Big Ten Carbon Emissions Went Way Up In 2024, Showing Academic Hypocrisy

The Big Ten Conference is one of several to add a number of new teams across the geographic spectrum. Suddenly, a conference with Rutgers in New Jersey and Penn State in central Pennsylvania added schools like the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. 

And what do you know? As a result of all that increased travel across the continent, carbon emissions for the Big Ten have gone up substantially.

A Capital News Service analysis breathlessly reported Tuesday that the carbon emissions for the Big Ten’s football teams more than tripled in 2024 thanks to the four new members on the West Coast. And the numbers are staggering and hilarious. 

Per the analysis, “Each of the Big Ten’s new members is traveling at least twice as much this season as the year before, with UCLA and Washington traveling more than three times as much in 2024 for regular-season conference games as they did in their final Pac-12 seasons.”

Seventeen of the 18 schools will see their emissions increase, with the four new West Coast schools the worst offenders. Washington is the highest, while USC, UCLA and Oregon were just above Penn State, Rutgers and Maryland.

And absolutely no one involved in the Big Ten Conference cares. Nor should they.

LOS ANGELES, CA  – OCTOBER 7, 2023: USC emerges from the tunnel to take the field before the game against Arizona at the LA Memorial Coliseum on October 7, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Big Ten Schools Fearmonger About ‘Climate Change’ While Expanding Conference

This is bad news for the dozens of far-left Big Ten fans who think climate change is an existential threat to humanity, all evidence to the contrary.

But more importantly, it highlights the inherent hypocrisy of the conference and its member institutions. Every single one of the Big Ten schools, except for Purdue, has a “climate action” plan. They’ve all spent millions on campus climate change initiatives, while virtue signaling about reducing carbon emissions and their impact on the environment.

Then they created a super conference with geography spanning the entire United States. Because none of them actually care about carbon emissions. 

It’s just like the rest of the climate change warriors who own private jets, take cars everywhere and own mansions with massive gas and electricity needs. If they actually believed climate change was as imminent and dangerous as they claim, conference realignment would need to be immediately undone. They clearly don’t. Because money matters more. 

The next step is to get the schools to admit that they don’t actually care, that their positions are about signaling the correct set of political values. Don’t hold your breath. There’s too much currency in false virtue.