California Senate leader urges Dodgers to drop oil and gas advertisers

A leading member of the California Senate is urging Dodgers owner Mark Walter to end the team’s sponsorship deals with oil and gas companies, telling him that “continuing to associate these corporations with our beloved boys in blue is not in our community or the planet’s best interest.”

In a letter Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach) wrote that Angelenos “breathe some of the most polluted air in the country, with demonstrated links to negative health outcomes.”

The recent L.A. County wildfires, she said, have called attention to the fact that “fossil fuel pollution is responsible for not only the climate crisis, but also the persistently harmful air quality in the region.”

One of the Dodgers’ most visible advertisers is Houston-based oil giant Phillips 66, which owns the 76 gas station chain. Orange-and-blue 76 logos are displayed throughout Dodger Stadium, including above both scoreboards — a climate red flag that I highlighted in a column last year.

My column prompted climate activists to rally outside Dodger Stadium and start a MoveOn.org petition — which as of Tuesday afternoon had garnered nearly 23,000 signatures — calling on Walter to dump Phillips 66. Activists and academic experts say fossil fuel companies, like tobacco companies before them, use ads at sports stadiums and other cultural institutions to build goodwill and normalize the harms caused by their products.

Gonzalez noted that California is suing major oil and gas companies, including Phillips 66, for climate damages, with state officials accusing the industry of a “decades-long campaign of deception” to hide the truth about global warming and delay the transition to clean power. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed the lawsuit to move forward.

Federal prosecutors, meanwhile, charged Phillips 66 last year with violating the U.S. Clean Water Act by dumping oil and grease from its Carson refinery, just outside Gonzalez’s district, into the L.A. County sewer system.

Removing the Phillips 66 ads from Dodger Stadium “would send the message that it’s time to end our embrace of polluting fossil fuels and work together towards a cleaner, greener future,” Gonzalez wrote.

The Dodgers didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The 2024 World Series champions aren’t the only pro sports team taking fossil fuel money. A recent survey from UCLA Law’s Emmett Institute tallied at least 59 U.S. franchises that accept sponsorship dollars from oil giants, or utility companies whose energy sources are primarily fossil fuels. The list included five other California teams: LAFC, the Sacramento Kings, the Athletics (formerly of Oakland), the San Francisco Giants and the San Francisco 49ers.

The Dodgers, though, occupy a unique place in American sports history.

As Gonzalez wrote, the team has long been ahead of the curve. The Dodgers broke baseball’s color barrier when they signed Jackie Robinson in the 1940s, and when they barred cigarette ads from Dodger Stadium in the 1960s. More recently, the team has encouraged fans to take public transit to games and launched sustainability efforts.

These efforts “make the Dodgers’ continued partnership with Big Oil all the more anachronistic,” Gonzalez wrote.

Gonzalez wrote to Walter after hearing from Zan Dubin, the climate activist leading the push for the Dodgers to drop Phillips 66. Dubin, who has worked with the local Sierra Club chapter on the campaign, praised Gonzalez for showing “true leadership and unflinching courage as the first elected official to endorse our campaign.”

“Greenwashing must end so we can accelerate adoption of renewable energy,” Dubin said.

A spokesperson for Phillips 66 didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did a spokesperson for Ohio-based Marathon Petroleum, whose Arco gas stations have run ads at Dodger Stadium in recent years.

In an interview, Gonzalez described herself as a “huge baseball lover” who grew up cheering for the Dodgers. She said she wishes players on the team would start talking about fossil fuel advertisements, too.

“I’d love for [Shohei] Ohtani or [Freddie] Freeman or someone to say, ‘This is important to us, too,’” she told me.

The Dodgers travel this week to Tokyo, where they’ll open the season with two games against the Chicago Cubs. They’ll return to Los Angeles for the home opener at Dodger Stadium on March 27.

The 76 logos will loom large. Just a few months removed from the Eaton and Palisades fires, Dodgers fans taking pictures and posting them on social media will, in many cases, be providing free publicity to Phillips 66.

The 76 logo sits above the left field scoreboard at Dodger Stadium.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)