The tiresome trend of self-righteous climate activists gluing themselves to treasured works of art to “protest” fossil fuels and anthropomorphic climate change recently extended to the US Open, where tennis was condemned via the gluing of feet to the ground. This theater of the cultishly absurd has become increasingly clownish as attention-seekers vie for the limelight. This contrasts starkly with historic American protests, such as those involving labor unions, civil rights, women’s suffrage, Abolition, and the war in Vietnam.
By now, the folly of humans deliberately gluing their fleshy limbs to airport runways, Picassos, or dinosaur parks to decry carbon dioxide has become passe. This fad is flagging like pet rocks and platform shoes. Once enough of the “in crowd” has attached adhesively to a motorway, car dealership, or Italian sculpture, ennui sets in. The tennis court disrupters sporting “End Fossil Fuels” T-shirts had their 15 minutes of fame, but such antics increasingly stick out like a bad mullet. How can such juvenile shenanigans be taken seriously?
Vietnam War protesters, union organizers, urban blacks, and slave liberators often had skin in the game -- gluing feet is child’s play next to burning a draft card in public or taking a club to the head to unionize or desegregate. America has not been this divided since Vietnam but is now splintered over carbon dioxide gas. Yet those protesting on behalf of climate ignore the environmental disaster of the war in Ukraine.
Protests against the Vietnam debacle were volatile, and many Americans railed against the war in Iraq. But there is nary a peep from the peaceniks about Ukraine. Perhaps this is due to the lack of American military personnel being shipped overseas to fight in Ukrainian grainfields (let alone a draft!). Would the tennis-court-shouters be so bold if they clutched draft cards instead of $1,000 cellphones that pollute the planet?
The greenhouse gases generated by the ongoing Ukraine conflict increase daily, joined by toxic chemicals. Cluster bombs manufactured in the United States contribute to significant warming in that region – a heat wave of demonstrably anthropomorphic origin. Schoolchildren are conditioned to think that burping cows are an existential threat, and that humanity has but a handful of years within which to avert certain doom. Even a youngster could understand, if that is true, the munitions and destruction in Ukraine threaten to destroy the entire planet irrevocably unless peace is sought immediately.
Climate Peace in Ukraine?
(Photo by STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
But is an end to the conflict being sought in the name of climate change? Not by the Biden administration, NATO, the United Nations, or the brave tennis disrupters. If not on behalf of the women and children being maimed and killed in Ukraine, why not protest for climate urgency? Where is John Kerry’s derision of the US-fueled war? He’s too busy chiding American farmers for growing food with tractors and owning Holsteins. AOC is vocal about cow flatulence but doesn’t burp a word against the ongoing environmental calamity in Ukraine. Instead, she hawkishly votes to send more weapons there.
A recent UN report claimed that drastic shifts in finance, industry, and consumption are required to sufficiently reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avert catastrophe, lamenting this is unlikely to be achieved. The global body called for eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, which drive up consumer energy costs by trillions of dollars, to “incentivize” struggling communities to use less fuel. Meat consumption must be reduced by 80%, immediately – quite a good deal for Bill Gates’ creepy synthetic comestibles.
No Protests of the Ukraine War
World leaders gather at the United Nations to inflate consumer fuel prices and compel vegetarianism (who gets to eat the 20% of meat left, BTW?) while funding Ukraine’s war machine with hundreds of billions of dollars.
The Nord Stream pipeline was sabotaged by actors unconcerned by climate impact. The German Environment Agency estimated the explosion to be equivalent to roughly 7.5 million metric tons of carbon. That equates to a whole bunch of Dutch Friesans, yet cows are targeted by the United Nations, with no concern for war.
The rippling effects of the conflict in Ukraine are cataclysmic in climate terms. Beyond the munitions and explosions, and the exploded Nord Stream, there are Pantagruelian dimensions of increased greenhouse gases. Per one report:
“Germany has followed through on the controversial decision to close its six nuclear power plants (NPPs) and has restarted its coal-fired plants to replace lost Russian gas imports. Germany is currently burning an all-time record amount of coal to keep the economy powered. And it’s not just Germany: Turkey overtook Germany and Poland in June to become Europe's top producer of electricity generated at coal-fired plants.”
The World Burns Because Ukraine Burns
Where are the American protesters of the Dakota Access and other oil pipelines, who should be screeching like Vietnam war dissidents against this Ukraine-centered, Europe-wide, greenhouse-gas effusion? Why is the mass conversion of large swaths of Europe to a coal-burning frenzy not attracting the attention of the cow-flatulence and Rembrandt-souped climate crisis brigade, even as the United Nations calls urgently for universal immediate consumer sacrifice?
Perhaps they are watching tennis, glued to their TVs.
