Jonathan S. Tobin
It’s apparently not just airplanes and cows that are killing the planet.
Harvard–Yale climate-change protests
last weekend help explain why Americans aren’t buying global-warming
extremism or the tantrums of angry youngsters.
Are environmental activists changing the hearts and minds of
Americans about global warming, inspiring them to treat it as a pressing
crisis? So far, the results are mixed, as we saw last Saturday when
climate protesters stormed the field to disrupt the annual Harvard–Yale
football game. The stunt earned more boos than cheers from the crowd at
the Yale Bowl in New Haven.
Polls have shown that more Americans than ever before are aware of
climate change as an issue, but they are mixed about whether it is a
“crisis” or just a “problem” that won’t require major sacrifices to fix,
as a recent Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll found.
That survey showed that Americans were split down the middle
on how to define climate change, with 38 percent saying it is a crisis
and an equal number calling it merely a problem. But the results were
far more one-sided when it came to the question of what to do about
climate change, with 62 percent of the public saying that any solution
will require only “minor sacrifices” or “not much sacrifice.” Only 37
percent believe it will require “major sacrifices.”
The public’s disinclination to see climate change as a pressing global
catastrophe is fueling the rage of activists. Swedish teenager Greta
Thunberg, who has become an international celebrity for her angry
warnings that we’re on the brink of “mass extinction,” is widely
applauded by the media, but there’s little indication that Americans are
ready to heed her advice. Indeed, some environmental activists think
her emphasis on pushing people to change their personal behavior — to
give up meat, cheese, plastic, and air travel — is bound to undermine
their cause. They have little hope that people living in the 21st
century will be content to live as if they were in the 19th because
Thunberg and other activists tells them it will save the planet. These
advocates want the sole focus to be on governments, not individuals.
...At the heart of the divide on climate change is a question of
hypocrisy and class. Elites such as the students who attend the
country’s most exclusive universities don’t merely believe the claims
that the planet is burning up. They go further and support the kind of
radical countermeasures put forward in the Democrats’ “Green New Deal,”
changes that would utterly transform — and devastate — the American
economy and society.
Celebrities including Britain’s Prince Harry, actor Leonardo
DiCaprio, and former president Barack Obama all attended the so-called Google Camp event on the environment at a Sicilian resort
this past July, flying there in 114 private jets that pumped an
estimated 784,000 kilograms of carbon into the atmosphere. Similarly,
student activists at Harvard and Yale show no sign of giving up their
privileges and living by the rules they’d like to impose on the rest of
the country. To be fair, Thunberg eschews air travel and scolds her
parents for trying to get away with late-night cheese snacks. (On the
other hand, Thunberg’s much-ballyhooed transatlantic crossing by
sailboat, to deliver her to the U.N. for her climate-change speech,
actually had a larger carbon footprint than one round-trip Europe–New
York flight, given that two crew members had to fly across the Atlantic
to NYC to man the boat on its return, and two of the original crew flew
home from NYC to Europe.)
Such hypocrisy was on display at last weekend’s football-game protest
as well. The antique ritual of the Harvard–Yale game has long been a
favorite of the non-Yale residents of New Haven. They attended the Yale
Bowl in large numbers this year; the fact that they lustily jeered the
students trying to spoil their fun is telling.
...The Harvard–Yale protest was very much in line with the Thunberg-style
politics of angry and intolerant children. Such demonstrators pay little
heed to democratic processes or any counterarguments to their climate
catechism. But are privileged students going to persuade Americans to
make “major sacrifices” for the sake of the climate by spoiling their
Saturday-afternoon football? Will Americans follow the advice of
celebrity scolds who threaten to take away their freedom of movement and
their access to a non-vegan diet? The climate-change alarmists seem to
think so, but they are tone-deaf to American public opinion and
sensibilities.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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