Reality offsets: Climate meets capitalism at the Olympic Games

Abstract

In the era of undeniable climate crisis, investors too have become wary of corporate greenwashing. Far from heralding progress, this development appears to legitimise a collective greenwashing project better described as corporate environmentalism. Through this meta-greenwashing, corporations as a bloc are exploiting their communicative platforms to renarrate climate crisis into climate opportunity, positioning the corporation as an indispensable agent of overcoming the crisis. From one perspective, the entry of big capital into climate discourse promises to overcome the contradiction between endless growth and a finite planet. Yet, from another, it merely sustains the contradiction, fuelled by unjustified hope. This article critiques corporate environmentalism through the example of the Olympic Games. As the world’s largest media event that fuses half the population by technology while producing vast carbon emissions, the Games has in recent decades countered environmental critique through policies and discourses exemplary of corporate environmentalism. Analysing Olympic sustainability discourse shows how it sustains the double reality of climate crisis and capitalism by conjuring a seductive vision of a future of sustainability – a vision that floats free of present-day unsustainability in the same way net-zero targets rely on leaps of faith and undeveloped technologies. The examples analysed show how a new grammar of ‘future perfect sustainability’ offsets environmental concerns by rendering the present in light of a hoped-for future sustainability, just as it pushes sustainability ever farther away.

Keywords

Climate change climate hypocrisy corporate environmentalism discourse greenwashing Olympic Games

Are we entering a new phase in the dialectic of capitalism and climate change? As states defend their ‘ambitious’ Paris Agreement pledges and corporations parade net-zero targets, scientists grimly note the unreality of both (Dyke et al., 2021) and the UN Secretary-General slams climate lies, empty pledges and broken promises. Climate deniers are no longer the chief concern; that honour now belongs to the climate hypocrites – so-called sustainability leaders parading unfulfillable promises. This apparent hypocrisy has led observers to critique the wishful thinking (Austin, 2019), ‘blah blah blah’ (Henriquez, 2021) and ‘bullshit’ (Stevenson, 2020) of climate politics. While the political-economy explanation of climate crisis is as simple as it is effective – we are all vulgar Marxists now (Clemens, 2015) – what is new is the depth of the split that has opened up between unchanged everyday practices and the looming reality of massive climate disruption. Underlying this climate ‘double reality’ (Norgaard, 2011: 5–6) is a ‘new political grammar’ (Wallace-Wells, 2022) devoted to ‘sustaining the unsustainable’ (Blühdorn, 2007), and it has entered into mainstream discourse.

This article investigates the role of imaginary sustainability in sustaining this contradiction. A discourse perspective links climate change understandings to political outcomes (Hulme, 2009; Leiserowitz, 2006; Lorenzoni et al., 2006; Zhao et al., 2011). Some researchers trivialise discourse as an epiphenomenon that can be dismissed because it is a ‘mere’ representation itself. Yet, most people encounter anthropogenic climate change in symbolically mediated form rather than through direct experience. While this is especially relevant when it comes to understanding how social movements influence policy, it holds true too for scientists and policymakers. Just as the social reality of climate change is created in and through discourse, so too are the political and policy mechanisms that shape climate responses (Bulkeley, 2000: 774; Dryzek, 2005: 2–5; Hall, 1993; Princen, 2008: 3–4; Sovacool et al., 2020: 274; Ungar, 2000).

‘Risks of communication’ threaten the translation of climate change between discursive spheres (Weingart et al., 2000). Even within societies that show a high degree of scientific literacy on climate change, cultural values and ideologies shape how public understandings of climate change are translated into politics and policy (Kahan et al., 2012). These cultural values are encoded in the metaphors, narratives, and other rhetorical devices through which climate change becomes salient to social groups (Jasanoff, 2010; Lakoff, 2010; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Ungar, 2000). These rhetorical devices help make climate change meaningful at social and individual levels within the public sphere. They engender the interpretations, emotions, affects, and connotations that constitute people’s personal ‘relationships’ to climate change, and shape whether they understand it as a challenge, a crisis or a catastrophe, for example, as well as who is to blame, who should act, how and at what cost.

Such subjective relationships, far more than scientific literacy, will influence climate’s voyage through the socio-political sphere. My point of departure in this article is that these relationships are being formed in the context of the collective ‘greenwashing’ project of ‘symbolic corporate environmentalism’ (Bowen, 2014), which rewrites the climate crisis from the vantage point of its inevitable resolution. In so doing, it recasts present-day unsustainability as the ‘becoming-sustainable’ and enshrines the legitimacy of the corporation as the agent of climate solutions while dismissing the need for strong state regulations. The growing presence of this ‘future perfect sustainability’ will only widen the gap between climate science and public policy, and threatens to enable dangerous levels of global heating. This article shows this process in operation through a perhaps unlikely target, the Olympic Games and its governing institution, the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

Ephemeral, exceptional, nationalistic and overhyped, the Olympics are ready-made to be dismissed as objects of serious social inquiry. But we should be cautious when dismissing their significance. The Olympics are a global mega-event that occupies a unique cultural niche, one that carries emotive personal meaning for audiences and generates billions of dollars through sponsorship and advertising programmes. Not only is the Olympic Games the most-watched media event, but the Games provide ‘a nearly unparalleled global communications opportunity’ (Holden et al., 2008: 884). Through the mass spectacle of the Opening Ceremony to the sponsorship arrangements with global corporations like Dow Chemical and Coca-Cola, through its Permanent Observer status at the United Nations to its influence on the elite networks that promote bids to host the Games, the Olympics enjoys an outsized role in shaping global narratives of sustainability. As this article details, the sustainability narratives issued from the ‘Olympic platform’ (Price, 2009) go beyond greenwashing the Olympics. They constitute a dangerous vision of ‘future perfect sustainability’ that suspends present-day practices through the retroactive logic of legacy.

Founded in 1894, the IOC is headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland. It is structured as a non-governmental organisation (NGO) and commands $7.4B in annual income, largely from broadcast and marketing rights (International Olympic Committee (IOC), 2020). The IOC claims the Olympic Games will be ‘climate positive’ (i.e. beyond carbon neutral) by 2030 and the IOC’s internal operations will be from 2024 (IOC, 2021). They have sought to cast the Olympics as an enlightened environmental leader. But here, I show how Olympic environmentalism normalises a dangerous brand of corporate environmentalism that builds a unified socio-ecological vision disconnected from the many present-day challenges wrought by climate change. The Olympic vision of a future in which sustainability will have been achieved – future perfect sustainability – is seductive because it is partly built from plausible elements: faith in the transformational power of technology and innovation, for example. And yet, it offers little more than imaginary wish-fulfilment. It displaces critique and planning with hyper-investment in the future. The premise is not present-day unsustainability but the guarantee of future sustainability; the narrative logic flows backwards from there. Time has been reversed and, with it, cause and effect. It is enough to sustain business as usual.

In this article, I describe the temporal reversal and hyper-investment of future perfect sustainability through a discourse analysis of Olympic environmental media. The pillars of my argument rest upon the peculiar modality structuring Olympic environmental discourse: a future-perfect grammar in which climate crisis is retroactively narrated from its imaginary future resolution. I begin by locating my approach to Olympic sustainability narratives within the existing literature. Then I outline my argument, cover the historical development of Olympic greening, and reconstruct future perfect sustainability through examples drawn from across Olympic media. Finally, I consider the implications for the climate crisis generally.

Olympic sustainability

Most scholarly work on the Olympics and the environment takes the approach of the sympathetic critic. This includes research from the sports and events management fields (Del Fiacco and Orr, 2019; Geeraert and Gauthier, 2018; Girginov and Hills, 2009; Gold and Gold, 2013; Holden et al., 2008; Karamichas, 2013; Ross and Leopkey, 2017; VanWynsberghe et al., 2021) and historical scholarship detailing the emergence of sustainability policy within the movement (Aragón-Pérez, 2017, 2019; Cantelon and Letters, 2000). A less sympathetic literature addresses the environmental aspects of the Olympics from a broadly Marxian critical theory approach. Its most prolific exponent is Jules Boykoff, an academic and regular media commentator (Boykoff, 2014, 2016, 2021; Boykoff and Gaffney, 2020; Boykoff and Mascarenhas, 2016). Other notable voices include Helen Lenskyj (1998, 2008) and Toby Miller (2017). These critics target the Games’ complicity in environmental destruction and the IOC’s corruption, hypocrisy and unaccountability.

These classes of scholarship can be characterised as critiques within the dominant frameworks of ecological modernisation and sustainable development, on the one hand, and anti-capitalist critiques, on the other. Despite their differences, their critiques are both based on identifying discrepancies between Olympic words and actions. Where they are critical, they seek to reveal hypocrisy between the Olympics’ self-styled eco-sensitivity and their material practices. I suggest that this is an inherently limited form of critique to apply to the Olympic Games. By holding the Games to account on their own terms, they are treated as an isolated entity, effectively extracted from the broader socio-political environment of environmental communication. This environment is comprised of networks of stakeholders including audiences, corporate sponsors and governments. Given the Olympics’ cultural prominence, to not bring these networks into the analytical frame when examining the Olympics as an institution is to miss the true significance of Olympic environmentalism.

Although the IOC is an NGO, the Olympics, in their periodic iterations and in their continuous institutional role, are a platform (Price, 2009), a self-sanctioned ‘open’ site for the exploration of questions that arise from changing conditions of national and global subjectivity and collectivity (MacAloon, 2010: 102). Global environmental questions fall within this ambit, as do questions of the role of the global corporation. Thus, here I employ an analytical notion that encompasses greenwashing but goes beyond it to capture the collective ideological project conducted by global capital through individual corporations, their networks and allied entities – in this case the Olympic movement.

In general, greenwashing denotes organisations engaging in misleading messaging about their concern and or conduct in relation to the environment (Boykoff and Gaffney, 2020). Their public relations and advertising arms are commissioned to promote stories containing falsehoods and partial truths. Yet, because it relies on critically differentiating ‘rhetoric’ from ‘reality’, something often highly technical, not practically feasible, and deeply implicated in ideological norms of what constitutes ‘sustainability’, operationalising the concept of greenwashing proves difficult, especially now that corporations are attuned to evading such charges.

This study navigates around these limitations by applying an analytical framework of symbolic corporate environmentalism (Bowen, 2014). To appreciate the distinctions made available by this framework, it is helpful to situate it amid the broader concept of corporate environmentalism (CE). CE is the active adoption by companies of a role that will ‘solve’ sustainability problems through technological innovation and the introduction of ‘green’ products (Dauvergne and Lister, 2013; Hoffman, 2001; Wright and Nyberg, 2014). CE has been institutionalised to some extent through voluntary reporting initiatives such as the Carbon Disclosure Project and the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. CE creates ‘new roles, identities and meanings’ for employees and consumers, such as aligning economic growth and consumerism with sustainability. Like ecological modernisation, CE is presented as ‘win-win’ instead of a trade-off between growth and sustainability. CE is a useful concept because it can help to reveal how corporations, under pressure and no longer able to deny or ignore the reality of the deterioration in our planet’s health, now openly admit the seriousness of ‘the sustainability challenge’ – even if they do so while carefully sidestepping their own culpability in it. Symbolic corporate environmentalism (SCE) adopts the premises of CE but expands them further. So, while CE focuses on organisations’ strategic use of environmental communications in an ad hoc manner, SCE takes a broader view and sees ‘corporations as mediators and constructors of environmental discourse’ (Bowen, 2014).

I apply four major elements of the shift from greenwashing to SCE. First, rather than seeing corporate environmental communication as greenwashing that seeks competitive advantage through reputation, it sees it as an effort to control environmental rhetoric. Second, rather than being directed towards ensuring legitimacy and social licence to operate, it aims to ensure the status and authority of the corporation in an environmentally conscious situation. Third, rather than a deliberate, firm-level strategy, SCE is an emergent strategy that exists in the institutional fields in which companies operate, that is built from interactions between diverse agents (consumers, regulators, trading partners, media, etc). Without implying that it is coordinated, the collective dimension of CE serves corporate interest in general. Fourth, SCE includes actions as part of the symbolic field (Bowen, 2014). In short, SCE enables us to view not merely how organisations are creatively engaging in CE, but how they collectively are reconstituting the environmental problematic on their own terms. When a bloc of interests succeeds in instituting its favoured interpretation of a shared social concern, that account has become hegemonic (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 135–136). It has become naturalised common sense. Attempts to redefine or speak outside of the hegemonic frame are seen as detached from reality. They may even be unintelligible. As I will argue, future perfect sustainability is part of a collective effort on behalf of capital interest to renarrate ecological crisis and normalise the dangerous brand of CE that distracts and deflects from capitalist unsustainability by procuring hyper-investment in an ungrounded future vision. The discursive scenes of this collective effort are elite fora such as the World Economic Forum at Davos and Olympic meetings themselves, where epistemic communities (Haas, 1992) are forged and maintained that sustain the idea that sustainable capitalism has no alternative.

Future perfect sustainability

Future perfect sustainability begins at the end. It invokes a retroactive logic in which present-day sustainability challenges are understood through the inevitability of their solutions – and inevitability grounded in the unimaginability of their failure. The original, grammatical sense, of the future perfect describes an action that will have been completed. I use it in this sense to denote the vision of environmental peace that anchors Olympic sustainability storytelling. Perfect here also connotes the mystical, fantasmatic dimension of this vision, which is eco-utopian in its unjustified idealism. I will argue that future perfect sustainability’s narrative structure is both simple and mythical – it is organised around its own endpoint: an imaginary millennium of sustainability that invites audiences to suspend judgement and view present-day unsustainability as the becoming-sustainable.

The grammatical concept of the future perfect has been critically employed previously. Elizabeth Povinelli applied it to the narrative of sacrificial love that the Bush Administration used to legitimate the deaths of American soldiers in the Iraq War. The narrative of sacrifice reinscribed the brutal deaths of citizens from the point of view that they will have been necessary to the securing of peace. This retroactive logic suspends critical engagement. The present, in all of its fractured, troubled nature, ‘becomes a mode of pastness by being projected into a perfected future’ (Povinelli, 2011: 168). Although on different terrain, the same temporal logic operates in Olympic sustainability narratives. Future perfect sustainability nurtures an overwhelmingly reassuring vision of socio-ecological reconciliation. This retroactive denouement mystifies and distracts from actually existing unsustainability (Barry, 2012). Projected backwards from a perfected future, it ‘swallows up the possibility of a more complex mode of dwelling in the fractured present’ (Povinelli, 2011: 168). Functioning as a fantasy, it proposes a transcendent vision of sustainability as the resolution of immanent material contradictions.

In the weak regulatory environment of global neoliberalism, industry’s stature as actor and narrator of the planetary environmental story has grown. Puffery, an accepted and legal form of bullshit in the culture of advertising and public relations, is now incorporated into corporate environmental communication. In turn, it exerts power over public debate and policymaking. This amounts to the transfer of governance into private hands and it necessitates critical scholars holding the private sector to account for its practices in this domain (Banerjee, 2010). Here I scrutinise the part played by the Olympics in this privatisation of environmental governance.

Background

Until the 1990s, the IOC did not see the environment as relevant to the Olympics, beyond the occasional issuing of platitudes at formal meetings. It was the swelling of widely publicised environmental protests around the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics that forced a change of mind-set among the IOC leadership, which had hitherto not seen the environment as a particularly relevant issue. In the construction phase of the Albertville Games, news reports began to appear that painted disturbing pictures of the destruction of sensitive alpine ecosystems, and indiscriminate siting of infrastructure like roads, pylons and concrete blocks. The emerging ‘environmental disaster’ (Cantelon and Letters, 2000) received global media attention and was condemned by the European Parliament and the Council of Europe. Two years later came what the IOC praised as the ‘first truly ecological Games’ (Christie, 1994) – those of Lillehammer 1994. The Norwegian Winter Games were not only ecologically respectful, but they also pioneered new organisational strategies for minimising environmental-political conflict. Popular environmental consciousness was rising amid such events as James Hansen’s Congressional testimony about the impacts of climate change (1988), the Exxon Valdez spill (1989) and the Rio Earth Summit (1992). It was also then that sustainable development (SD) and ecological modernisation (EM) were in their fertile growth period. While they have differences, SD and EM share the conviction that social and economic development can be ‘decoupled’ from ecological harm and cooperation can replace environmental conflict through such policy insights as ‘pollution prevention pays’ (Hajer, 1995: 3).

Between its Albertville and Lillehammer experiences of 1992 and 1994, the IOC learned that it ‘must be seen to be responding to global environmental concerns’ (Cantelon and Letters, 2000: 305). The Olympic Charter (its ‘constitution’) was amended in 1994 (Rogge, 2007a) to include a clause committing the IOC ‘to encourage and support a responsible concern for environmental issues, to promote SD in sport and to require that the Olympic Games are held accordingly’ (IOC, 2019: 17). It was amended in 2003 to state that the IOC will also ‘promote a positive legacy from the Olympic Games to the host cities, regions and countries’ (Gold and Gold, 2013: 3530). In communications promoting Olympic greening, the IOC claimed to place environment at the heart of how it runs the world’s largest mega-event.

For the Olympics, these early environmental reforms might have headed off the waves of criticism of the 1990s, but they were not the end of the matter. The two major policy additions in the recent era have been Agenda 2020, adopted, with its ‘three pillars’ of Sustainability, Credibility, and Youth, in 2014, and the New Norm, adopted in 2018. While President Bach will cite these developments as proactive responses to the ‘sea of troubles’ (Bach, 2021) that the IOC was facing (Russian doping, Korean political tensions, social unrest in Rio, COVID-19), in this period, the Olympics was being widely perceived as unsustainable, lacking credibility and self-focused. Turning ‘the challenges into opportunities’ is how Bach describes the IOC’s response in the form of Agenda 2020.

Yet, Agenda 2020 fails to cover incentives for Olympic hosts towards achieving environmental sustainability, limiting any significant change in this area (Geeraert and Gauthier, 2018). What this period of reform has generated, however, is a significant quantity of communications on Olympic sustainability. These communications make up the corpus of the discourse analysis conducted here. They comprise the Agenda 2020 reports (Bach, 2021), the Sustainability Strategy (IOC, 2017), the Climate Solutions Framework co-authored with Dow (2016), Sustainability through Sport (IOC, 2012), and the Sustainability Essentials guidebooks for the wider Olympic movement (IOC, 2016, 2018). These documents offer a view into how sustainability came to be considered one of the Olympics’ great contributions – part of its legacy.

Legacy

Legacy is our raison d’être. It ensures that the Olympic Games are more than metres and medals . . . Values, partnership and legacy are all required to turn the Olympic Games into an enduring celebration of the human spirit. (Rogge, 2007b)

Within the IOC and among bid and organising committees, legacy has become a defining feature of Olympic discourse (MacAloon, 2008: 2064). In this usage, it stands for the array of overwhelmingly positive impacts that hosting the Games supposedly generates, over decades-long timeframes. Legacy refers to the physical legacies of infrastructure and facilities left behind by the Games, but also the cultural legacies such as residents’ morale and sports participation and the ineffable ‘prestige’. Wrapped up in this meaning is an extension of the Olympic mission of creating a better world through sport. One of those outcomes is sustainability which itself has become sucked into the vortex of the legacy vision. From the Albertville experience through the ‘green Games’ of Sydney 2000 and Beijing 2008’s closely observed Sydney lessons, Olympic legacy talk is Olympic sustainability talk (Gold and Gold, 2013).

Trafficking legacy discourse around the globe is a ‘proliferating tribe of transnational bid consultants’ (MacAloon, 2008: 2070). These consultants, almost entirely Anglophone, work across multiple Games editions, selling their services on the basis of their involvement in previous winning bids. As a result, their fingerprints are detectable on most Games bids and, thus, Games. It becomes incumbent on cities to replicate the winning formula in a sort of ‘coercive isomorphism’ (Pentifallo and VanWynsberghe, 2012). Bid consultants are just part of the ‘coalition of beneficiaries’ invested in the staging of Games but all beneficiaries are now carriers of the legacy discourse, the essence of which is that mega-events self-evidently generate desirable long-term outcomes (Grix et al., 2017).

In the same period, in which cities are pulling their bids because they realise that the Olympic legacy is usually one of unsustainable debt, idle infrastructure and social displacement, legacy talk has proliferated within Olympic discourse. It wins bid competitions. A concern for the future is undoubtedly a good thing. MacAloon (2008: 2065) asks, who ‘could be against’ the commitment to leave durable positive outcomes for local communities and the Olympic movement? It is this unassailable appeal, however, that has led legacy to exert a ‘magical’ effect on Olympic discourse. From a critical perspective, legacy, like sustainability, derives its meaning from standing for a future that can only be imagined. Legacy’s seductive magic arises because its emptiness is also its fullness. It invites its audience to imagine the kind of future they want. It provides plausible-enough justifications for how this future might be reached. And it enables the system of elite-driven global mega-events to keep on spinning. Legacy talk is talk in the grammar of the future perfect because its justification for the unsustainable present is the sustainable past it will have become. The following examples of Olympic sustainability storytelling seek to draw attention to how this narrative reversal is a core feature of sustainability discourse in general.

The world witnessed this deliberately instituted narrative arc in the Rio Olympics Opening Ceremony, globally the most-watched television event of 2016. Creative Director Fernando Meirelles described his intention to create a ‘ceremony about the world’, to ‘celebrate mankind’. The Amazon rainforest here and its native inhabitants served as a kind of original Eden, and the birth of civilisation was narrated metaphorically through the arrival of the Portuguese and the rapid urbanisation of São Paulo. The upbeat fiesta of samba, rap and breakdancing, the music fades out, the stadium darkens, the performers exit the stage, and the tone turns markedly sombre. Satellite imagery and data visualisations are projected across the stadium, dramatising the accumulating greenhouse gases, melting ice caps, disappearance of Greenland and rising sea levels swamping cities from Shanghai to Lagos to Amsterdam. ‘What a challenge for the coastline cities. . . Is there a way out?’

The answer, quite inexplicably, arrives in the next scene. An indigenous boy dressed in urban attire, walking sombrely across the barren landscape stage, looks down and sees a lone seedling sprouting in the street. He kneels before it as piano softly plays, before Judi Dench and Fernanda Montenegro recite the Carlos Drummond de Andrade poem A Flor e a Nausea (The Flower and the Nausea):

A flower has sprouted in the street

Buses, street cars, steel stream of traffic steer clear

A flower, still pale, has fooled the police.

It’s breaking through the asphalt.

Let’s have complete silence

Halt all business

I swear that a flower has been born

Its colour is uncertain

It’s not showing its petals

Its name isn’t in the books

It’s ugly, but it really is a flower

I sit down on the ground of the nation’s capital

At five in the afternoon

And fondle with my fingers this precarious form

It’s ugly, but it’s a flower

It broke through the asphalt

Tedium, disgust, and hate

(Rio 2016 Opening Ceremony Full HD Replay | Rio 2016 Olympic Games, 2016)

The seedling’s defiance of the concrete jungle is accompanied by video projections of seeds sprouting, trees being planted, as if the ‘cycle’ of human civilisation overwhelming nature had come full circle – a return to Eden. Attention turns to the symbolism of the native Brazilian seedlings to be ceremonially planted in the Athlete’s Forest.

The point at which the flower bursts through the concrete is the point at which the Olympic sustainability narrative takes the unaccounted leap into the future perfect. Never had the environment been addressed so directly in an Opening Ceremony. This stirring, stadium-scale depiction of the triumph of nature over the depredations of humans, broadcast to billions of viewers, of course, came amid the failure of the much-hyped effort to clean up Rio’s Guanabara Bay, notorious as a dumping ground for garbage, animal corpses and the raw sewage of half the city (ABC News, 2016). In crucial ways this, however, is beside the point. Opening Ceremonies are stagings of national narratives of progress from the ‘magic’ and mystery of particularistic local cultures into a global, universal, rational, open future (Malanski, 2020). Although these imaginative visions are future-oriented utopias, their chief function is to project this utopianism onto the events of the present.

Such ‘spectacular reassurance strategies’ (Gunderson, 2020) align conveniently with the Olympic mission of creating ‘a better world through sport’ (IOC, 2019: 15). Visions employed by organisations and societies are not merely rhetorical flourishes that are inconsequential compared to the ‘rational’ prescriptions of policy and strategy. On the contrary, visions activate the crucial function of subjective investment in particular policies over others. Visions ‘can be used to open some futures and close others, and to narrowly redefine or even shut out some narratives’ (Sovacool et al., 2020: 674).

As Povinelli notes, the future perfect is a grammatical tense and social construct through which ‘the ethical nature of present action is interpreted from the point of view of a reflexive future horizon and its cognate discourses’ (Povinelli, 2011: 3). Future perfect sustainability shapes the contours of time around a future vision of social-ecological reconciliation. This is effected not through a rational consideration of cause and effect but through the cultivation of a vision of the future in which humankind’s trespasses on nature are forgiven and the flower breaks through the asphalt. To the extent that it overwhelms the rational faculties of its audiences, this vision effects an imaginary resolution of the material contradictions of capitalism.

This vision is cultivated on the image gracing the front cover of the IOC’s Sustainability Strategy (IOC, 2017). In this vision of socio-ecological harmony (see Figure 1), leaping gymnasts, sprint cyclists and distance runners share lush green grass. Sailors and kayakers cruise pristine waters alongside leaping dolphins. Beijing’s Birds Nest stadium sits next to a skyscraper. Gulls, a jetliner and a cloud of snow powder from the ski jump share the sky. Engineers survey blueprints next to a row of multi-coloured recycle bins. A multi-ethnic group of spectators huddle together. Fantasies, of which this image is an example, can make certain antagonisms invisible, and constitute others in ways that strip them of their ideological content (Mulvihill and Bruzzone, 2018: 71). In this image, the Games are integrated harmoniously into the ecosystem, the Olympic Rings are emblazed across the middle of an expansive green, grassy area. The Olympics barely encroaches on the natural world.

Figure 1.

Front cover of the official Olympic ‘Sustainability Strategy’ (IOC, 2017).

This is a highly stylised representation, but therein lies its essence. It constructs and perpetuates an ahistorical space of sustainability. It shapes the temporal frame of Olympic environmental narrative in ways that produce the present as the necessary part of a fantasmatic future. The ‘time-of-no-time’ in this future vision can be understood as Benjamin’s messianic time, a ‘sacred, simultaneity across past, present and future’ (see Eisenlohr, 2004: 84). It is a eutopia (no-place) and though it pretends to offer a guiding light towards an improved society, it stands in for actual progress, soothing the anxieties of those who suspect progress is has reached its limit (Klein, 2001: 470–471).

The modern Olympics, as the Ancient before them, are machines of meaning-production – for athletes, for nations and for humankind. As one senior marketing executive described it, ‘the Olympics are about dreams, dreams that consumers can share with athletes’ (Seguin et al., 2008). Dreams are the modern, capitalistic version of myths. Of course, such visions cloud rational judgement and ‘can enable powerful actors to hide serious problems and encourage incomplete solutions’ (Sovacool et al., 2020: 678). Such visions are regularly interspersed through the grammar of Olympism, punctuating seemingly rational discourse with a compelling vision of (future perfect) sustainability so amenable to audience investment that it effaces contrary evidence.

This investment was in circulation in June 2019 as Thomas Bach presided over the opening of the new Olympic headquarters beside Lake Geneva in Lausanne. Gleaming white surfaces meet glass and steel in an architectural vision of eco-modernism representing transparency, unity and sustainability. Although its functional purpose is as a unified headquarters for the IOC, official discourse emphasises Olympic House’s symbolic value. Recognized with three sustainable building certifications, Olympic House is ‘one of the most sustainable buildings in the world’. It is a literal ‘testimony to our sustainability commitment’ (Bach, 2021).

The Danish firm that designed it writes that Olympic House embodies the IOC’s values of transparency, unity, collaboration, fair play, and sustainability (3xn, 2019). ‘Allowing the IOC HQ’s inhabitants’ daily work to be visible’ reflects the ‘fair play and open values’ of the organisation. Olympic House aims to embody the three pillars of Olympic Agenda 2020: credibility, sustainability, youth (Bach, 2021). More significantly, its architectural grammar matches the new discourse the IOC has lately adopted. In its attempts to cast off its aristocratic image it has adopted a Silicon Valley-style language that is part neoliberal, part ‘creative techno-utopia’ (Kayne, 2020: 282). As much as this discourse represents a break with the IOC’s past, it shares a continuity in that it maintains the ‘cosmopolitan utopian fantasy’ that underlines IOC members’ genuine beliefs that by bringing the world together through sport, they are helping to solve its problems in the absence of politics (Kayne, 2020: 216–219). The key difference is that progress now comes not through the civilising impact of sport so much as through exposure to the rigours of market dynamism with its demands to become agile, resilient and innovative – or die. In essence, the IOC’s politics of progress now aligns with a growing Silicon Valley-led form of corporate prophecy (Pethokoukis, in Ball, 2021), emblematised by those such as Elon Musk for whom growth and technological innovation are the keys to maximising human potential and solving problems.

Olympic House shows that the IOC ‘is committed to sustainability, walks the talk and leads by example’ (IOC, 2022). Yet, this tangible ‘testimony’ to Olympic sustainability replicates the same contradictions of CE that it purports to resolve. The IOC boasts that the building is so sustainable that it gained Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum status. LEED is a building standard developed by the US Green Building Council. Although often associated with government accreditation, LEED is in fact the product of property developers, architects, and builders attempting to defuse the green threat to the building industry’s untrammelled growth (Bowen, 2014: 61, 74, 243). LEED certification often involves the ‘purchasing’ of easily obtainable points for using, for example, normal building materials like concrete and structural steel, installing bicycle racks in the garage, and preferred parking for fuel-efficient cars. Moreover, LEED certification is awarded during the design phase, which has been likened to ranking football teams before the season begins (USA Today, 2012). Many of LEED’s points are not enforced and may have little impact on the building’s day-to-day usage.

It is unsurprising that the Olympic headquarters should embody sustainability as spectacle. This is the organisation, recall, whose core competency, staging nationalist- and consumer-oriented sporting mega-events places it atop a well-populated field of global sporting spectacles. As critics have contended in relation to Apple Corporation’s similarly sustainable-spectacular headquarters, the vast, ring-shaped, Norman Foster-designed ‘groundscraper’ Apple Park in Silicon Valley which opened in 2017, the building’s sustainable-spectacular mythos is contradicted by its sprawling dimensions, its isolation from socially diverse downtown areas, and its car-dependency (Sims, 2022: 293). Such criticisms can equally be laid at the feet of the IOC’s headquarters. In the effort to create a spectacle (and centralise its workforce), the chosen site is on the outer fringe of Lausanne, where it is surrounded by asphalt carparking spaces and isolated from public transport links.

As with future perfect sustainability in general, the IOC’s spectacular headquarters Olympic House represents the future that we want to see while suspending from view the present that we don’t. There is nothing wrong with holding in mind a desirable future vision. Or even with allowing this gleaming vision of sustainability to cast its glow back onto the present. The ideological work of future perfect sustainability is in the leap into perfection. The future perfect implies that which will have been. Sustainability will have been achieved. Ideologically deployed, it implies channelling personal and political desires into a fictitious space of ecological harmony that bears no link to the present. Non-places in a time of no-time. The danger is not that this assumed, assured state of sustainability is fictitious but rather that it exists in a different spatiotemporal order to the present. Unconnected to the present, it negates the present not because it is the ideological mirror image of the unsustainability of the present but because it is the unsustainable present’s ideological supplement – the ideological, imaginary resolution of a real contradiction inevitably comes in imaginary (ideal, abstract) form. As the next section shows, just as it bends temporality, this imaginary, abstracted form enables Olympic sustainability to bend logic too.

Reality offsets

The chemical company Dow is responsible for the worst industrial disaster in global history in Bhopal and some 96 toxic waste sites across the United States alone (Rosenfeld and Feng, 2011). It is also the Olympics’ ‘Global Carbon Partner’. This arrangement enables the Olympics to claim huge quantities of carbon credits from Olympics-unrelated projects initiated by Dow, in return for Dow being able to associate itself with the Games. Dow’s Climate Solutions Framework (Dow, 2016) was developed out of this partnership and is premised on a rhetorical sleight-of-hand capturing the logic of future perfect sustainability:

Global, large-scale sporting events have significant environmental footprints. However by mitigating the carbon impact through low-carbon technologies, events can demonstrate how collaboration, when mixed with innovation, can leave a lasting legacy for a more sustainable future. (Dow, 2016: 4)

Consider the ‘however’ in the second sentence. It does not signal that the second sentence will rebut the first. In fact they are not related. An example of an ignoratio elenchi, an irrelevant conclusion, the statement suggests sporting mega-events can produce a ‘more sustainable future’ and appears to deliver on the promise of the ‘however’ but evades the first sentence’s subject altogether. This strategic evasion of mega-events’ carbon footprints is achieved by priming the reader with the imaginary sustainable future captured in the final phrase: ‘a lasting legacy for a more sustainable future’. In other words, the future perfect is at work in the very syntax of sustainability language. In this example, ‘lasting legacy’ is what Lacan calls the ‘quilting point’, point de capiton, that punctuates what is otherwise the free-flowing chain of signifiers. It stabilises the sliding of the signified under the signifier, and retroactively commits the reader to one interpretation of the text (Lacan, 2006: 99).

The reader is to believe that events are leaving a sustainable legacy precisely because they can project a sustainability that will have been: a future perfect sustainability. This logical fallacy is enabled by the fantasmatic ‘pull’ of the sustainability fantasy that retroactively provides the interpretive key. The passage assumes what it purports to seek. In the future perfect sustainability of the ‘lasting legacy for a more sustainable future’, ‘the “promise of sustainability” ‘grants a special moral status to vague imaginary futures at the expense of concrete problems associated with environmental discourse’ (Mulvihill and Bruzzone, 2018). As such, it enables the coordination of anti-ecological capitalist practices by continually reading these practices through the future perfect: through ‘the redeemed end of a perfected social field’ (Povinelli, 2011: 67).

Conclusion

For an organisation that once lampooned the ‘intransigent disciples of ecology’ who found in the Olympics a convenient scapegoat (Gafner, 1993: 4), the IOC has embarked on a dramatic turnaround. It now places sustainability at the heart of its global mission. Yet the Olympics remains a vast global enterprise and an emblem of pre-environmental excess. Faster, higher, stronger. Citius, altius, fortius. Observing how the Olympics manage this tension provides insights into the nature of the contradiction between capitalism and planetary boundaries. Applying the framework of SCE to Olympic sustainability storytelling revealed that the Olympics resolve this tension by rendering contemporary environmental crises into the tense of the future perfect. I brought together a series of examples to show how the Olympic transformation to environmental is achieved through crafting a retroactive sustainability narrative. Present-day unsustainability is subordinated to the future imaginary resolution of present-day contradictions. This narrative then gives meaning to the present. It recasts the unsustainable as the becoming-sustainable.

While the Olympics is an unusual object to target for environmental hypocrisy, Olympic greening knits together corporate environmentalist elements in a way that highlights the grammatical and structural centrality of a longed-for future. The future perfect is a social tense that interprets present actions from a desired end point that is neither assured, democratically arrived at or rationally based. It misdirects attention from where it needs to be, the durative present, to the illusion of sustainability that will have arrived (Povinelli, 2011: 12). Future perfect sustainability is wish-fulfilment for late capitalism.

It is not easy to be a ‘stable hypocrite’, as Feldman and March (in Bowen, 2014: 71) put it. Sustainability discourse can introduce uncertainties that destabilise faith in the dominant order (Torgerson, 1995). Yet, this perspective misses the crucial difference between greenwashing and SCE, the difference at the centre of the future perfect strategy. Green talk does make you open to charges of hypocrisy if you adhere to business-as-usual. But when business-as-usual incorporates sustainability discourse, the critical task is not to compare rhetoric to reality – this distinction is untenable – but to address how reality itself is being shaped by sustainability rhetoric.

The Olympics have not adopted a consciously deceptive strategy to placate environmental critics. Rather, future perfect sustainability is a symptom of underlying, unresolved contradictions. In this analysis, I have hoped to show what the Olympics’ negotiation with the environmental problematic can tell us about how other organisations, especially corporations, are doing it, and how capitalist ideology negotiates it. Future perfect sustainability replaces the very coordinates of reality– time and space, cause and effect – with the sublime abstraction of a future free from unsustainability. A corporate environmentalist metaphysics is being born that ‘resolves’ the material – physical – contradictions of capitalism, by giving up on them. From a planetary perspective, nothing has changed, of course. The material contradictions of capitalism will continue generating new ecological risks and heightening existing ones, even as these unfortunate events are remnants of a past that will have been overcome.

Future perfect sustainability exists at the cultural-ideological level, yet it is an expression of capital expansion confronting its inherent limits. Yet, these laws assume a rational understanding of temporality and causality. As full-blown ecological crisis draws ever nearer, political-economic contradictions can be resolved at either end of the material-ideological spectrum – either systemic political-economic change, or by corrupting the relation between present and future, cause and effect. In this ‘reality offsetting’, present-day troubles become the necessary part of a glorious future. Climate hypocrisy and bullshit are sustained through an imaginary, narrative resolution of a real, structural contradiction. We may expect to see more of it, and the widening of the climate double reality, until there is social change at a material level.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Prof Brett Hutchins for his comments on earlier versions of this article, and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research for this article was undertaken as part of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant DP200103360.

ORCID iD

Ben Glasson

Biographical note

Ben Glasson is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in culture, media, and climate change. His research critically analyses linguistic and cultural obstacles to climate action, examining their interplay with formations such as subjectivity, nationhood, gender, and modernity.His research is published in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Continuum, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, and the Journal of Political Ideologies.

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