Activists decided it would be a good idea to delay one of the most notable NCAA Football Championship Subdivision football games of the year to make a political statement.
The Yale Bulldogs hosted the Harvard Crimson on Saturday and beat them 50-43 in double overtime, but that’s not why the game made headlines. At halftime, left-wing activists took the field and refused to leave when the second half was supposed to start.
The protesters demanded that the two schools divest from their fossil fuel investments and cancel their holdings of Puerto Rico’s debt. At its peak, the protest featured about 500 students on the field. It resulted in 42 arrests.
Although the protest earned praise from liberals such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and actress Alyssa Milano, it was the kind of display that has no place at a sporting event. Plus, it is yet another example of how radical environmentalists are preventing rational discussions from occurring on climate change.
For both Harvard and Yale, this is the biggest sporting event of the year. It’s a rivalry that dates back to 1875 and has featured 136 games. For well over a century, the long-standing tradition has been a way for people to take their minds off everything going on in the world around them for a few hours, including politics, to enjoy their lives, and watch something that brings them happiness. This should have been the case for the thousands of people attending the game in New Haven and for those watching the game at home on ESPNU.
However, instead of sports being a unifying source of entertainment, protesters decided to break the law and screw with a lot of people’s day by wasting their time. They annoyed a lot of people by trying to ruin a historic football game. That’s no way to win people over in the climate change debate. If someone had a busy schedule, the delay also means they might not have been able to see the game’s exciting finish.
Surely, there is a serious discussion to be had on climate change, but some of the more extreme environmentalists hurt the credibility of the discussion. Humans do contribute to climate change, though it’s unclear how much of the effect is from humans and how much is natural.
If there is going to be a serious discussion, it’s not going to come from trying to ruin a football game. It’s not going to come from a $93 trillion socialist trojan horse known as the Green New Deal. It won’t come from a wealthy 16-year-old Swedish girl telling people what to do. It won’t come from blocking city roads and highways, messing with people’s commutes. It won’t come from alarmist rhetoric, like when Ocasio-Cortez tells people the world is going to end in 12 years (former Vice President Al Gore’s climate predictions were ice cold, after all). In extreme cases, alarmist rhetoric about the environment inspires disturbed individuals to commit eco-terrorism.
Possible solutions to the climate change issue may include some topics left-wing environmentalists would be uncomfortable discussing, like nuclear energy, fracking, carbon capture technology, putting pressure on other countries such as China and India to clean up their acts, and even restrictions on immigration to the United States, as Numbers USA suggests. After all, the carbon footprint for potential immigrants would be smaller in their home country than in car-driving, iPhone-using America.
There is room for bipartisanship on environmental issues. What there is no room for, however, is unruly protesters delaying sporting events and creating division.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
