Science

The Teacher in Room 1214

Published

1 year ago

February 23, 2025

It was 45 seconds too late, but the teacher had a plan.

A gunman had just barraged her classroom with an AR-15, killing two students and injuring four others before turning to a classroom across the hall. The bullet-riddled walls were crumbling. Ceiling tiles were falling. If the shooter came back to kill more of her students, the teacher decided, she would stand up and shout, “We love you.”

The teacher was Ivy Schamis, whose husband would be waiting at home with a Valentine’s Day dinner; whose son was planning a wedding she couldn’t imagine missing; whose curriculum for this class — History of the Holocaust — had just moments earlier stirred a discussion about hate on campuses.

We love you. These would surely be her final words, Ms. Schamis thought. She knew her plan was futile — irrational, even. But with no stop-the-bleed kit, no shield, no help, words were all she had to show the children that an adult had put up a fight.

The moment never came. The gunman doubled back to the class across the hall, but not to Room 1214. At the command of a SWAT team, Ms. Schamis climbed over bodies and ran with her surviving students down the blood-smeared hallway, out the doors, and into the blinding light.

What waited for her there, in the days and months and years ahead, would be a whole new role in the lives of the 30 students who had survived. For them, she would be what she couldn’t be for the two who died: a lifeline.

She felt she owed them that. She had been the only adult in the room.

Attending to Her Students

The morning after the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Ms. Schamis rose before dawn and began cleaning her bloodstained suede boots. Seventeen people had been killed, including Nick Dworet and Helena Ramsay, who had been in her class. Some of the surviving students had abandoned their blood- and glass-caked shoes on the school pavement, but Ms. Schamis had the strange feeling she ought to take hers home and wipe them down, over and over, until they came clean.

She left the boots out by the closet to dry and then phoned the moving company that was set to relocate her family to a new neighborhood in a few weeks. She no longer had time to pack boxes, she explained to the movers. She needed to attend to her students.

Within a few hours, Ms. Schamis was corresponding with her students by text. Today, she adamantly denies that she started the Room 1214 text thread, but everyone else seems to remember it that way. She used it to organize car pools to wakes and funerals, to check in on the wounded and to plan a meet-up at Cold Stone Creamery, just so everyone could be together.

When the school reopened two weeks later, Ms. Schamis was there, shuffling between campus buildings with a cart of teaching supplies. The school’s psychological support offerings for students included coloring books and Play-Doh. She found them useless. She arranged to instead have a service dog, Luigi, a golden retriever, join her classes for the rest of the year.

When Luigi arrived, tail wagging madly, students from throughout the school came to play with him — including some who had otherwise refused to return to campus. The following fall, Ms. Schamis arranged to have everyone from Room 1214 placed in her study hall for support.

Ms. Schamis had known some of the students for only six weeks before the shooting, but she seemed to have a preternatural sense of what each of them needed. Rebecca Bogart, who had been a senior, felt so lost after what she had witnessed that Ms. Schamis encouraged her to apply for a scholarship to go abroad to Ecuador. The physical distance finally gave her mental space from the event.

Ally Allen, who had watched the killer approach through a glass door panel, kept waking in the night with tears pouring down her face. When Ms. Schamis dropped a picture of a German shepherd puppy in the Room 1214 group chat — a future service dog, in need of a home — Ally felt deep down the dog was meant to be hers. She received Dakota the morning after the one-year anniversary of the shooting: a new beginning.

And Kelly Plaur, who had called 911 four times during the shooting, was at a music festival when the crowd began running from what sounded like gunshots. This time, it was Ms. Schamis she called. Keep calm, the teacher coached. Keep me on the phone, and keep running.

Students called and texted her with their grief, their panic attacks, their drug use, their suicidal thoughts. What their own parents could not fully understand — the worst moment of their lives — Ms. Schamis could.

One day, she took some of the students to meet with a survivor of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado. His experience of being shot and watching a friend die was remarkably similar to theirs, and Ms. Schamis hoped that his journey toward healing would assure them that together, they could persevere.

But weeks later, Ms. Schamis’s phone began buzzing incessantly. It was the Room 1214 text thread. The Columbine survivor had died of an overdose.

Leaving Parkland

Ms. Schamis committed herself to staying at Marjory Stoneman Douglas until every surviving student from Room 1214 graduated in the spring of 2019. It was not easy. On her commute each morning, she had the same troubling premonition: her car plummeting off the expressway overpass. Finally, her husband, Jeff, suggested a daily ritual. When she approached the bridge, she was to call him to discuss something grounding and ordinary, like what they would have for dinner.

At the 2019 graduation ceremony, Ms. Schamis wept: Helena should have received a diploma. Ms. Schamis found Helena’s brother and hugged him, but Helena’s mother stood back. Ms. Schamis wondered what the woman felt seeing the teacher who had been with her daughter.

That fall, she took the semester off and then moved to Washington, D.C., forgoing her full pension in search of peace.

Washington was where Ms. Schamis truly began to mourn. She joined a two-year waiting list for therapy. She reached out to Ally Allen, whom she had referred to a breeder for a service dog, realizing for the first time she needed one of her own.

But two Parkland survivor charities she approached for financial aid to train a dog said they could not help her. As a teacher, she wasn’t entirely surprised: She didn’t recall a school administrator ever once checking in on her. She had never heard any school official admit that she had not received active shooter training, or that her classroom had no stop-the-bleed kit. And she had never been able to reclaim mementos of almost 20 years of teaching that remained inside Room 1214.

Ms. Schamis, who has a master’s degree in education and specialized in Holocaust studies, had spent almost her entire career at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. She had loved teaching social studies in part because it allowed her to watch students see themselves anew: As they made sense of current events in the context of history, she witnessed their opinions changing and their prejudices being renounced.

There was nothing more meaningful to her. But she could not return to another classroom.

So she took a job as an office manager at a small private school, accepting a major pay cut to avoid being in a classroom where she would again be responsible for students’ safety.

When she started, she discovered the office manager station was in the front foyer of the building — in a way, the first line of defense.

‘Always Available’

The students, too, scattered around the country, but the Room 1214 text thread bound them together. Over time, there were updates: Ally Allen, inspired by Ms. Schamis, was preparing to become a teacher. Hannah Carbocci was pursing a career in criminal justice and writing her thesis on warning signs in school shooters. Catie Krakow was getting a degree in mental health counseling and shared tips on how the others could care for themselves as another anniversary approached.

I hope everyone is doing as well as they could be, wrote Elena Blanco, who had been assigned to the seat behind Nick.

You guys are forever family, replied Matt Walker, whose desk had been next to Helena’s.

As long as I am breathing, Ms. Schamis told them, I will always be available for you.

A year later, soon after the Uvalde, Texas, shooting, Ms. Schamis woke up to a message on the thread that had landed during the night: Uvalde was one too many, a student wrote; he couldn’t take his anguish anymore.

Ms. Schamis had taken a suicide prevention course the summer after the massacre. She knew the steps. She called the former student, asking if he had a specific plan to end his life. He did. She kept him engaged with questions — what was something he was looking forward to? — while she sought emergency help for him from five states away.

She spent the next five hours in a maze of dead ends. She tried the suicide hotline, but they could not help her, since she was not the person in distress. She did a 40-minute intake call with a Florida behavioral health center, only to learn they did not serve his region. She connected with a mental health hospital, but it turned out to be private. By now, she was weeping.

Eventually she reached the instructor of her suicide prevention class from all those years ago, who told her to call the West Palm Beach Police Department and explain that the distressed young man was a survivor of Parkland’s school shooting.

The boy ultimately received emergency care and survived. But not before the dispatcher who answered Ms. Schamis’s call admitted that with all the school shootings, she could not specifically recall what happened in Parkland.

‘That’s My Girl.’

Four years after the shooting, a process server arrived at Ms. Schamis’s home with a subpoena calling on her to testify at the killer’s sentencing trial. Ms. Schamis hid.

The text thread began to buzz with messages from former students who would also be required to appear. Ms. Schamis reverted to her usual role. I’m with you as you testify, she wrote.

Daniela Menescal, who had gone on to study psychology in Boston and still had shrapnel embedded in her leg and back, was distressed about going alone.

I’ll ask if I can be with you, Ms. Schamis told Daniela.

As the sun rose on a Wednesday morning, she texted the group that it was her turn. Dylan Kraemer, who had already taken the stand, replied fast.

You got this! If you look straight when u testify, he wrote, you can’t see the shooter.

On the witness stand, Ms. Schamis spoke with the tone of a teacher in front of a class, nodding for emphasis and gesturing around the room. Her gold necklace glimmered under the lights as she described the layout of Room 1214, the lesson she had been teaching, the first deafening blasts.

Her eyes trailed over to the defense table. There he was, the man who had stolen Nick’s chance to swim at the Olympics; who had robbed Helena of her plans to attend college in England.

The killer kept his head down. The prosecutor, Mike Satz, brought over a photograph, Exhibit 3S, and asked Ms. Schamis to name the subject.

“That’s my girl,” she said, putting her hand over her mouth, her voice cracking. “Helena. Helena Ramsay.”

Then he brought over another, Exhibit 3R.

“And that’s Nicholas Dworet,” she said. “Handsome boy.”

Parents in the courtroom shifted in their seats. Others shook their heads. Ms. Schamis looked up to the ceiling, blinking the tears from her eyes, patting her cheeks with a tissue and adjusting her glasses back on her nose where they had been.

Hannah Carbocci — watching the trial live from home — knew her teacher wouldn’t see the group chat until later, but she sent an encouraging message anyway: Mrs Schamis you’re a rockstar, she wrote.

There were no further questions, the lawyer in the courtroom said.

Ms. Schamis climbed down from the stand. That afternoon, she typed a response in the thread: Love you so.

A Demolition

As the sixth anniversary of the shooting approached last year, Lexi Gendron was struggling. She had tried to go to college, but like many of the others, found herself too preoccupied with classroom seating arrangements to focus. She couldn’t have her back to the door, but facing it meant watching for a killer.

After one class, she dropped out, instead working at a casino and a winery before moving to Texas. Now, she was about to start nursing school in hopes of a career in pediatrics — which meant returning to a classroom once again.

Just spilling my heart out, she wrote on the thread one night. Lexi had thrown away all her #MSDStrong memorabilia in search of a fresh start in Texas — only to realize that those tangible objects had been her puzzle pieces to a day that had never fully sunk in.

I’m so upset with myself for letting that stuff go, she wrote. I can’t believe I did that.

Ms. Schamis was the first to reply, offering to send T-shirts, bracelets, buttons and pins. Let me know whatever will make you feel better, she wrote.

She understood the pull of Parkland. When the school’s 1200 building was set to be demolished, Ms. Schamis had reached out to the school board, desperate to return to her classroom one more time. The jury, bereaved parents, journalists, and even Vice President Kamala Harris were granted permission to enter the building, but Ms. Schamis was not. Instead, prosecutors sent a package to her home in Washington: a five-year-old box of stale Valentine’s Day chocolates from her desk in Room 1214.

On the morning the demolition was set to begin, Ms. Schamis heard a radio segment as she drove to her new school in Washington. Bereaved families in Parkland were cathartically hammering off bits of the school building before the team came in to clear it away.

Ms. Schamis, shaking, called Jeff. They discussed the weather.

Her last mental image of her own classroom comes from a press pool report in which strangers described the artifacts left inside her fourth-period Holocaust class: a 2017-18 school year planner; a whiteboard bearing Ms. Schamis’s learning objective, “to be aware of the world and its surroundings”; bullet strike marks across the desks; and the dried blood of Nick and Helena coating a book titled “Tell Them We Remember.”

‘The only adult in there.’

Last summer, Ms. Schamis sat on the patio of a Mexican restaurant in Washington, recounting that day in 2018. Her German shepherd, Sayde, sprawled beneath her chair. All these years later, she still seemed uneasy. “That’s what keeps me up at night, thinking I was the only adult in there,” she said.

Jeff sat across from her. He reminded her of the bonds she had forged with her students: the pancake breakfasts at their place; the letters of recommendation for graduate schools; the tattoos that several had gotten — Room 1214 — including one who had it drawn in Ms. Schamis’s handwriting.

“But I didn’t save them — I didn’t save them,” she said. Her words hung in the air, jarring against the faint mariachi music coming through the patio speakers.

Jeff leaned forward and said with a seasoned assurance, “How could anybody save somebody from an AR-15?”

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Science

Feds declare Eaton fire was a cleanup success. Their testing shows otherwise

Published

1 day ago

May 21, 2026

Press Room

Feds declare Eaton fire was a cleanup success. Their testing shows otherwise

Despite finding nearly one in five homes had excessive levels of lead, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this week claimed that recent soil testing in Altadena proved that expedited federal cleanup efforts had effectively removed toxic ash and debris from homes destroyed by the deadly Eaton fire.

Earlier this year, the EPA announced it would perform a limited soil sampling at 100 destroyed homes across the burn zone in order to verify that contractors had thoroughly mitigated toxic substances. In a recent news release, the EPA said that testing revealed median lead concentrations below federal standards, and “confirmed that cleanup methods successfully addressed contamination and verified cleanup protocols.”

The EPA soil sampling comes amid mounting pressure from residents and environmentalists who claim that a hasty federal cleanup effort had left behind or spread hazardous fire debris. Internal government reports also raised questions about the thoroughness of the cleanup.

The EPA did not release its report to the public, but it said 95 of 100 soil samples collected near the surface of the home’s building footprint were below the federal lead screening level.

“I think for the folks in Altadena who maybe had some concerns about the adequacy of the work that was performed by the federal government in removing ash and debris — I think they should feel confident that those areas of their property are safe to use now,” said Mike Montgomery, EPA Superfund and emergency management director.

In announcing its findings, the EPA cited federal lead standards only, and not California’s more stringent thresholds. Of the 100 homes sampled, 17 had lead levels above 80 milligrams per kilogram, California’s benchmark for residential properties. The highest concentration of lead was 705 milligrams per kilogram — nearly nine times higher than the state standard and triple the federal threshold, according to a copy of the report that was reviewed by The Times.

The results unnerved some Altadena residents, who see more and more fire-destroyed homes being rebuilt. Joy Chen, executive director of Eaton Fire Survivors Network, called on federal officials to release the full report and provide additional resources to address elevated contamination.

“From the beginning, people have been very worried that they [federal workers] did not thoroughly clear these sites. Now 16 months later, people are taking it upon themselves to test or bioremediate to ensure it’s safe to rebuild. Most of us don’t have the resources to make those decisions,” Chen said.

“It would’ve been much easier if homes had been cleared to safe levels the first time around.”

EPA officials said the agency had notified Altadena property owners of their soil test results and encouraged them to review local public health guidance. Montgomery said EPA officials would proactively reach out to property owners whose lots had lead levels above the federal benchmark of 200 milligrams per kilogram.

Federal disaster officials say that some toxic substances within the burn zone could have been deposited there long before the fire — the result perhaps of decades of burning leaded gasoline or lead paint.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency had refused repeatedly to pay for post-cleanup soil testing and broke from long-standing California fire recovery protocols that are intended to protect returning residents from toxic substances. FEMA, along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA, had touted the fire recovery as the fastest in modern history.

Disaster crews removed millions of tons of fire debris from nearly 9,700 properties affected by the Eaton and Palisades fires in roughly eight months.

But hundreds of disaster victims had complained about substandard work from federal cleanup workers, and internal government reports said crews had left debris behind and, in at least one instance, dumped ash on a neighbor’s property.

In January — shortly after the one-year anniversary of the fires — the EPA announced that it would perform soil testing for lead at 100 randomly-selected homes that were destroyed in the Eaton fire and later cleared of debris by federal contractors. The announcement followed months of criticism that federal cleanup workers had mishandled debris — including dumping fire debris and contaminated pool water on neighboring properties.

The Los Angeles Times collected soil samples in March 2025 and published the first evidence that already-remediated home sites retained elevated levels of toxic substances. Los Angeles County, UCLA, USC and several other organizations launched their own soil testing efforts, and all found elevated levels of lead at homes that had already been remediated by federal cleanup crews.

Lead is a potent neurotoxin that can stunt the brain development and lead to behavioral issues in young children that inhale or ingest it. When the Eaton fire burned through Altadena’s historic neighborhoods, it destroyed many homes that were coated in toxic lead paint. Plumes of smoke and ash then deposited the heavy metal across the burn zone.

Dr. Nichole Quick, chief medical advisor for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, encouraged property owners to seek further testing if they have concerns about contamination, including free testing services provided by local universities.

Quick said residents can take steps to limit their exposure, such as washing dusty equipment and keeping cleaning floors and other surfaces clean.

“Guidance is really geared towards how you interrupt that ingestion exposure, so we’re talking about a high-risk group, our kids with developing brains, pregnant women,” Quick said. “Kids also happen to be the ones that crawl around on all sorts of stuff and hands directly into mouth, so a lot of what we’re talking about is stopping that sort of exposure.”

Environmental experts quickly questioned the EPA’s soil sampling approach, which drastically differed from soil testing procedures from California environmental agencies. Andrew Whelton, a Purdue University researcher who has studied environmental risk following disaster, said the EPA sampling — which only tested one mixed sample — would likely mask heavily polluted areas of the home. The agency also only tested for lead — one of 17 toxic metals typically tested for following wildfires.

“It’s apples and oranges,” Whelton said. “They [the EPA] only looked for lead and didn’t look for hot spots. The approach that EPA differs from everything that California has done for fire cleanup for the last 15 years.

“My advice to property owners who haven’t tested soil or are adjacent to the fire area is conduct soil testing as it has always been done.”

The EPA and L.A. County health department are expected to discuss the soil testing results at the Altadena town council meeting on June 16.

Science

How a SoCal native became one of NASA’s most valuable assets

Published

2 days ago

May 20, 2026

Press Room

How a SoCal native became one of NASA’s most valuable assets

One of NASA’s most valuable assets is a Southern Californian.

Following the space agency’s successful Artemis II mission around the moon last month, Victor Glover — who grew up primarily in the Inland Empire and has spent much of his career at Southern California’s many military and aerospace hubs — is now the only pilot to have flown NASA’s Orion capsule.

As the crew finishes its international victory lap before the media, Glover is preparing to put his head down and get to work training the Artemis generation of moon-faring astronauts.

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“I think Artemis is going to demand us to change the paradigm,” he told The Times.

The International Space Station, which has been continuously inhabited by a revolving crew of astronauts in low Earth orbit for over 25 years, has a “very well-worn” training program, he said. But developing a new instructional regimen for complex high-stakes moon missions as the agency tries to aggressively ramp up Artemis launches from once every 3 1/2 years to every six months is a different beast.

“Until we get really ramped up and have a solid training program, I think astronauts need to take more ownership of the training and be involved so we can share this experience,” Glover said.

As of today, the list of Artemis astronauts is only four people long. And the list of Artemis pilots has only one name: Victor Glover.

Glover, 50, was born in Pomona, graduated from Ontario High School and lived “all over” Southern California’s urban sprawl, including Baldwin Village (which he instinctively referred to by its pre-1988 name, “The Jungle”). He completed his undergraduate studies at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and received graduate degrees (plural) from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base.

He cut his teeth as a test pilot at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, in the Mojave. After NASA selected him as an astronaut, he learned to fly SpaceX’s Dragon capsule at the company’s then-headquarters in Hawthorne before riding it to the ISS.

Glover particularly misses those test pilot days, when he was pushing the limits of the F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet in China Lake while completing a master’s degree on the side.

“That was actually maybe one of the best times of my career. We had our fourth daughter while we lived in China Lake,” he said. “I was … working really hard but having a ton of fun at a house full of kids.”

In one of Glover’s favorite pictures, snapped by his wife, he is sitting at his desk in his tan desert flight suit, focused on graduate school work while holding one of his daughters.

Glover sees himself as just one example of how the Golden State’s deserts and coastal cities have left a lasting mark on America’s space program.

“Southern California is very uniquely postured to help NASA,” Glover said. “Southern California has the combination of culture and technology — and it doesn’t hurt to have Hollywood” to help share NASA’s mission and values.

(Glover fondly recalled his joy seeing the “Iron Man” production crew, including actor and rapper Terrence Howard, roll through Edwards Air Force Base during his tenure.)

Glover, who now lives in Texas near NASA’s Johnson Space Center, is focused on bringing that SoCal sensibility and invaluable experience piloting the Orion capsule to the agency’s astronaut training program.

When asked if he hopes to fly again on an Artemis mission, he gave a simple answer: “No.”

There was one other thing on his to-do list, though.

“Tell L.A. I love them and all of Southern California — and I can’t wait to get back out there and visit my home state and my hometown.”

Science

3 countries. 16 stadiums. 104 matches. 2026 World Cup set to become ‘most polluting’ games ever

Published

3 days ago

May 19, 2026

Press Room

3 countries. 16 stadiums. 104 matches. 2026 World Cup set to become ‘most polluting’ games ever

As nearly 300,000 fans prepare to arrive in Los Angeles for the men’s World Cup soccer championship in mid-June, the international soccer federation is coming under fire for what climate scientists and advocates are calling the most polluting World Cup in history.

This year’s event is being held in 16 stadiums across three giant countries: Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

That’s despite the fact that climate change is worsening, the risk of playing in dangerous heat is rising and the federation, FIFA, has a commitment to reduce its carbon emissions 50% by 2030.

“It’s the sheer amount of travel involved in this tournament,” said Freddie Daley, a researcher at the University of Sussex.

Even more than the geography, this year’s event also includes 60% more games than in the past; FIFA expanded the number of teams from 32 to 48, so some 5 million fans will be traveling from around the world to watch.

“The expanded tournament, twinned with its geographical span, means that it’s by far the most emissions-intensive World Cup that we’ve ever seen,” Daley said.

Jet exhaust is a major contributor to climate change, 3% to 4% of all warming, and air travel is usually the biggest contributor to carbon emissions from major sporting events.

The most dedicated and affluent fans will be flying longer distances than ever before to follow their teams around during the games.

Eight games will be played in SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, beginning with the U.S. men’s national team’s opening match on June 12 and ending with a quarterfinal July 10.

Los Angeles World Airports spokesperson Brian Denney estimates 290,000 visitors will come through LAX, about 40% from outside the United States. Because of the worldwide decline in travel due to fuel prices, however, commercial flights into LAX will net about the same as this time last year.

Daley, a campaigner with the Cool Down Sport for Climate Action Network, calculated the emissions projected for the World Cup with researchers from Scientists for Global Responsibility and the Environmental Defense Fund.

They found that the 2026 games will generate over 9 million tons of carbon dioxide, about double the average for the last four World Cups — 4.7 million tons. A million tons is the equivalent emissions of about 220,000 cars on U.S. roads for a year.

FIFA spokesperson Jhamie Chin said FIFA “acknowledges that air travel is a significant contributor to the overall footprint of any major event, and that managing emissions linked to flights remains one of the most complex sustainability challenges for event organizers.”

He said FIFA “welcomes informed scrutiny” but did not respond to a question about how the group plans to achieve its climate goals if World Cups are getting more carbon intensive.

A sellout crowd estimate of 88,966 is displayed on the scoreboard at the 2022 World Cup final between Argentina and France at the Lusail Stadium in Lusail, Qatar, in December 2022.

(Tom Weller / Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

The games in 2030 will span multiple countries, too, but much smaller ones: Spain, Portugal and Morocco, with opening games in Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina. They’ll emit 6.1 million tons of CO2 — less than this year’s games but still more than World Cups past.

The 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia will take place in a more geographically compact area, but the country plans to build 11 new stadiums, whereas this year’s World Cup will only use existing ones. Stadium construction is another leading cause of mega sporting event emissions, so using only existing venues, as Paris mostly did for the last Olympics, is one main way event hosts can address climate change.

The Saudi plans will drive the 2034 event’s pollution up to 8.6 million tons of CO2, based on conservative estimates.

Private charter jet companies hawk World Cup packages online to fly fans all over the continent, but most won’t be able to pursue this kind of travel.

Jose M. Hernandez, a 67-year-old soccer fan, lives in Culver City and has attended the past eight World Cups, always dressed as the Catholic saint Juan Diego. He normally follows the Mexico national team, but with World Cup prices he’s less particular.

“I follow other teams because I like to meet people from different countries, experience different teams,” he said. “It’s really fun.”

For the World Cups in Russia in 2018 and Brazil in 2014, Hernandez flew to games in different cities to get a flavor for different parts of the host countries.

He said he’ll make the high costs this year work by staying with family and friends for games in Monterrey, Guadalajara and Mexico City, where he’s originally from. He’s also catching the Iran vs. New Zealand game in his hometown, Los Angeles. But many of his friends and fellow fans won’t be so lucky.

“Three different countries is really hard for us, especially people who want to follow their own teams,” Hernandez said. “Fans come from Argentina, Brazil, France and have to travel all across the country, and north and south. I don’t know who is going to do that.”

This isn’t the first time the World Cup has come under fire for its climate claims. In 2022, the group Carbon Market Watch and five other nonprofits challenged claims that the World Cup in Qatar would be “carbon neutral.” A Swiss advertising regulator found FIFA to be in breach of federal law.

A stadium is seen with purple lights illuminating the field to promote grass growth in Arlington, Texas.

For this year’s games, FIFA is no longer making those claims, but it’s still promising to lower emissions 50% by 2030 in line with the Paris Agreement, and to eventually reach a net zero climate impact by 2040.

Chin, the FIFA spokesperson, pointed to this year’s use of existing stadiums and FIFA’s environmental strategy, which lists reducing food waste, prioritizing clean technologies and promoting public transport, but without specific targets.

Climate advocates say that doesn’t cut it.

“They have shifted their communications, but at the same time, this World Cup is an expanded event,” said Gavin Mair, a spokesperson for Carbon Market Watch. “It’s not a very credible suggestion to say that they’re aligned in any way with the Paris Agreement.”

Climate watchers concede scaling back the games is a difficult discussion.

An aerial view shows Estadio Akron, a venue for the FIFA World Cup 2026.

“An expanded tournament means that more teams that have never been able to take part get to play for the first time,” Daley said. “This is a wonderful thing.”

Still, he added, “if they are serious about driving down emissions, then that has to be part of the conversation.”

His group’s report does recommend reducing the number of teams. He also recommends FIFA drop high-polluting sponsors and prioritize host countries with existing clean transportation to shuttle fans between games.

Soccer fans in L.A. won’t be able to hop on a high-speed rail for games in Houston or Seattle, like they might to get between cities in parts of Europe or Asia, for example.

Metro is touting the expansion of the D line and a special World Cup bus service with about 300 buses and 15 routes to get fans to SoFi Stadium.

Mayor Karen Bass “is encouraging all fans to take public transportation, including through the enhanced Metro service that will be available throughout the World Cup,” said a spokesperson for her office. “This will reduce carbon emissions and encourage an enjoyable experience for all.”