land. For yet others, the main concern is that the extensive costs will exceed any potential economic benefit. Of course, another main concern is the environmental impacts of such a large global event, and I will focus on these in this article.

One problem with the Olympics in general is that they require the host city to engage in massive infrastructure development, requiring considerable industrial activity. This is activity that would not otherwise have taken place. In most cases, planners do try to construct facilities with the potential for other uses after the event, though this doesn't always work out as planned. With the threat of global warming we need to focus on reducing industrial activity, not increasing it. We should be reusing, or retrofitting, existing buildings, not building more. In order to reduce carbon emissions, we need massive reduction and reuse generally.

The Olympics have also been the cause of local environmental damage, including the destruction of important habitats. As Scientific American reports, the Eagleridge Bluffs, which contained a rare forest ecosystem with endangered species, has been bulldozed in order to build a road connecting Olympic venues. This is in spite of the fact that the British Columbia government itself had previously concluded it was a "significant area for plant diversity" and contained 22 "regionally rare or significant plants".

There have been similar problems in previous Olympic Games, such as Beijing 2008, Torino 2006, Athens 2004, Salt Lake City 2002, Sydney 2000, Nagano 1998, etc. Of course, many types of construction and infrastructure development can result in some type of environmental damage. However, this damage still happened despite many efforts by the Olympic organizers to be greener. Also, none of the Olympic development was necessary in the first place.

Another obvious problem with the Olympics is the amount of air travel involved. Over 10,000 athletes competed in the previous two summer Olympics in Athens and Beijing, and tens or even hundreds of thousands of people visited. According to this calculator a single cross-country return flight from Toronto to Vancouver is responsible about 4000 pounds of CO2 emissions. Multiply this by hundreds of thousands, and you have a massive amount of emissions. Also, consider that many people attending the Olympics are flying internationally, not just cross-country.

The Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee (VANOC) says the total emissions generated by the Olympics will be 300,000 tons of carbon. This is the official estimate, of course, others argue there are additional factors that have not been considered in the calculations. VANOC claims they will somehow balance this out, but without providing any details of how this might be done, other than by purchasing offsets. The problem here is that buying offsets really doesn't reduce the damage. As Mark Jaccard, a scientist at Simon Fraser University, says:

I put CO2 in the atmosphere, how do I offset that in terms of what the temperature of the earth will be 50 years from now? The only way is if I can capture CO2 somewhere else in the atmosphere and bring it back to a solid or liquid phase pressurized under the earth, something like that.

Then, I would be offsetting those emissions, anything else is hocus pocus

Even one of the members of VANOC, Linda Coady, admits:

Offsets are not a solution to climate change. The most important thing is to try to reduce [emissions] at source. The best way to do them is not to emit them in the first place

This is a surprising admission, and completely undercuts the claim that they can offset the 300,000 tons of carbon. She is correct about the solution, though, we shouldn't emit the carbon in the first place. The only way to do that is for everyone to stay home.

With Copenhagen coming up, the world needs a powerful symbol, an international act that can demonstrate that humanity truly recognizes the seriousness of our situation. Cancelling future Olympic events would send this message, and show that we understand we cannot continue with business as usual. Until such a decision is made, we as individuals should boycott all Olympic events so that down the road, this decision will be made inevitable.