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The Summer Olympics will soon begin in Paris, against the backdrop of heat waves and drought throughout much of Southern Europe.

The organizers of the games say that in light of climate change, they’ve made sustainability a centerpiece of their enterprise. Channeling their inner Greta Thunberg, they promise that the event will be “historic for the climate” and “revolutionary Games like we’ve never seen before.”

Yet in the city where global leaders signed a landmark agreement in 2015 to limit postindustrial global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we’re getting a recycled version of green capitalism that is oblivious in its incrementalism, vague with its methodology and loose with its accountability. It’s too late for Paris, but if the Olympic organizers truly want to be sustainable, the Games need to reduce their size, limit the number of tourists who travel from afar, thoroughly greenify their capacious supply chains and open up their eco-books for bona fide accountability. Until then, the Olympics are a greenwash, a pale bit of lip service delivered at a time when climatological facts demand a systematic transformation in splendid Technicolor.

Greenwashing is nothing new for the sports world, where a massive chasm exists between sustainable word and deed. Sports mega-events such as the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup have long voiced concern for the environment and claimed to proffer solutions while doing the bare minimum—if anything—to make genuine ecological improvements.

Nevertheless, Olympic organizers swear they are scything a fresh path. “We want the legacy to be different,” Tony Estanguet, president of the Paris 2024 Olympics, told Time magazine. “We’ve promised to cut the carbon footprint in half from the London Olympics in 2012.” Those Olympics in London emitted around 3.3 million metric tons of CO₂. Paris 2024 is aiming for 1.5 million metric tons.*

To be sure, this summer’s Paris Olympics have made significant sustainability strides. But their earnest efforts have raised a broader question: Can the Olympics truly be an environmentally sustainable event? “There is no version of a sustainable Games as of yet,” said Madeleine Orr, author of Warming Up: How Climate Change Is Changing Sport, in an interview with the Real News Network. This sentiment is echoed by many, including Christine O’Bonsawin, an Indigenous sport scholar and member of the Abenaki Nation at Odanak in Quebec, who dubbed such measures an “Olympic sustainability smokescreen.” The modern-day supersized Olympics, with its fossil-fuel-guzzling ways, is simply not compatible with an authentic sustainability agenda.

So how has Paris fared?

To limit their carbon footprint, organizers have kept venue construction to a minimum by building only two new sports facilities—an aquatic center and a climbing venue—and two additional sites: the Media Village for journalists and the Olympic Village, where athletes will reside during the Games. Organizers have made an effort to deploy bio-sourced materials—especially wood—and to reuse and recycle supplies, such as the seats in the aquatic center, which are constructed exclusively with local plastic waste. Construction of the Olympic Villageaspires to limit carbon intensity—the amount of carbon dioxide released to create a kilowatt-hour of electricity—by expending less than 650 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per meter squared (kgCO2e/m²), half of France’s average for the construction of office structures (1,400 kgCO2e/m²) and multifamily housing (1,300 kgCO2e/m²).

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