Time for the Dodgers to stop taking Big Oil money

I’m pleased to report that Mark Walter, who owns the Los Angeles Dodgers, is financing two big clean energy projects.

I’m less pleased to report that under his watch, the team to which I’ve devoted much of my life won’t stop shilling for Phillips 66 — an oil company that California officials have accused of a “decades-long campaign of deception” about climate change.

Walter is the billionaire chief executive of financial services firm Guggenheim Partners. He led a group of investors that rescued the Dodgers from the disastrous tenure of Frank McCourt, paying $2.15 billion to take the franchise off McCourt’s hands. Thanks to Walter and friends, the Dodgers have made the playoffs 11 straight seasons, winning a World Series in 2020.

Suffice to say, I’m grateful.

Baseball runs in my family: My grandfather grew up rooting for the Dodgers in Brooklyn. My parents took me to my first game when I was 6 weeks old; by age 8, I was running around Dodger Stadium during batting practice, asking players for autographs. You’ll still find me at the ballpark every home stand, cheering my heart out. Bobbleheads line my dresser, desk and bookshelf.

To quote Tommy Lasorda, I bleed Dodger blue.

So I was tickled when Tyson Slocum, who leads the energy program at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, emailed me with a tip he knew would appeal to my sensibilities: He had figured out, by studying obscure filings at a Byzantine federal agency, that Walter was a significant minority investor in two massive battery energy storage systems being built in Arizona.

The lithium-ion battery banks, called Sierra Estrella and Superstition, have finished construction; an event is taking place Monday to celebrate their completion. Together, their 340 megawatts can supply 76,000 average-sized homes for four hours, according to Phoenix-area public utility Salt River Project. The batteries will, among other tasks, help the utility store solar power for after dark, making it possible for one of America’s largest metros to keep the lights on with fewer heat-trapping fossil fuels.

It’s a win for Salt River Project customers — including Camelback Ranch, where the Dodgers hold spring training.

Dodgers pitcher Walker Buehler throws during spring training at Camelback Ranch in February 2020.

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

Here’s the thing.

Slocum was reading Federal Energy Regulatory Commission filings — which, as far as I can tell, he actually finds fun — when he noticed something. Texas-based Plus Power, which built Sierra Estrella and Superstition, owns 60% of the projects. But a different company owns the other 40%. Slocum did some sleuthing and concluded the other company was likely owned by Walter.

In the interests of transparency, he submitted his own filing to FERC, raising the question of who owns the other company.

Lo and behold, the company confirmed to the federal agency that it’s owned by Walter, as a private individual.

“I’m thrilled that he’s investing in [storage]. My filing is in no way trying to dissuade that investment, or not allow it,” Slocum told me. “We simply just have a policy that any energy system that’s located in a community, members of the community should have a clear understanding who owns it, whether it’s a coal-fired power plant or a solar system, or a battery system.”

Makes sense to me. If I were Walter, I’d welcome the publicity. He’s using his wealth to confront the climate crisis.

In Arizona, anyway.

In Los Angeles, Walter continues to spread the gospel of Big Oil.

The Dodgers have a long history with Phillips 66 and its predecessor companies, dating back to the team’s move from Brooklyn. Union Oil Co. — which for decades owned the Union 76 gas station chain — helped finance Dodger Stadium’s construction, later sponsoring TV and radio broadcasts. That’s why there used to be a 76 gas station in the stadium parking lot, and why there are still prominent 76 logos above both scoreboards, part of a sponsorship deal with Phillips 66, which now owns the 76 brand.

The former 76 gas station in the Dodger Stadium parking lot in 2003.

(Alex Gallardo / Los Angeles Times)

The sponsorship deal doesn’t end at the scoreboards.

There are 76 gasoline ads plastered throughout the ballpark, from the visiting team’s bullpen to the ribbon board screens lining the stands, which flashed 76 promos — including “Buy 8+ gallons with the Fuel Forward App” — during Sunday’s 3-0 win against the Kansas City Royals. Even the on-deck circles on the field, where batters prepare to hit, are orange-and-blue 76 logos.

There’s a reason oil companies have spent billions of dollars on advertising in recent decades.

Like the tobacco industry years ago, Big Oil is seeking “social license to operate,” according to Robert Brulle, a visiting professor at Brown University who researches climate denial and misinformation. When Phillips 66 associates itself with an iconic team like the Dodgers, it buys goodwill with millions of fans, even if the fans don’t realize that — staving off the day when Big Oil becomes a social and political pariah, whose products are rightfully seen as harmful to our health and safety. Much like cigarettes.

“It creates this acceptance and legitimacy of them as a responsible corporation that’s part of our community,” Brulle said.

In other words: Even if the 76 logos at Dodger Stadium don’t directly translate to higher gasoline sales, they ingrain in our minds the idea that gas is something we can’t live without. Like Clayton Kershaw’s left arm, or Freddie Freeman’s dance moves.

It’s sneaky. I make a living reporting on global warming, and even I rarely consider that every time I post a photo of the glorious Dodger Stadium skyline on social media, I’m inadvertently promoting fossil fuels — and thus a future of ever-worsening wildfires, floods, droughts and sea level rise, not to mention regular old air pollution that kills millions of people every year.

Speaking of which, Brulle had a theory as to why Phillips 66 is so eager to burnish its image with Dodgers fans: The firm operates a South Bay oil refinery that has faced a series of public health concerns potentially affecting Carson and Wilmington residents. In a 2019 lawsuit threat, for instance, environmental groups accused the Phillips 66 refinery of mismanaging hazardous waste.

A few weeks before the environmental groups threatened to sue, the Dodgers and Phillips 66 issued a press release announcing that the 76 logos had been reinstalled in their original spots above both scoreboards, after more than a decade of absence.

“They must pay a pretty penny to the Dodgers,” Brulle said.

A tank at the Phillips 66 oil refinery in Wilmington is decorated with a Dodgers logo in October 2021.

(Andrew Camacho / Phillips 66)

I tried to get a comment from Mark Walter, reaching out through a Dodgers spokesperson. No luck.

Here’s hoping Walter reads what I have to say.

The Dodgers occupy a unique place in American sports and culture. They’re the franchise that broke the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson, helping propel integration. They’ve got a long history that bridges both coasts, uniting the nation’s two largest cities. They’ve been baseball’s most successful team for a decade, cheating Houston Astros be damned. And now they’ve got the eyes of the world upon them, thanks to Shohei Ohtani, the planet’s most popular and highest-paid baseball player.

They’re a trusted messenger. And by putting 76 at the pinnacle of their cathedral, they’re sending a powerful message: that oil is our friend, that climate change isn’t so bad, that we can trust the industry that created this problem to get us out of it.

Conversely, if they were to end the sponsorship deal, they’d be telling the world it’s time to embrace clean energy.

Right now, if you go to a game and look at the scoreboard, “Shohei’s big, beautiful smile is sitting right there under the 76 sign,” said Cara Horowitz, a climate expert at UCLA Law School. “It sends the message that the Dodgers endorse fossil fuels.”

The 76 logo sits above the left field scoreboard at Dodger Stadium.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

Like me, Horowitz is a Dodgers fan. And like me, she didn’t give the 76 ads much thought until recently.

But while sitting in the stands last week, something clicked for her. The Dodgers were blowing out the Rangers, giving Horowitz plenty of time to look around the stadium without worrying about the outcome of the game. It occurred to her that the previous week, António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, had called on all countries to ban fossil fuel advertising.

Horowitz also recalled that California’s attorney general is suing several oil and gas giants — including Phillips 66, formerly part of ConocoPhillips — for climate damages. The lawsuit accuses the firms of “a disinformation campaign beginning at least as early as the 1970s to discredit the burgeoning scientific consensus on climate,” in part through promotional material “designed to conceal and mislead consumers … about the serious adverse consequences that would result from continued use of [their] products.”

As Horowitz watched the Dodgers and gazed at those 76 logos, shew grew increasingly uneasy.

“We have to move beyond this kind of advertising,” she said.

Allen Hershkowitz disagrees.

Hershkowitz has done more than anyone to clean up the sports business. It started in 2004, when, as a senior scientist with the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, he started working with the Philadelphia Eagles to source the toilet paper at their new football stadium from a different supplier, after learning that the initial supplier harvested timber from actual eagle habitat.

“I told the owners, ‘People are going to wipe their ass with toilet paper that was cut down to destroy eagle habitat,’” he said.

Turns out there was demand for Hershkowitz’s sustainability expertise: Before long, he was working with Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Assn. and the National Hockey League. He later left NRDC and co-founded the Green Sports Alliance.

He still works with teams and leagues to limit climate pollution and other environmental harms. He told me he’s thrilled by the progress he’s seeing — including in Inglewood, where Clippers owner Steve Ballmer is building the Intuit Dome. Hershkowitz is the team’s environmental science advisor. He said the arena will be the most “ecologically advanced building in the world.”

An artist’s rendering shows fans strolling a wide concourse inside the Clippers’ new arena, the Intuit Dome.

(Amy Millhouse / L.A. Clippers)

Hershkowitz doesn’t love seeing oil and gas promos at stadiums. But in his view, it’s more important that teams focus on fighting climate change through their operations. If a fossil fuel billboard helps fund clean energy, he said, “I’ll take the money.”

“If there is no money, you can’t advance environmentally better technologies,” he told me.

“I don’t know that a billboard really changes behavior,” he added.

Although I respect everything Hershkowitz has accomplished, I disagree with him. For two reasons.

First: Refusing to accept sponsorship dollars from Phillips 66 and its ilk doesn’t mean there will be “no money.”

Plenty of companies would love to associate themselves with Ohtani, Kershaw, Freeman, Mookie Betts and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. And even if none of them will pony up as much as Phillips 66 — which, consider me doubtful — Walter’s estimated net worth is $6 billion, according to Forbes. Guggenheim Partners, meanwhile, manages more than $320 billion in assets. Showing Phillips 66 the door won’t stop Walter from investing in a winning team and also advancing clean energy, if that’s what he wants to do.

Second: There’s lots of evidence that billboards can, in fact, change behavior.

Studies have found that cigarette ads encourage smoking — and that bans on tobacco advertising lead to fewer people smoking. Similarly, a University of Albany study showed how effective 30-second TV spots can be at convincing people that fossil fuel firms are shifting quickly to clean energy, even when they’re not — a tactic called greenwashing. An ad agency working for ExxonMobil concluded that a 12-week campaign in the New York Times increased Exxon’s “brand favorability” by more than 10%.

I could cite other analyses. But there’s no better illustration of the power of fossil fuel industry advertising than a story told by the Dodgers’ former team photographer, Richard Kee, in “The Dodger Collection,” a book of his photos published last year.

Vin Scully, who called Dodgers games on radio and TV for 67 years, is one of the most beloved people in Los Angeles history. Like many Southern Californians, I grew up listening to him almost daily. As long as I live, he’ll be the voice of the Dodgers.

But to Kee’s preschool-age daughter, Scully was originally a legend for another reason entirely.

When she took a baseball signed by Scully to school to show her classmates, she told them that Scully “puts gas in our cars” — a reflection of the fact that she knew him not from his Dodgers broadcasts, but from the many TV spots he filmed for 76.

Vinny, sadly, is no longer with us. But the 76 logos remain.

Vin Scully sits in the broadcasting booth at Dodger Stadium in 1999.

(Bob Carey / Los Angeles Times)

Here’s the bottom line: Human civilization is in a terrible bind, and it’s largely Big Oil’s fault.

If the U.S. had acted decisively on climate in 1988 — when scientist James Hansen told Congress “with 99% certainty” that global warming had begun — maybe we wouldn’t be experiencing such deadly heat waves and destructive storms. Maybe intense heat, wildfire smoke, melting snow and other rapidly shifting weather conditions wouldn’t be making it harder to play sports.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened.

What happened is that oil and gas companies waged a successful war to obscure the link between their products and the climate crisis, a plot first widely exposed by Inside Climate News and L.A. Times journalists. What happened is that carbon emissions kept rising, to the point where scientists are now urging us to slash those emissions more than 40% by 2030 — a gigantic lift.

It’s time to stop letting gasoline brands like 76 off the the hook, and start demanding they pay up.

That’s what California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, is trying to do with his lawsuit against the oil companies. When I asked him about the case a few months ago, he told me California is on “the same path as tobacco” in terms of the potential payout.

Under a 1998 settlement, cigarette makers agreed to pay California and dozens of other states more than $200 billion.

“There are many similarities between tobacco and opioids and lead paint,” Bonta said.

Do Walter and the Dodgers want to wait until California and other forward-looking governments and companies revoke Big Oil’s social license to operate, climate consequences between this moment and then be damned? Or do they want to choose the route of Jackie Robinson and Walter O’Malley, and go first, and help carve a path toward a world without fossil fuels?

Dodgers Mark Walter introduces tennis star and Dodgers minority owner Billie Jean King at a news conference in 2018.

(Alex Gallardo / Associated Press)

Asked to comment, Phillips 66 spokesperson Al Ortiz gave me a typical Big Oil response, saying the firm believes “efforts around climate are best addressed outside the courtroom, working collaboratively with government toward a lower-carbon future.”

“We value our relationship with the Los Angeles Dodgers and our historic connection to Dodger Stadium,” he said in an email.

Personally, I value a livable planet.

I hope Walter will help make it happen, much like he did when he and his partners saved the Dodgers from McCourt and ushered in an era of sustained excellence. Bringing the Phillips 66 sponsorship deal to an abrupt end would be akin to the Adrián González trade — a stunning, thrilling statement that shows Walter and the franchise’s commitment to what’s right and just.

In that case, the Dodgers winning a World Series. In this case, a habitable climate for ourselves and future generations.

I’m sure it wasn’t easy for Vin Scully to stop smoking. But he did it, for his health and for his family.

That was his burden; this is Mark Walter’s. Stop going to bat for Big Oil.

This column is the latest edition of Boiling Point, an email newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. You can sign up for Boiling Point here. And for more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X.

Tuesday’s newsletter incorrectly stated, based on reporting from another news organization, that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has sided with Oregon ranchers in a Klamath River Basin water dispute. The agency has actually sided against the ranchers.