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Olympic Games are historically about gold, silver, and bronze not green. Even the greenest†Olympics, held in London in 2012, used nearly 400 temporary generators, which release harmful pollution, including carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides among many others. Nevertheless, when Brazil won its bid in 2009 to host the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, the country pledged to host the “Green Games for a Blue Planet,†a festival with sustainability at its core.

Brazil, nearly as large as the U.S. and holding 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest, currently uses renewable energy to make about 85 percent of its electricity (compare that to the U.S., where only 13 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources). With renewable energy success like that, who better to host the Green Games?â€

Yet, despite Brazil's ambitious goals, years of planning, and an advantage in existing renewable energy resources, Brazil is falling short of its goal for a cleaner, greener Olympics. This is because serious social, political, environmental, and health challenges tangent to the Olympics have constrained the nation's ability to realize the sustainability goals Brazil thought achievable in 2009.

Like Brazil, countries and states around the world today including my home state of Texas are embarking on their own ambitious national and state sustainability goals. These goals are more long-term than a single summer event, but we have the same lesson to learn: To reach sustainability and environmental goals requires interweaving into the fabric of all policy solutions.

Intertwined solutions

Brazil has set environmental goals, such as stopping deforestation and aiming to reduce the country's carbon emissions View Full Article