Toby Miller

I'm enjoying watching the Women's Twenty20 World Cup on television in
Australia, where I spend seven weeks a year mentoring junior faculty and
giving guest lectures when professors want to escape Perth, elude the
responsibility of entertaining the great unwashed, or save their souls
from preparing one more PowerlessPointless slideshow because today we
are all 1970s art historians who just *lurv* Malevich.

The tournament is like watching [the College World
Series](http://www.ncaa.com/video/baseball/2015-06-25/college-world-series-finals-game-three-virginia-vanderbilt-highlights),
but with drastically fewer spectators. I saw almost no one in the stands
[for the semi-final in
Mumbai](http://www.icc-cricket.com/world-t20/match/women-worldt20-2016/22)
between New Zealand/Aotearoa and the West Indies (an imaginary
confederation of former British colonies in the Caribbean).

The match lasted about as long as a baseball game and was of high
quality, with dramatic slow bowling, big hitting, shrewd captaincy, and
fairly athletic fielding. The commentary was serious but delivered in
good humor, and featured big names from the past of both the women's and
men's game, such as Ian Bishop.

As I watched this match, and others before it, I was writing and editing
four columns, for a newspaper, *CST*, a football-fan website, and
*Psychology Today*. Perhaps this should be called "[Blogs by a
Nobody](http://www.classicly.com/download-the-diary-of-a-nobody-pdf)".

As I relaxed thanks to fun TV while producing these things, I pondered
the contest's lack of resonance with local spectators. [It is said that
the Indian organizers failed to promote the Women's World Cup
adequately](http://www.sportstarlive.com/cricket/international/womens-cricket-still-a-long-way-to-go/article8413925.ece).

Matches were supposedly boosted by being set up as double-headers with
the men's competition. But what did that mean? Girls played in the heat
of the day, when folks were at work; boys played in the cool of the
afternoon and evening, and families attended *en masse*. Right. Go
figure.

But as I relaxed in my hotel (as readers may recall, [I've been denied a
TV set at home, so this was a guilty
pleasure](https://cstonline.net/new-world-of-television)), I thought
about what made it possible for me to enjoy the program.

Superficially, of course, it was the sport of cricket, the players, the
TV network, and its precious, wonderful, generous advertisers.

But actually, deep down---[in fact, down, down, deeper and
down](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKe2OfXLxuc)--it was brought to me
by electricity. And hence by power. And hence by some combination of
coal and uranium.

I decided to take a peek at what we know about the environmental impact
of watching TV sports.

My childish headline, designed to catch your attention, is indeed
childish, because ratings for Twenty20 women's cricket are not massive,
[at least outside
Australia](http://www.cricket.com.au/news/womens-big-bash-league-attendance-mcg-television-ratings-broadcast-melbourne-derby/2016-01-03).
But live sport---specifically association football---has the capacity to
draw gigantic numbers of viewers. And that's where I found data and
stories.

The UK's National Grid has the gall to promote its management of peak
electricity usage based on the impact of audience viewing and activity
during half time in football matches, when people race to the kettle and
porcelain. Power use surges then by as much as 10% in what is known as
the 'TV pick-up,' because folks both boil and urinate water.

The Grid proudly illustrated this with a graph of viewership and power
surges during England's hilarious exit from the 1990 men's World Cup of
football.

![](http://cms.cstonline.net/resizeimage.php?width=500&height=317&image=http://cdn.cstonline.net/assets/image/user_92/1990SemiFinalPickups.gif){.addCaption
.aligncenter loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="418" height="266"}

Twenty-five years after that pitiful failure, the Carbon Trust has shown
that people watching football on cell phones multiply their footprint
tenfold in comparison with television or WiFi viewing. And the drain on
power sources in other countries broadcasting the Cup is certainly huge,
but rarely acknowledged:
<http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Media+Centre/WorldCup2010>;
<http://www.carbontrust.com/media/360767/carbon-bootprint-infographic.pdf>.

Clearly, the carbon bat-and-ball print of the Twenty20 Cup is not as
significant as the environmental scar that we call "football on
television."

But fans like me, who luxuriate from afar at the skills on display in
women's cricket, are complicit with the impact of team transportation,
power generation at the ground, transmission energy, our own electricity
use, and so on.

As you are all aware, the endless, repetitive *nostra* that color
debates about the effects of watching TV are conducted within
psychology, paediatrics, communications, and cultural studies. Everyone
knows what everyone thinks, and writes off contending research as
ordinary science.

No-one departs from their easy ways and comfy *clichés* to discuss the
environmental impact of their demons or pleasures.

So in amongst a certain sadness of viewing a high-quality but
ill-promoted cricket tournament, I lay back in my hotel room---pampered
but lonesome, as one is---and pondered not just the women's migrant
labor that brought me my fresh linen, superfluity of soap, and new
teabags, but the carbon footprint of my TV fun.

 

**Toby Miller** is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of
California, Riverside, the Sir Walter Murdoch Professor of Cultural
Policy Studies at Murdoch University, Profesor Invitado at the
Universidad del Norte, Professor of Journalism, Media and Cultural
Studies at Cardiff University/Prifysgol Caerdydd and Director of the
Institute for Media & Creative Industries at Loughborough University in
London. He can be contacted at <tobym69@icloud.com> and his adventures
scrutinized at [www.tobymiller.org](http://www.tobymiller.org/).

 


I’m enjoying watching the Women’s Twenty20 World Cup on television in Australia, where I spend seven weeks a year mentoring junior faculty and giving guest lectures when professors want to escape Perth, elude the responsibility of entertaining the great unwashed, or save their souls from preparing one more PowerlessPointless slideshow because today we are all 1970s art historians who just
<em>
 lurv
</em>
Malevich.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

WHY WOMEN’S TWENTY20 CRICKET IS RESPONSIBLE FOR GLOBAL WARMING