If Madeleine Orr had been searching for a launch pad for her book, Warming up: How Climate Change is Changing Sport, last week provided the perfect rocket boosters. Only two years after the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, brandished a “green card for the planet” in a video message, football’s world governing body signed a four-year sponsorship deal with the Saudi oil and gas conglomerate Aramco, the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter, the third biggest carbon emitter since the industrial revolution (behind China’s state coal company and the former Soviet Union) and one with plans, alongside other fossil fuel companies, to expand production in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.
“A comedian couldn’t write that,” says Orr over the phone from North Carolina. “It is textbook greenwashing. I’m kind of sad that I didn’t put it in the book as case study No 1. But it is a practice that has been going on for 100 years.”
