A climate protester at the U.S. Open tennis tournament disrupted the women’s semi-final match between American Coco Gauff and Czech player Karolina Muchova for almost an hour. Now he is talking to the press about what he thinks was an attempt to silence him.
Shayok Mukhopadhyay and three other climate activists stood up and began to chant “End fossil fuels now” shortly after the second set began. As event security moved in, it became apparent that Mukhopadhyay had glued his feet to the concrete floor of Arthur Ashe stadium. Mukhopadhyay’s companions were led away, but it took medical personnel almost 50 minutes to get his feet unglued so he could be taken into custody.
In other news, a protestor super glued his feet to the concrete and there was a 45 minute delay in the US Open semi-final while they unglued him. pic.twitter.com/0IlBdSVLOU
— ACL-Sports.com®–Sports Investor (@TheRealMrACL) September 8, 2023
But these were Mukhopadhyay’s 15 minutes. And he wasn’t going to waste a second of them. Mukhopadhyay was taken to East Elmhurst Hospital and given a psych exam.
“I’ve been arrested before, but I’ve never had this experience,” Mukhopadhyay said. “They were asking obvious leading questions like, ‘Do you think the world is going to end?’ This typical stereotype of the crazy, apocalyptic cult kind of thing.”
Well, if the shoe fits…
“India is something I constantly think about because I grew up there, and I’m keenly aware of how low the level of resource consumption and energy consumption is there,” Mukhopadhyay said. “The Gangetic Delta, the mangrove forest, the Sundarbans, where the Ganges river empties into the Bay of Bengal, these are extremely vulnerable areas to climate change… They’re going to pay the price for this huge amount of resource and energy consumption in the global north. That injustice really, really horrifies me.”
Except that India is now the third-largest carbon-emitting country on the planet. It surpassed the EU in emissions in 2019 and has continued to pour CO2 into the atmosphere.
Police took Mukhopadhyay to a nearby precinct, where he was allowed to leave after a few hours with a ticket.
“This was completely a mechanism to intimidate and humiliate and to paint a distorted picture of me,” he said. “Who’s the crazy person here? It’s Biden who’s the crazy person here, who, in 2023, is approving new oil and gas projects when international energy agencies founded by Henry Kissinger – no tree hugger – have said there should be no new fossil fuel infrastructure.”
On Wednesday, Biden announced he had put 13 million acres of Arctic wilderness off limits to drilling and canceled all oil and gas leases in the region that had already been let. Mukhopadhyay must have been too busy gluing his feet to concrete to have heard this news.
Mukhopadhyay obviously has a hugely inflated picture of himself. Are there 10 people in the United States that give a flying fig about who this guy is or what his cause is? Why would the cops want to paint a distorted picture of a complete unknown?
His attorney, Ron Kuby, tried to paint Mukhopadhyay as someone who was just “following the science.” Doesn’t everyone think that civilization will be destroyed unless people are roused to take action?
“When somebody who accepts the international scientific consensus that climate change is putting the planet in peril is deemed by the cops to be a delusional psychotic, it’s disturbing,” Kuby said. “Given the fact that they involuntarily held him at a psychiatric institution because he agrees with climate science, probably dismissing the charges at this point seems like a fair balance.”
In fact, the “consensus” is that unless we can keep global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade by the end of the century, there will be a runaway greenhouse effect. The “consensus” is based on modeling, not real-world observation. And there are plenty of climate scientists who disagree with the specifics.
Related: 1,600 Scientists Humiliate the Climate Ghouls Once and for All
But this is too esoteric for a climate hysteric like Mukhopadhyay to grasp. So he doesn’t realize that his insane advocacy really does warrant examination by a qualified mental health professional.
And the fact that the nutcase glued his feet to concrete might have had something to do with the determination he might need professional intervention.
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