Watching on the TV the plumes of smoke rise as cars tore across the landscape at the Dakar race (an annual cross-country car rally), I wondered, how is it possible in a climate emergency that such an obviously polluting and environmentally destructive activity is allowed to continue? While personally I do not find it as distressing to watch as a blood sport like bull-fighting, but watching this kind of “spectacle” feels uncomfortable when the environmental cost is considered.
Cross country racing, even in a desert, is such a blatant manifestation of everything that is wrong with the way we are treating the planet – both caring for the land, and for what reaches the sky. As thick wheeled vehicles fly across terrain, carving it up as they go, not only are fumes belched out into the atmosphere, but also particulate pollution from the tyres and brakes is released into the ecosystem. Perhaps seeing a desert, it doesn’t look like there’s an abundance of life, but as David Attenborough’s astonishing documentaries have shown, there is life virtually everywhere on earth.
Over the last decade the rally has been held in South America, where environmentalists rang the alarm about the threat to topsoil in fragile ecosystems and the habitats of llamas and condors. Nonetheless the high levels of revenue to be gained from the tourist pull of the event were enough to sideline these concerns.
Its concrete based cousin, Formula 1, also has its fair share of environmental questions to answer producing emissions of around 256,551 tonnes of CO2 per year. To put that in perspective, that represents the equivalent of 90,000 people each emitting 3 tons a year (a shade higher than India’s current average per capita) – and represents the target we need to get to per capita in order to stay below 1.5C warming.
While I understand there is employment in this industry, the idea that we have a right to leisure activities at any cost has to be set against the health of the living planet, the extinction of so many species and the increasing number of people killed or affected by climate change.
The motor racing industry is just one area of a giant leisure industry – of which gaming is another big CO2 emitter (more on that in another post), and obviously there are people who will lose their jobs should this cease to exist. Those people should be helped into other employment, whether they are ex miners or mechanics, but motor sports cannot continue to literally run rough-shod over the world’s precious ecosystems, or continue to eat up our ever dwindling carbon budget.
