Tennis Courts and the War in Ukraine: A Climatic Comparison

Why aren't climate alarmists protesting against the Ukraine War?

The tiresome trend of self-righteous climate activists gluing themselves to treasured works of art to “protest” against fossil fuels and anthropomorphic climate change recently extended to the US Open, where tennis was condemned via the gluing of footwear to the tarmac. This theater of the cultishly absurd has become increasingly clownish as attention-seekers vie for the limelight. This contrasts starkly with historic American protests, e.g., labor unions, civil rights, women’s suffrage, Abolition, or the War in Vietnam. Protesting tennis based on climate is shameful compared to the misery and climate impacts of war, particularly the War in Ukraine.

The folly of humans deliberately gluing their fleshy limbs to airport runways, Picassos, or dinosaur parks in protest against carbon dioxide has become passe. This self-flagellating fad is flagging like pet rocks or platform shoes. Once enough of ‘the in crowd’ have attached themselves adhesively to a motorway, car dealership, or Italian sculpture, the ennui sets in. The tennis court disrupters sporting “End Fossil Fuels” t-shirts had their fifteen 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 one’s shoes to the ground 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 the Vietnam War 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 War were volatile, a cauldron of tension boiling beneath the nation’s socio-economic landscape. More recently, many Americans protested against the indefensible war in Iraq. But nary a peep from the erstwhile peacenik left against the Ukraine War. This is tragic, likely due to the lack of American military personnel being shipped overseas to battle in Ukrainian grainfields (let alone a draft!). The tennis-court-gluers would not be so bold if they clutched draft cards instead of $1,000 cellphones that pollute the planet, risking only their loafers.

The greenhouse gases generated by the ongoing Ukraine conflict increase daily, joined by toxic chemicals. Cluster bombs manufactured in the USA contribute to significant warming in that region – a heat wave of demonstrably anthropomorphic origin. American elementary school children 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 those schoolchildren can see that, 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?

And yet peace is not sought in the name of climate change, either by the Biden Administration, NATO, the United Nations, or the brave tennis court foot-gluers. If not on behalf of the women and children being maimed and killed in Ukraine, why not protest for climate urgency as applied to that faraway conflict? Where is climate envoy John Kerry’s derision of the US-fueled war while he chides American farmers for growing food with tractors, or owning cows? AOC is vocal about cow flatulence but doesn’t burp a word against the ongoing environmental calamity in Ukraine – instead, she hawkishly voted to send weapons there.

A recent UN report claims that drastic shifts in finance, industry, and consumption are required to sufficiently reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avert disaster and that it is unlikely this can be achieved. The report calls for eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, which will drive up consumer energy costs by trillions of dollars to “incentivize” struggling communities to use less fuel. It also claims meat consumption must be reduced by eighty percent, immediately – quite a good deal for Bill Gates’ creepy synthetic meat, especially since the UN calls for global domination using “both supply and demand side measures” to technocratically control markets! 

No Protests of the Ukraine War

Yet the environmental impacts of the war in Ukraine have gone unprotested by those who glue themselves to paintings, airport runways, and tennis courts. The world leaders gathering at the UN to inflate consumer fuel prices and compel vegetarianism (who gets to eat the 20% of meat left, BTW?) also gathered to fund Ukraine’s war machine with hundreds of billions of dollars. Perhaps they could have saved the UN their upcoming November meeting, had they sued for peace instead.

The Nord Stream Pipeline was sabotaged as a consequence of this un-climate-protested war, by actors unconcerned by environmental impacts. The German Environment Agency estimated the climate impact of the explosion to be equivalent to roughly 7.5 million metric tons of carbon. That equates to a whole bunch of Dutch cows, yet cows are targeted by the UN, with no concern for war. 

The rippling effects of the Ukraine War are cataclysmic in greenhouse gas terms. Beyond the munitions and explosions, and the Nord Stream Pipeline, 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 protesters of the Dakota Access and other oil pipelines, if not screeching like Vietnam War protesters against this Ukraine-centered, Europe-wide, greenhouse gas effusion? Is the protection of sacred Native American lands paramount to Ukrainian villages? Might the carbon footprint of the Ukraine War call down the world-ending fire of climate change upon those very same sacred tribal lands? 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-gluing climate crisis brigade, even as the UN calls urgently for universal immediate consumer sacrifice? 

Perhaps they are watching tennis, glued to their TVs.

(An edited version of this commentary was previously published at Liberty Nation.)