We watched LA burn this year. If you’re not from around here, you might have seen it unfold in the news like so many other infernos. Neighborhoods in ashes. People in shock.
I was nearby when it happened in January, visiting home from New York to attend a family member’s funeral. As a climate journalist, I was thankful that I wasn’t covering this disaster in real time. Instead, I was with my family, trying to keep track of which freeways were closed because of the blazes, whether that might keep any of us from reaching the service, and whether the flames might be headed our way.
That’s become a part of life in Southern California. It’s getting worse with climate change as higher temperatures and drought suck the landscape dry, creating more fuel for fires. When I moved back to California this spring, my editor asked me what I would miss most about New York. I said water (and public transportation). I meant not having to agonize over every extra drop that comes out of a faucet when I’m not using it.
Climate change really fucking sucks in Los Angeles
This is a longwinded way of saying that climate change really fucking sucks in Los Angeles. Now, on top of that, we have to deal with the latest Clippers’ scandal — franchise owner and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer allegedly circumventing the NBA’s salary cap to secure star player Kawhi Leonard through a carbon credit scheme.
It’s the juiciest sports scandal of the year, and, if true, a serious blow to the system that’s supposed to ensure a level playing field regardless of whether your team’s owner is one of the richest people in the world. It’s also part of a bigger environmental disaster. Breaking the rules of the game under the guise of caring about the planet just adds insult to injury for the Clippers’ community, which has been hit hard by climate change.
Admittedly, this whole thing has been a real struggle to wrap my head around, even as someone who writes about weird carbon shenanigans. So kudos to journalist Pablo Torre for breaking the news on his podcast this month after digging into bankruptcy files and speaking to former employees of a self-proclaimed “climate-friendly” bank called Aspiration that has close ties to Ballmer.
Leonard silently inked a $28 million endorsement deal with Aspiration, which Torre and former Aspiration employees allege was a way for the Clippers to get around the salary cap that the NBA has in place to spread out the league’s talent by restricting teams’ ability to simply buy all of the top players. Aspiration also had endorsement deals with Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr., and Drake. Leonard got more money than all of them combined, but he never actually promoted the brand in any kind of ad, event, or social media post, and Aspiration never even made any kind of public announcement about the endorsement deal. Around the same time, Ballmer personally invested $50 million in Aspiration, which Torre’s reporting alleges could have funded Leonard’s “no-show job.”
What would Leonard have promoted had he done that job? Aspiration helped companies, including Microsoft and Meta, purchase carbon credits to try to offset their climate pollution. Aspiration also became a founding partner of the Clippers’ new arena, the Intuit Dome, through a $300 million sponsorship announced in 2021. “There is a responsibility associated with building the best arena in the world,” Ballmer said in a press release at the time, claiming that the arena would “operate 100% carbon-free from day one.”
Together, Aspiration and the Clippers would offer fans a “Planet Protection Fund,” allowing them to pay a fee to offset some of their own carbon emissions. Last week, Torre’s podcast revealed that the Clippers also paid Aspiration $56 million for carbon credits in 2022, ostensibly to offset Intuit Dome’s emissions. Suspiciously, the Clippers made payments to Aspiration around the same time that the environmental firm was paying out Leonard. By 2024, the Department of Justice was reportedly investigating Aspiration over whether it was misleading people with shoddy carbon credits. The company went bankrupt in March, and in August of this year, Aspiration cofounder Joseph Sanberg agreed to plead guilty to defrauding investors and lenders in a $248 million scheme.
The Clippers didn’t reply to The Verge’s requests for comment from Ballmer, Leonard, or the franchise. Nor did they immediately answer questions about whether the Intuit Dome is currently carbon neutral and, if so, whether that relies on carbon credits brokered by Aspiration. A statement from the Clippers last week says that the team contracted with Aspiration to purchase carbon credits, but that Ballmer “was duped on the investment and some parts of this agreement, as were many other investors and employees.” And in a statement to Torre, the Clippers denied allegations that it circumvented the salary cap — allegations the NBA is now investigating.
In full transparency, I’m writing this from a Lakers-loving household, where gossiping about the Clippers has become dinner-table talk for a couple weeks now thanks to Torre’s investigation.
This is far from the first controversy involving carbon credits, which are at the root of so much corporate greenwashing
But this is far from the first controversy involving carbon credits, which are at the root of so much corporate greenwashing. Each carbon credit is supposed to represent a metric ton of planet-warming CO2 pollution captured or avoided — typically by planting trees or preventing deforestation. Companies and individual consumers might buy these credits to try to cancel out their own pollution, but the actual climate benefits are often overstated, if not nonexistent. Planting a tree doesn’t ensure that it’ll survive for a century or more, a minimum standard to have a meaningful impact on the climate. And there are a lot of concerns about double-counting the amount of carbon stored.
Even before the Aspiration drama came to light, Ballmer had jumped on a bandwagon of what many call a false solution to climate change. And in LA, the consequences of climate change are visceral. Fire season has grown longer in California as a result of human-caused climate change. The January fires that tore through Pacific Palisades and Altadena in Los Angeles County killed at least 31 people (and one study found that excess deaths could have been as high as 440) and destroyed 16,000 homes and buildings. Global warming made the hot, arid conditions that supercharged the fire 35 percent more likely, one study found.
Wildfire smoke has become a bigger health risk that could lead to tens of thousands more premature deaths in the US in coming years. And worsening smog is yet another insidious side effect of climate change. Cars, trucks, and power plants that burn fossil fuels emit carbon dioxide and smog-forming pollutants. Hotter temperatures happen to speed up the chemical reaction that creates smog.
That all reminds me to check the air quality as I write this from my backyard, it’s currently “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” which is “similar to yesterday at about this time.” I’m not too far from Leonard’s hometown of Moreno Valley; we both grew up in the often overlooked Inland Empire region east of LA that has some of the worst smog in the nation, according to the American Lung Association.
That’s where some of the personal heartbreak is in all of this, I guess — when you want to root for the hometown hero, and they let you down.
