By Danielle Baussan

Ten years from now, Super Bowl XLVII will be remembered for several reasons:

• 108-yard kickoff return for a touchdown
• an energized, though unsuccessful, comeback from the 49ers, and
• a record 164.1 million viewers who saw the Superdome lose electricity for 34 minutes.

Super Bowl XLVII’s blackout wasn’t the first outage at a sporting event, but it may be the first time that such a blackout served as a kickoff for conspiracy theories and misleading facts about energy infrastructure. Here’s a ten-yard run through misleading facts that have been attributed to the blackout.

We need more coal!

Entergy’s claim that there was no problem with energy supply wasn’t enough to deter Peabody Energy Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Gregory Boyce, who stated that, “Without coal, you might as well turn off half the lights not just for our favorite games but also for our cities, shops, factories and homes.” Yet coal use in power plants has dropped from 50 to 36 percent, based on the low cost of natural gas, and the high cost of respiratory problems from its pollution. Coal-powered electric plants are the nation’s top source of carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution, the primary source of climate change. Power plant emissions also cause smog, which triggers a host of health problems from lung damage, asthma attacks, and chest pain. Boyce’s claims aren’t just wrong—they’re dangerous.

We need to drill more!

Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-AK, said that the Super Bowl outage “helps to perhaps kick-start the debate,” as she released her energy plan blueprint that gives a big boost to increased drilling for oil and gas. “We’ve got this Immaculate Conception theory of energy: It just happens, the lights turn on, it’s the temperature we want, until it’s not,” said the Senator. Oil isn’t generally used for electricity, though natural gas is a significant fuel for power plants. Regardless of what happened at the Super Bowl, an energy plan relying on fossil fuels gives us temperatures we really don’t want, in the form of global warming.

Energy efficiency caused the power outage!

Others tried to blame the Superdome’s 26,000 LED lights for the blackout, despite the fact that energy efficient lights reduce strain on the electrical grid and can help prevent blackouts. This sly finger-pointing was quickly shot down when others noticed that the LED lights were on the outside of the stadium — and did just fine.

Blame it on Beyonce!

Pop stars aren’t often blamed for infrastructure failures, but Beyonce’s high-voltage halftime performance raised theories that the brightly lit show caused an electric demand overload. Not so, says the Superdome’s manager — the performance was lit with generators.

While we haven’t quite discovered the true cause of the outage, this year’s Superbowl has sparked a new kind of Monday morning quarterbacking about energy infrastructure. Let’s hope that by next January, people will stop making the blame game the next “Superbowl shuffle,” end tired plays to promote dirty fossil fuels, and instead make forward passes on energy efficiency, cleaner power, and smart grid reform.

Danielle Baussan is the Associate Director of Government Affairs at the Center for American Progress

This is the SodaStream commercial CBS banned from airing during the Superbowl:

Sodastream is a home carbonation system that touts itself as “Earth Friendly”:

• SodaStream is an “Active Green” solution that minimizes the huge eco-footprint caused by the manufacture, transport and waste of plastic bottles.

SodaStream says its “vision is to create a world free from bottles.” They claim that ”since January 2009, we have saved the world from over 1 billion plastic bottles.”

Now it is is hard to see why CBS banned that ad gently ribbing the competition (albeit two Superbowl sponsors) — especially since last year NBC ran this ad by Chevy that (humorously) suggests you won’t survive the Mayan apocalypse if you drive a Ford truck [insert line here about trucks and the real apocalypse that's coming].

You shouldn’t shed a tear for SodaStream, however, since they will reportedly be airing a different commercial — and this ban has been a marketer’s dream, with the above ad being viewed more than 2.5 million times this week already.

Indeed, it was ad man Alex Bogusky who dreamed up this tweet to spotlight the ban:

Now the only reason I add all of this detail is that in October, Bogusky “partnered with The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) to launch a public info project called The Real Bears … to highlight the far-reaching affects of soda marketing.”

Now this is an ad that should air during the Superbowl:

Here is Bogusky again:

“This project attempts to contrast the marketing hype around soda with the stark reality, and it is my hope that it makes some small contribution to a critical cultural awakening. We need to begin to connect the dots between what we are sold, what we eat, and how sick we have become.”

Seriously!

And this all loops back to the connection between obesity and global warming, explored in a recent study featured in Scientific American. Guess I’ll have to do a separate post on that study after all.