The Oakland A's Impending Climate Dystopia
A's owner John Fisher is dragging the team to the front lines of global warming
Despite the “reverse boycott” held by Oakland fans on June 13th, every indication points to the Oakland A’s relocating to Las Vegas after Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo signed a $380 million public handout on Friday, gifting A’s owner John Fisher funds for a stadium in downtown Las Vegas. Before the A’s officially bid Oakland goodbye, Fisher still must submit a relocation application to the MLB Commissioner’s office and receive the approval of at least 23 other MLB owners.
While the owners will likely approve of Fisher’s plan and finally bring to an end the protracted relocation process, the move has been decried by players, fans, and media members as soul-less and greedy on the part of Fisher and MLB. One concern that has received less attention from the industry is the climate disaster MLB is setting up for themselves. When the A’s complete their move to Las Vegas, the city would immediately become one of the warmest locales in the league during baseball season, with average summer highs topping 100°F. Vegas is not only battling increasingly scorching summers, but a dwindling water supply. The city gets almost all of its water from Lake Mead, the reservoir filled by the Colorado River. Lake Mead has suffered from record low levels of water in recent years as the American Southwest struggles through its driest period in 1200 years.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Las Vegas was singled out as one of the cities most at risk of becoming inhospitable for sports teams as a result of climate change in a 2021 Defector article examining the climate futures of several sports cities. The A’s are not ignorant to Las Vegas’s worsening climate conditions, as evidenced by their proposed stadium plans. The proposed stadium would boast a climate controlled interior and a partially retractable roof akin to that of Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. The Texas Rangers were forced to build a climate-controlled stadium after their previous open-air stadium, opened in 1994, did not have a way to keep fans cool enough to attend Rangers games amid soaring summer temperatures in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Heat is not the only problem the Las Vegas A’s could be dealing with in their new city. As previously mentioned, water presents a looming problem for the future of Las Vegas. Water is in such short supply that Nevada lawmakers passed a law giving power to the Southern Nevada Water Authority to more strictly enforce annual household water usage limits, in addition to already-passed regulations such as a ban on watering residential lawns. Sports teams are not immune to suffering from the water shortage, as the Las Vegas Raiders (who also relocated from Oakland to Vegas) struggled to maintain Allegiant Stadium’s natural grass during the last NFL season. Plans for additional water consumption to shore up the grass and cool off fans at the stadium did not go over well with some community members. The water usage for the A’s proposed stadium would undoubtedly be intensely scrutinized.
In addition to the heat and water concerns, the A’s arrival in Las Vegas could affect the local air quality. A’s team president Dave Kaval predicts that the A’s will bring 400,000 tourists to the city every year. While he does not give details about how he expects those fans to travel to Las Vegas, approximately one half of visitors to Las Vegas in 2021 arrived by car according to GLS Research. As the Las Vegas Raiders have seen, fans from California will arrive in droves to watch their favorite California teams play in Nevada, causing thousands of additional car trips along I-15 into Vegas.
The American Lung Association gave Las Vegas an “F” in air quality, scoring particularly poorly on ozone levels. Car exhaust is a huge component of Las Vegas air quality problems, and the effects are disproportionally suffered by poor Las Vegans. One such resident, Cinthia Moore, described her experience living next to the highway to The Guardian in 2021. Moore says that she and her son have experienced migraines, persistent allergies, and breathing problems since moving to Las Vegas, and that her neighbors who live even closer to the roadway have it worse. She’s worried about the future of her neighborhood if pollution keeps increasing, saying “there are folks who are living right there and it’s going into their homes and they are experiencing pollution every day.” If Dave Kaval’s prediction of 400,000 additional tourists coming to the city to see A’s games comes true, folks like Moore and her neighbors will suffer the pollution consequences.
Even in the face of Las Vegas’s scorching heat, dwindling water supply, and air quality issues, MLB is still pressing forward with the A’s relocation bid. The only remaining hurdle John Fisher has to clear is securing a 75% vote by MLB owners to approve the relocation. In one last piece of hope for fans hoping the A’s stay put, some resistance is forming among big-market MLB owners. According to MLB insider Ken Rosenthal, some owners may object to the move to Las Vegas because of the small market Las Vegas represents; compared to the 6th largest market in the nation in Oakland, Las Vegas ranks only 40th.
While uncertainty hangs in the air about when exactly the relocation vote will take place, one thing is for certain: the A’s will see out the remainder of their lease on the Oakland Coliseum, which expires at the conclusion of the 2024 season. For at least the next year and a half, the A’s can savor the cool Bay Area breeze before embarking for the scorching desert.
Thanks for this piece. It's a good angle here, thinking through the intersections between climate change and mass audience sports like baseball. This move to Vegas seems problematic on many levels, including the climate-related dimensions you bring up here.