This Sunday, the thing most football fans will be worrying about is the score of the biggest game of the year—not the 1 million lbs. of CO2 released into the atmosphere because of it. But the NFL isn’t dropping the ball on global warming: For the first time, renewable energy credits (RECs) will help offset all of the Super Bowl’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The massive electrical system at Dolphin Stadium—including the new "Softsun" lighting rig installed by CBS Sports for the game—will consume somewhere around 300,000 kw/hr, releasing 30 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions through Super Bowl XLI, says Jack Groh, director of the NFL Environmental Program. The league’s mass transportation fleet of 2500 vehicles for fans and league personnel accounts for the other 70 percent, but the NFL’s three-year-old tree-planting program should compensate for that energy use with 3000 new trees at a dozen south Florida sites (pictured at right).

But for this year’s matchup between the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts, the NFL is partnering with Sterling Planet to provide RECs from wind and solar energy sources. Unlike carbon emissions, which are bought and sold between companies, RECs replace “dirty” energy on the electric grid and can then be sold as a commodity on the marketplace, neutralizing the environmental impact of the customer’s use and going into the construction of more renewable energy sources.

The RECs donated by Sterling Planet will completely cover the energy needs of the stadium and the NFL Experience theme park, Groh says. “We’d been investigating solutions like this for a couple of years, but an emissions-credit system just didn’t make sense to us,” he insists. “RECs seemed like a better solution.”

Critics have panned the NFL’s tree planting because its effects won’t be seen for quite some time, but the league is also sponsoring solid waste management projects, using recycling and reuse of materials to divert waste from local landfills. “The next big issue is water conservation, which we’re looking into now,” says Groh. —Erin McCarthy