Why Climate Pledge Arena’s first banner is more important than a sports title

Perched in the Kraken owner’s suite before Tuesday’s home opener, the man responsible for some of Seattle’s signature sports happenings was discussing big-picture accomplishments.

Oak View Group co-founder Tim Leiweke once brokered the backyard deal that brought coach Pete Carroll to the Seahawks, arm-twisted Major League Soccer into awarding the Sounders franchise and orchestrated a $1.15 billion overhaul of what’s now Climate Pledge Arena to secure the Kraken and a hoped-for NBA Sonics rebirth. Leiweke, making a Seattle stopover amid a 42-day, worldwide business jaunt, knows well that the Kraken scoring just three goals in their winless first four games won’t be remembered a handful of seasons, or even weeks, from now.

He’s all about the macro, the greater vision. And in listing sports achievements, Leiweke says there’s a new one among his proudest that barely registers a peep from micro-focused local fans: Climate Pledge last week becoming the world’s first sports venue to earn Zero Carbon Certification from the nonprofit International Future Living Institute (IFLI).

“I’ve been doing this for 45 years,” said Leiweke, builder of America’s foremost sports palaces as well as championship franchises in the NHL, NBA and MLS. “At the top, I won a Stanley Cup. I’ve got like 19 (championship) rings someplace. This to me is one of the proudest things ever because this will last a lifetime. This will last my daughter’s lifetime. And I think we’re going to get the rest of the industry to answer the charge now.”

That daughter, Francesca Bodie, his likely successor atop OVG, was standing just feet away in the same owner’s suite Tuesday. She was chatting with Kraken co-owner Samantha Holloway, whose own father, David Bonderman, was recruited by Leiweke along with Hollywood mogul Jerry Bruckheimer to run this city’s NHL — and eventual NBA — team and invest in the arena and climate initiatives.

To attain certification, the arena met rigorous IFLI requirements that included 12 months of documentation proving it had eliminated fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy. Solar panels on the venue’s roof and parking garage supply electricity, while more clean power is attained through Puget Sound Energy’s Lower Snake River wind farm.

By 2025, Climate Pledge will become one of the first Seattle City Light commercial clients in a Renewable Plus program that will see the arena power all operations exclusively through self-produced solar and wind energy.

Typically, the IFLI certification takes five years. But the arena pulled it off in two.

Still, it’s hardly an overstatement to suggest that feat — not to mention Leiweke’s zero-carbon bugle call challenging other sports power brokers to match it — barely registers among fans. There were louder cheers when the Kraken’s assistant strength trainer was introduced during Tuesday’s opening night festivities than for a subsequent announcement about the zero-carbon achievement.

Which isn’t surprising. We’ve often been numbed to climate-change warnings, even as supposed “natural” disasters mount.

Our cynical side — especially in left-leaning Seattle — also tends to suspect virtue signaling and “greenwashing” by corporations touting climate initiatives while at the same time contributing to environmental pollution worldwide. Leiweke and OVG are among those corporate interests, as are their partners such as Amazon, the global retail disrupter that coined the “Climate Pledge” initiative — pledging net carbon neutrality by 2040 — and bought rights to name the Kraken’s arena after it.

And Leiweke, for his part, isn’t claiming otherwise.

“That’s true,” he said of how Amazon planes transporting merchandise keep adding to fossil-fuel emissions. “And by the way, I’m not denying that. I flew here today to get here. I get it, right? But we’ve got to start somewhere.”

His words reminded me of my trash-night misgivings when sorting items into three or four different-colored bins. We’re big on that in Seattle, but less so elsewhere. I’ve visited places in Eastern Europe, Africa and South America that dump trash in the street while factories billow toxic smoke unimpeded.

Thinking we’re meaningfully blunting the global carbon footprint by having more multicolored Seattle trash bins than the Kraken have goals scored this season seems naive. Maybe akin to a little virtue signaling, given we keep ordering off Amazon and forcing them to fly their planes.

But those bins are at least a start at reshaping the global mindset. It just takes time. That the planet might be running out of time won’t alter that change must start someplace.

I’ve been to OVG headquarters in Los Angeles where Leiweke, the former LA Kings president, keeps a miniature Stanley Cup from their 2012 championship in his windowed office. It sits mere miles from the washed-out freeways and flooded streets that beset L.A. two months ago during a rare West Coast tropical storm.

Leiweke’s office also had a fishbowl view of smoke from wildfires that burned around L.A. in recent years. One of those, the Getty Fire, struck the city’s Brentwood enclave where Leiweke’s former house hosted a secret 2009 backyard meeting where Carroll was talked into leaving USC and coaching the Seahawks.

So, Leiweke isn’t some climate-hoax believer.

“It’s not an economic benefit to us,” Leiweke said of Zero Carbon Certification, which he estimates cost $50 million in arena modifications. “But I think if we don’t start doing this, then 50 years from now, people aren’t going to be building arenas anymore. Because the earth is going to start falling apart beneath us.”

Seated alongside Leiweke was Rob Johnson, the former Seattle City Council member and now the Kraken’s senior vice president of sustainability and transportation. Johnson said the road to Zero Carbon Certification became nightmarish once the COVID-19 pandemic struck amid the arena’s reconstruction.

OVG installed a heating and filtration system that protected workers from the coronavirus, but had to completely overhaul it because it was powered by natural gas and not electricity.

Then, the team’s hockey management warned that electric dryers can’t get sweaty player uniforms and equipment ready in time the same as gas-powered ones. So, OVG removed all dryers and engineers devised modifications, so they’d get hotter and dry things faster electrically.

OVG has similar sustainability plans elsewhere, including a 20,000-seat NBA arena in Las Vegas expected by mid-2026. Incidentally, Sonics fans might closely monitor that 2026 target as this city and Las Vegas are expected to receive NBA expansion teams in unison.

Leiweke relayed details of an early conversation with Jeff Bezos and his Amazon lieutenants about incorporating the “Climate Pledge” within the arena’s name and operations.

“They kind of told us, ‘If you don’t do this in Seattle, then who the hell will do it?’ “

The resulting Zero Carbon Certification might not be something Kraken fans care about hanging proudly from Climate Pledge’s rafters. But it may ensure future championship banners they do want displayed can actually still be won decades from now by heirs of Leiweke, Bodie, Bonderman, Holloway and anyone else with teams playing in venues spared from collapsing into the ruined earth beneath.