November 23, 2019 marked the 136th meeting of the Harvard and Yale football teams. This year, the annual pigskin classic featuring these Ivy League powerhouses included a half-time protest that revealed the sheer scope of climate change hysteria that has run rampant on college campuses throughout the nation.
In case you missed it, as the first half of the game concluded and the teams left the field to take a break before the second half kickoff, hundreds of students stormed the field and refused to leave. Apparently, the students were staging a sit-in over Harvard and Yale’s complicity in the so-called climate change apocalypse that will supposedly end life on Earth as we know it, in about a decade or so.
According to the protestors, Harvard and Yale must immediately eliminate all fossil-fuel companies from their endowment investments. The students also called for the disinvestment of companies that hold Puerto Rican debt, among other outrageous demands.
The student groups responsible for coordinating the protest (Fossil Free Yale, the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition, and Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard), issued the following statement:
“Harvard and Yale claim their goal is to create student leaders who can strive toward a more ‘just, fair, and promising world’ by ‘improving the world today and for future generations.’ Yet by continuing to invest in industries that mislead the public, smear academics, and deny reality, Harvard and Yale are complicit in tearing down that future.”
Needless to say, the student protestors could be just a wee bit biased. However, this is very understandable considering they have been indoctrinated for years by the very academics who they claim are “smeared” by the evil fossil-fuel industry.
Of course, these climate change crusaders fail to realize one very simple fact: Their lives are made infinitely better by fossil fuels. Without fossil fuels, these students would live in a world that is practically unimaginable by today’s standards.
In fact, fossil fuels provide the vast majority of electric power for the United States. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “In 2018, about 4,171 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) (or 4.17 trillion kWh) of electricity were generated at utility-scale electricity generation facilities in the United States. About 64% of this electricity generation was from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, petroleum, and other gases). About 19% was from nuclear energy, and about 17% was from renewable energy sources.”
Do the entitled students at Yale and Harvard realize that if they actually got their way and the U.S. went fossil fuel-free, the U.S. economy would crater in the blink of an eye? The availability of electricity would plummet, transportation would grind to a halt, and technology (including their precious cell-phones) would be utterly useless.
In other words, the Ivy League student protestors are virtue-signaling to a whole new degree. Either they are wholly ignorant about the reality of energy production and consumption (a likely scenario given their academic upbringings), or they are falling prey to the uber-Left mentality of, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
No doubt, the protestors are as reliant upon fossil fuels as the rest of us who do not decry the very resources that have revolutionized modern society and improved our lives beyond comprehension. If this is not the case, I challenge any one of the hundreds of protestors to actually put their behavior in line with their ideology. If these protestors are so genuinely concerned about the future, they ought to dramatically reduce their carbon footprints.
So, what are the odds that even a handful of these students actually follow through and change their lifestyles to reflect their ideology? I am no mathematician, but according to my calculations, the odds of this happening are about equal to the odds of a climate change induced catastrophe over the next decade. In other words, don’t bet on either one if you have half a brain.