SELF-INFLICTED JOYLESSNESS.

"The easiest way to be miserable" and "absolutely unnecessary," notes Derek Hunter.

It's apparently a mandatory disposition among the Troubled Left, though.  "The FIFA World Cup: Private Jet Pollution Spikes."

As fans gather for the FIFA World Cup final match, pitting Spain against defending champion Argentina, New York City has been engulfed in a shroud of wildfire smoke.

At the same time, thousands of wealthy fans are arriving in luxury private jets, the most carbon-emissions polluting form of transportation. This seems an appropriate image for what may prove to be the most polluting sports tournament in world history, thanks in part to private jet excess.

I suppose we should be grateful the joyless continue to confine their unhappiness to the private jet people.  I mean, all those stacks of waffles and free pop refills.

Compounding the injustice, ordinary fans, taxpayers, and the flying public subsidize the pollution spewing activity of the high-flying private jet class. Private jets don’t chip in their fair share of the cost of airspace, let alone their environmental impact. And last year, the U.S. Congress slathered on more tax breaks for private jets and their ultra-wealthy users.

These tax breaks don’t even address the biggest subsidy: the ability of private jets to avoid any responsibility for the health and environmental costs of their pollution impacts.

With an assist from our new IPS Private Jet Emission Tracker, designed to assess the impact of special events, we know that thousands of private jets have already attended the first 102 matches of the FIFA World Cup. Prior to the final match, the private jets attending the tournament have spewed an estimated 136 kt of additional carbon pollution into the atmosphere, the equivalent of driving 31,723 gasoline powered cars for a year. The Tracker looks at private jet activity in match-host cities over five years and documents the spike in activity.

In our assessment, Red Card for Private Jets at the FIFA World Cup, we document the excessive emissions and the costs to everyone else. We call on FIFA to ban private jets at matches and live up to their pledge to be carbon neutral by 2040.

Forgive me an impertinence, perhaps the easiest way to end the regressive transfer inherent in government provision of air corridors and air traffic control is to treat the airways as productive assets and privatize them.  Furthermore, as the atmosphere is a productive asset, perhaps an expanded market in tradable carbon credits will allocate private trips to future footie tournaments more efficiently.

Perhaps I should be grateful that as of this afternoon, that count of private jets at the World Cup is not being knitted into a shawl somewhere such that, come the revolution, the guiltiest high rollers will be first to the scaffold.

But for a sport with such widespread proletarian appeal, particularly in the developing world, its tournament is sure bothering the self-styled progressives.

Khalid, a Saudi Arabian international student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who asked that his real name not be used out of concern about losing his student visa, tells The Progressive that his father feared for his safety when he applied for a student visa in the United States in 2024, even before Donald Trump had returned to office. “It was during the Biden era, before everything became even worse,” Khalid says. “People [in Saudi Arabia] perceive the United States as dangerous.” This stereotype primarily results from the discrimination and mistreatment that many citizens from the Middle East have faced in the United States since 2001. Now, the recent World Cup controversies, he says, are “not really helping with that stereotype.”

Leading up to the World Cup, more than 120 civil society groups across the globe issued a travel advisory warning people visiting the United States for the tournament that they could be at risk of serious rights violations under the Tr​​ump Administration, including “arbitrary denial of entry and risk of arrest, detention and/or deportation.” In May, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin also stated that ICE would be present at World Cup matches—a decision met with protests and boycotts in the United States and around the world.

“I know people that just refuse to go to the United States, even though they’re huge, huge soccer fans, just because of the political climate,” Khalid says.

Beyond the economic benefit that tourists and international visitors bring to the United States, Lily and Khalid believe that visiting may have allowed international citizens to gain a more nuanced perspective of the country and its people beyond the notoriety of the Trump Administration, improving the United States’s global reputation.

But fans are not the only ones at risk of denied entry, deportation, and discrimination during this World Cup season. In May, Iran’s soccer team moved its World Cup base camp from Tucson, Arizona,  to Tijuana, Mexico, after facing unusually harsh restrictions from the United States, including its players and staff being made to leave the country immediately and return to their base camp in Mexico after the final whistle of every game. Other international teams were permitted to establish base camps in the United States and remain in the host country between matches without issue. Just weeks later, World Cup referee Omar Artan was denied entry to the United States from his home country of Somalia, despite being selected to officiate at the tournament, with no reason offered by U.S. authorities for his repatriation.

It's probably too much to ask a Progressive contributor to acknowledge the good impressions the normies gave our visitors.  It's de rigueur in those circles to wallow in the joylessness.  “It’s really kind of tainted the benefit that I think the United States would have gotten otherwise for being one of the host countries. It’s a missed opportunity for the United States to improve its reputation and earn back some goodwill.”  Sad!