Why Hamilton’s ‘celebrity green’ shtick is just so hard to swallow
YOU can’t be a Formula one driver and lecture on saving the planet. You might think you can. But you can’t. You can’t have a BA gold card either, or do a promotional tour for the latest lousy film you flew to Los Angeles to make, or be a shill for a company producing SUVs like Benedict Cumberbatch.
Certainly, you can’t walk around with Petronas emblazoned across your chest, or be part of an industry that measures its carbon footprint much like a small country, and pontificate about a lunch-hour chicken sandwich as if it is the root of society’s ills.
So while Lewis Hamilton may care deeply about the world in which we live, Fernando Alonso is right: he really doesn’t get to lecture on how to live in it. Not when F1 measures its carbon output in megatons.
Hamilton is on the brink of a sixth drivers’ championship, one more than Juan Manuel Fangio, one less than Michael Schumacher. He is fast closing in on becoming the greatest of all time. It is a fabulous achievement, but one that comes at a cost. We all know it, and we can all see it.
At a time of climate crisis, F1 is a very expensive luxury. Not just the race itself but the circus around it. Go to Abu Dhabi in Grand Prix week, the huge yachts in the harbour, the lavish parties, the megawatt illumination of the track. You could see those lights from space. And, by then, F 1’ sr ace has usually long been run, and won.
So Hamilton has a choice, and it isn’t about beef versus beetroot. If he announced that this season was it, and he was ending his participation in motor sport, with its reckless consumption and pollution of the planet’s resources, well t hat would be a very admirable stand.
If he said he would travel the world by bicycle, planting trees to offset his carbon footprint to this point, he could get Greta Thunberg levels of approval. Yet turning vegan and hectoring the world to follow?
This is not the moment to ascend the moral high ground. It never is, in an F1 car.
Vegan ism makes no real difference to Hamilton, so is actually no sacrifice at all. Indeed, for an athlete in his sport, it may even be advantageous. Hamilton needs to stay slim, stay light, stay fit, and there are plenty of incredible and successful athletes who do not eat meat, such as Venus Williams or Jermain Defoe. And Hamilton probably likes vegetables, almost as much as he likes flying around the world to drive very fast cars. Yet you’ll notice he’s not giving that up.
So he’s green right up until the moment it starts to genuinely impact on him, which is what one might term Celebrity Green.
And that’s the newest green, the greenest green. Celebrity Green is never going to be pulled off the roof of a train at Canning Town station and beaten up by angry commuters. Celebrity Green doesn’t do much public transport; or economy class.
Celebrity Green i s Emma Thompson flying 5,400 miles from Los Angeles to protest about climate change. Celebrity Green i s the Duke and Duchess of Sussex chauffeured to their next private jet. Celebrity Green is an Extinction Rebellion cameo followed by a party at the Venice Film Festival.
Do we really need anyone going transatlantic to make the third sequel to Men In Black? It’s not art. It’s not even very good. Don’t they have actors in Hollywood anymore? Can’t someone just come by bus?
Green until it affects us: now there’s a slogan the world of celebrity can get behind, and appear not at all hypocritical. Green until I can’t do what I want. If there is, as Hamilton rightly states, an environmental argument for veganism, there is certainly one for putting racing cars out to grass.
Ever been to Formula one? It isn’t two days of brief speed trials, and then a race. It’s three solid days of fast car noise, sun up to sun down. Three solid days of massive f reight and people movements, three solid days of burning petrol, three solid days of massive human consumption.
Everyone has got to get there, everyone has got to get back, and many drive or fly because the circuits are rarely central. And when they are there, they eat, they drink, they take up hotels, all those bright lights, all that energy.
Some of the tracks are floodlit for night racing, and some F1 races are held at night, too, because the timing is then better for a global market. The idea that somebody in this game turns to the general public and questions the contents of their lunchbox is quite breathtaking.
‘We all know the lifestyle that Lewis has and that Formula one drivers take 200 planes a year,’ said Alonso. ‘You can’t then say don’t eat meat.’ Well, you can, but don’t be surprised at the reaction.
Here’s the maths. There are ten Formula one teams carrying between 50 and 100 tons of cars, car parts, and equipment to 21 races amounting to 110,000 air miles each year. With the cars go drivers and mechanics, and with them go fancy mobile headquarters and hospitality centres for their sponsors and guests.
So that’s 1.1 million air miles at a rate of five gallons of jet fuel per mile, meaning 5.5 million gallons of fuel just to race. But F1 teams don’t just race. They test, they promote, they serve the needs of the manufacturers and their sponsors.
Hamilton in a Mercedes car is advertising a product just as sincerely as Extinction Rebellion’s Benedict Cumberbatch is flogging his Chinese SUVs when he thinks no one is looking.
If we speculate that a quarter of F1 activity is devoted to journeys that are not race-specific, this is an industry burning roughly seven million gallons of jet fuel each year.
one gallon creates 21 pounds of carbon dioxide, so seven million gallons creates 147 million pounds of carbon dioxide. This puts F1’s carbon footprint at roughly the same as the annual Co 2 emissions of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a self-governing overseas territory of France, near Canada, with a population in excess of 6,000.
‘I know we are travelling around the world and racing Formula one cars, our carbon footprint is higher than the average homeowner who lives in the same city,’ said Hamilton. ‘But that doesn’t mean you should be afraid to speak out about things.’
Actually it does. Not afraid, maybe, but at least aware. To even think that F 1’ sc a rb on footprint is comparable to a homeowner beggars belief.
‘I’m always looking at how I can improve the effect that I’m having on t he world,’ said Hamilton, and that might be true. He is selling his collection of vintage, gas-hungry cars, apparently. He no longer has his private jet.
Yay for salad and all that, but if Hamilton really wanted to save the planet he needs to delve a little deeper into the 0.07-megaton-world he inhabits, and seems rather reluctant to leave behind.