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How OKC Thunder watch parties during 2025 NBA Finals are galvanizing the city
How OKC Thunder watch parties during 2025 NBA Finals are galvanizing the city

Yahoo

time24-06-2025

  • Sport
  • Yahoo

How OKC Thunder watch parties during 2025 NBA Finals are galvanizing the city

LIVE UPDATES: Follow The Oklahoman's live coverage of Thunder vs. Pacers in Game 6 of the NBA Finals. Courtney Mankin and her team are accustomed to large crowds flocking to The Jones Assembly, but they didn't anticipate the deluge of OKC Thunder fans driving for their doors ahead of Game 1 of the NBA Finals. Advertisement 'That Thursday, Game 1, it was like the floodgates had opened,' Mankin — president and partner of local dining group, The Social Order — told The Oklahoman. 'Everyone was super excited to be there. And we were like, 'Oh, OK, this is the Finals. We need to step up our game.'' Now, as the Thunder is on the brink of bringing the city its first NBA championship, a trend is taking shape in one of the NBA's smallest markets. The nation's 20th most populous city is eating, sleeping and breathing Thunder basketball, while holding its breath with every Alex Caruso steal or Cason Wallace deflection. And The Jones Assembly and Fassler Hall's watch parties have given diehards who can't get — or afford — tickets an opportunity to share a communal experience during a historic moment in the city. Monday night's Game 5 tickets started at $425 on StubHub. As of Wednesday afternoon, the cheapest tickets available for a potential Game 7 start at $1,166 apiece on Ticketmaster. The Jones' most expensive cocktail costs $14 for fans watching the game there. Oklahoma City's sports viewing scene is experiencing a vibrancy usually reserved for a town with multiple professional sports teams. Thirty minutes before Game 1 tipped at Paycom Center, 7 miles northeast, Game 2 of the Women's College World Series championship series had begun at Devon Park. On Tuesday, OKC Mayor David Holt signed an agreement keeping the Thunder in the city until at least 2053. Advertisement Mussatto: How an NBA title would solidify legacies of OKC Thunder, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Amid this global sports moment, The Social Order, which operates multiple downtown businesses including Spark in Scissortail Park and Dave's Hot Chicken and Fuzzy's Taco Shop in Bricktown, has seen a 20-30% sales increase across all establishments. ESPN's Malika Andrews and Brian Windhorst watched an Eastern Conference finals game while in town at The Jones. Former NBA player and Finals commentator Richard Jefferson swung by The Jones the night after Game 1 of the NBA Finals. The Jones, which has partnered with Michelob Ultra on specials, has identified about a 30% sales increase during the Finals, Mankin said, exceeding expectations. Over a mile north of The Jones, Fassler Hall — a German-inspired beer hall that has partnered with the Thunder to brand itself as Thunder Hall — is seeing three to four times the sales versus typical summer nights. During away games, the Thunder has brought some of its in-house entertainment staff and programming to Fassler. Advertisement 'Consumer sentiment in Oklahoma City is good right now,' Elliot Nelson, founder and CEO of McNellies Group, which operates Fassler, told The Oklahoman. 'People are in good spirits. They're in a good mood. People seem to be out a little bit more. Whether that's new customers or old customers, or people coming more frequently, you feel in the market that people are more optimistic. 'It lifts everybody's spirits and there's not a lot of things you see that lifts an entire community where everybody seems to be on board and supporting like the Thunder.' The increased demand at The Jones Assembly and Fassler has driven the need for more inventory and staff. Mankin's team has called on employees from their other restaurants as they've staffed up The Jones. Nelson says Fassler has about three times its normal staff working on Finals game nights. The Jones features giant indoor and outdoor video walls, food and drink specials, competitions and themed giveaways. Its frozen drink is named after Lu Dort, the Thunder's tenacious defender. Advertisement Tyrese Haliburton injury update: Pacers PG likely game-time decision for NBA Finals Game 6 On game nights during the Finals, you don't have to scroll too far on social media to find photos or videos of the large gatherings. This is especially true when the Thunder is playing in Indianapolis. 'It's great for people that maybe didn't think of us as a place to come and watch the game,' Mankin said. 'We're cementing ourselves as a place to go. I don't think we're necessarily branded as a sports bar, but we have been that place during the playoffs, and we've loved that. The national attention, whenever you get that, it's great for our city.' The exciting possibility for fans — and local businesses featuring official watch parties — is that this could be just the beginning of this Thunder lineup's success. The youngest team in the NBA is led by 26-year-old MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander; 24-year-old Jalen Williams, who became the fifth-youngest player in NBA Finals history to score 40 points Monday night; and 23-year-old Chet Holmgren, who has played only one full season. Advertisement Mankin and Nelson envision droves of sports-crazed patrons pouring into their hotspots long after the Finals end. Fassler hopes to cement itself as the go-to destination during next summer's FIFA World Cup. 'We're grateful to be able to reconnect with that part of the business that used to be there pre-pandemic,' Nelson said. 'And then, hopefully, capitalize on it and become a gathering place for people going forward to watch sports with large groups of people.' Before the Professional Basketball Club LLC, a group of investors led by Clay Bennett, brought the Thunder to town, Oklahoma City was better known for its struggles than as a bustling sports town. Much less a possible title town. Advertisement One game from an NBA championship, the Thunder is rolling — and business is booming in Oklahoma City. 'If OU has a good run, not everybody's behind them,' Nelson said. 'Everybody being behind (the Thunder) and being in a better mood and having this super optimistic, exciting thing to talk about, lifts the spirits (of the city) overall.' Colton Sulley covers the Oklahoma Sooners for The Oklahoman. Have a story idea for Colton? He can be reached at csulley@ or on X/Twitter at @colton_sulley. Support Colton's work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today at This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: OKC Thunder watch parties are galvanizing the city during NBA Finals

Scientists say they can calculate the cost of oil giants' role in global warming
Scientists say they can calculate the cost of oil giants' role in global warming

Washington Post

time23-04-2025

  • Business
  • Washington Post

Scientists say they can calculate the cost of oil giants' role in global warming

Oil and gas companies are facing hundreds of lawsuits around the world testing whether they can be held responsible for their role in causing climate change. Now, two scientists say they've built a tool that can calculate how much damage each company's planet-warming pollution has caused — and how much money they could be forced to pay if they're successfully sued. Collectively, greenhouse emissions from 111 fossil fuel companies caused the world $28 trillion in damage from extreme heat from 1991 to 2020, according to a paper published Wednesday in Nature. Industry officials have contested this sort of reasoning, and Trump administration officials, along with some congressional Republicans, are working to shield oil and gas companies from legal liability for climate-related damages. The new analysis could fuel an emerging legal fight. The authors, Dartmouth associate professor Justin Mankin and Chris Callahan, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, say their model can determine a specific company's share of responsibility over any time period. 'There's long been this veil of plausible deniability that any emitter could hide behind: 'We're all emitting greenhouse gases, so who's to say that mine are the ones responsible for outcome X, Y or Z?'' Mankin said. 'We can now do that accounting exercise.' Many climate advocates have hoped that establishing blame in a way that can be submitted into evidence could result in court rulings that make polluters pay. And outside researchers say this model goes further than anything that has come before it in connecting company actions to concrete harm. 'This is the first time I've seen this done in a really comprehensive way that isn't just for one specific event,' said Kevin Reed, a professor at Stony Brook University's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences. 'This is the real deal.' Mankin and Callahan focused on harm from extreme heat that would be reflected in economic growth figures, including crop losses and lower worker productivity. Their model would need further adaptation before it could be applied to cases that make claims about other sorts of damage or more specific harms — such as the lawsuit filed by Multnomah County, Oregon, which seeks to hold 17 oil and gas companies accountable for a 2021 heat wave associated with the deaths of 69 local residents. But some legal scholars say introducing this sort of calculation into a courtroom could devolve into a 'battle of the experts,' with each side hiring scientists to run different models with different assumptions to reach conflicting conclusions about a company's share of responsibility for climate change and its harms. The American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil and gas industry, defended its operations when asked about the Nature paper. 'The record of the past two decades demonstrates that the industry has achieved its goal of providing affordable, reliable energy, while improving standards of living globally and reducing emissions,' API spokesperson Bethany Williams wrote in an email. 'Retroactively penalizing U.S. oil and natural gas producers for delivering the energy consumers need is unconstitutional, and we welcome the administration's efforts to address this state overreach.' Callahan and Mankin's model is built on decades of work in the field of 'attribution science,' which tries to explain how much greenhouse gas pollution has changed Earth's climate and contributed to particular disasters, such as heat waves and floods. Scientists published the first landmark event attribution study in 2004, which showed that a record-breaking European heat wave that killed tens of thousands of people the previous year was twice as likely because of climate change. Since then, researchers have published hundreds of studies showing how climate change raised the risk or multiplied the damage of particular disasters — some of which would have been nearly impossible without the planet-warming pollution people have created. They've also built more powerful models to calculate the financial damage from these disasters and developed models that show how much particular polluters' greenhouse emissions have contributed to changing Earth's climate. Meanwhile, researchers have built a public database tracking decades of greenhouse emissions from 180 of the world's biggest oil, gas, coal and cement companies. The database uses companies' annual reports, Securities and Exchange Commission filings, and other self-reported data, along with third-party estimates from sources such as the U. S. Energy Information Administration, to calculate production and emissions. Callahan and Mankin's work combines all of these steps — estimating a company's historical emissions, figuring out how much those emissions contributed to climate change and calculating how much economic damage climate change has caused — into one 'end-to-end' model that links one polluter's emissions to a dollar amount of economic damage from extreme heat. By their calculation, Saudi Aramco is on the hook for $2.05 trillion in economic losses from extreme heat from 1991 to 2020. Russia's Gazprom is responsible for $2 trillion, Chevron for $1.98 trillion, ExxonMobil for $1.91 trillion and BP $1.45 trillion. Industry groups and companies tend to object to the methodologies of attribution science. They could seek to contest the assumptions that went into each step of Mankin and Callahan's model. Indeed, every step in that process introduces some room for error, and stringing together all of those steps compounds the uncertainty in the model, according to Delta Merner, lead scientist at the Science Hub for Climate Litigation, which connects scientists and lawyers bringing climate lawsuits. She also mentioned that the researchers relied on a commonly used but simplified climate model known as the Finite Amplitude Impulse Response (FAIR) model. 'It is robust for the purpose of what the study is doing,' Merner said, 'but these models do make assumptions about climate sensitivity, about carbon cycle behavior, energy balance, and all of the simplifications in there do introduce some uncertainty.' The exact dollar figures in the paper aren't intended as gospel. But outside scientists said Mankin and Callahan use well-established, peer-reviewed datasets and climate models for every step in their process, and they are transparent about the uncertainty in the numbers. Many of the climate lawsuits making their way through courts around the world involve questions of attribution. One of the furthest along globally is the case of a Peruvian farmer who alleges that German energy company RWE's greenhouse gas emissions warmed the planet and sped the melting of a glacier, which threatens to flood his Andean home. Hearings started last month, and, if the case results in a ruling or settlement, it could set a major precedent in Germany. But legal experts say the most significant climate lawsuits could play out in the United States, because the American legal system is particularly friendly to plaintiffs suing for massive damages — and generally doesn't force losing plaintiffs to pay the other side's legal fees, which makes it less risky to try out novel legal arguments. 'The U.S. has a longer history of very large tort damages, where hundreds of millions of dollars have been awarded in damages in various cases,' said Michael Gerrard, who founded Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. 'Most other countries don't have that tradition.' President Donald Trump has directed the Justice Department to weigh in on climate lawsuits by filing briefs aligned with the defendants, and fossil fuel companies have asked members of Congress to pass a law making them immune from climate lawsuits. That's unlikely to happen, because Democrats in the Senate can block the effort with a filibuster, Gerrard said. American climate cases tend to be modeled after the landmark U.S. tobacco and opioid lawsuits, which successfully argued that companies knowingly deceived the public about the harms of their products. The eventual settlements forced companies to pay billions in damages and fund public education campaigns. Similarly, Massachusetts and Honolulu are each suing fossil fuel companies for misleading the public about their contributions to climate change. The Massachusetts case could go to trial in the next year or two, according to Corey Riday-White, a managing attorney at the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit that supports climate deception lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. 'These lawsuits have not been held up by a lack of scientific evidence so far,' said Benjamin Franta, who heads the Climate Litigation Lab at the University of Oxford. Rather, most of the proceedings have focused on legal questions, such as jurisdiction. 'But some of the cases are getting close to trial now,' he said. 'And, at that point, it will be important to show that these companies actually are responsible for damages in a particular state, city or county.' Mankin and Callahan said their model is designed to be affordable, easy to run and adaptable to a range of scenarios, which they hope will make it a useful tool for anyone trying to hold companies accountable for climate pollution. In addition to potentially supporting lawsuits, models like this could help enforce laws that make companies pay for the consequences of their greenhouse gas emissions. New York and Vermont recently passed those sorts of laws, and California and Maryland are considering similar versions. Trump's April 8 executive order accepted industry arguments that such laws and the climate lawsuits amount to overreach that hampers the energy sector and burdens consumers. 'These State laws and policies weaken our national security and devastate Americans by driving up energy costs for families coast-to-coast,' he wrote, adding: 'They should not stand.'

The world's biggest companies have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, a new study estimates
The world's biggest companies have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, a new study estimates

Boston Globe

time23-04-2025

  • Science
  • Boston Globe

The world's biggest companies have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, a new study estimates

At the top of the list, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom have each caused a bit more than $2 trillion in heat damage over the decades, the team calculated in a study published in Wednesday's journal Nature. The researchers figured that every 1% of greenhouse gas put into the atmosphere since 1990 has caused $502 billion in damage from heat alone, which doesn't include the costs incurred by other extreme weather such as hurricanes, droughts and floods. People talk about making polluters pay, and sometimes even take them to court or pass laws meant to rein them in. Advertisement The study is an attempt to determine 'the causal linkages that underlie many of these theories of accountability,' said its lead author, Christopher Callahan, who did the work at Dartmouth but is now an Earth systems scientist at Stanford University. The research firm Zero Carbon Analytics counts 68 lawsuits filed globally about climate change damage, with more than half of them in the United States. Advertisement 'Everybody's asking the same question: What can we actually claim about who has caused this?' said Dartmouth climate scientist Justin Mankin, co-author of the study. 'And that really comes down to a thermodynamic question of can we trace climate hazards and/or their damages back to particular emitters?' The answer is yes, Callahan and Mankin said. The researchers started with known final emissions of the products — such as gasoline or electricity from coal-fired power plants — produced by the 111 biggest carbon-oriented companies going as far back as 137 years, because that's as far back as any of the companies' emissions data go and carbon dioxide stays in the air for much longer than that. They used 1,000 different computer simulations to translate those emissions into changes for Earth's global average surface temperature by comparing it to a world without that company's emissions. Using this approach, they determined that pollution from Chevron, for example, has raised the Earth's temperature by .045 degrees Fahrenheit (.025 degrees Celsius). The researchers also calculated how much each company's pollution contributed to the five hottest days of the year using 80 more computer simulations and then applying a formula that connects extreme heat intensity to changes in economic output. This system is modeled on the established techniques scientists have been using for more than a decade to attribute extreme weather events, such as the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, to climate change. Mankin said that in the past, there was an argument of, 'Who's to say that it's my molecule of CO2 that's contributed to these damages versus any other one?' He said his study 'really laid clear how the veil of plausible deniability doesn't exist anymore scientifically. We can actually trace harms back to major emitters.' Advertisement Shell declined to comment. Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and BP did not respond to requests for comment. 'All methods they use are quite robust,' said Imperial College London climate scientist Friederike Otto, who heads World Weather Attribution, a collection of scientists who try rapid attribution studies to see if specific extreme weather events are worsened by climate change and, if so, by how much. She didn't take part in the study. 'It would be good in my view if this approach would be taken up more by different groups. As with event attribution, the more groups do it, the better the science gets and the better we know what makes a difference and what does not,' Otto said. So far, no climate liability lawsuit against a major carbon emitter has been successful, but maybe showing 'how overwhelmingly strong the scientific evidence' is can change that, she said. In the past, damage caused by individual companies were lost in the noise of data, so it couldn't be calculated, Callahan said. 'We have now reached a point in the climate crisis where the total damages are so immense that the contributions of a single company's product can amount to tens of billions of dollars a year,' said Chris Field, a Stanford University climate scientist who didn't take part in the research. This is a good exercise and proof of concept, but there are so many other climate variables that the numbers that Callahan and Mankin came up with are probably a vast underestimate of the damage the companies have really caused, said Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climate scientist who wasn't involved in the study. Advertisement

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