Liberals Cheer the Dirtiest Show on Earth

Liberals preach a daily gospel of low-carbon life. Drive an EV. Skip the steak. Offset your flight for the feel-good points. For their ilk, the planet is dying and only their purity can save it.

Then the weekend rolls around, and some of them will pack the grandstands for Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, and NASCAR—the most spectacular, deliberate, high-octane burn of fossil fuel and rubber this side of a refinery fire.

This is not subtle hypocrisy. This is theater. Some of the liberal wankings in the racing press are just hilarious.

Formula 1 is the global champion of excess. Official operational footprint: 168,720 tCO₂e in 2024, trimmed to around 149,000 in 2025. That is the sanitized number the circus reports—factories, team travel, logistics, event ops. Independent accounting that includes the six million spectators puts the real annual hit north of 1 million tonnes. The cars, airplanes, and the carbon burn of hauling cars, engines, and hospitality kits across five continents, along with the army of staff. Brutal pollution. Absolutely brutal.

An F1 car is limited to 110 kg per race (roughly 26–38 gallons depending on density and circuit). Twenty cars, twenty-four races, plus practice, quali, and testing. One team figure put its seasonal fuel use (racing + testing) around 53,000 gallons. Multiply this across the grid and the number gets ugly fast - over 500,000 gallons of carbon-coughing fuel.

For tires, Pirelli ships thousands of sets. A full season sees tens of thousands of tires produced, fitted, scrubbed, and discarded. One team alone can chew through well over 3,000 per season. Chew on that a moment!

The logistics are the real killer. Multiple cargo aircraft. Sea freight when convenient. Long-haul trucks. Up to 1,200 tons of kit can move for a single race weekend, with the season’s calendar a deliberate global zigzag designed for television money, not carbon efficiency.

NASCAR is the American darling - less exotic, just as gluttonous. Scope 1 and 2 numbers are modest on paper (around 18,000–43,000 tCO₂e depending on market- vs location-based accounting) because they measure what the sanctioning body controls, not the full convoy. Reality: fleets of 18-wheelers hauling cars, tools, and hospitality across the country week after week. Fuel burn at 4–5 mpg in race conditions. One four-car team can burn over 10,000 gallons just on race miles in a season, before practice and qualifying. Series-wide the number climbs into the hundreds of thousands of gallons.

For tires, Goodyear hand-builds and leases well over 100,000 for the top three national series every year. Cup Series alone can put 50,000–80,000 tires on the track. Many of those are used once and recycled into other uses for ground rubber or burned as fuel. The rubber mountain is real.

IndyCar burns through roughly 25,000–34,000 Firestone tires per season. They run a 100% renewable fuel blend that claims a 60% greenhouse-gas cut versus straight gasoline - better marketing, still combustion engines screaming around ovals and street circuits at 2-4 mpg, and liberals cheering the event. Then the cars are packed on diesel transporters for a long haul to home base.

IMSA plays the same game with high percentages of renewable fuel and tires now incorporating 50% sustainable materials. While endurance racing means longer stints and fewer changes, but the support infrastructure remains diesel trucks, generators, and air travel for the bigger events. A 24-hour race? There is literally a crew tasked with nothing other than driving continual loops around the circuit and re-fueling the generators. The cars run 24-hours getting 3-5mpg.

It’s worth noting that even these “renewable fuels” must be synthesized by running massive, sensitive electrolyzers to split water into hydrogen, capture CO₂ from the air, and then use intense heat and pressure to force the elements and components to bond. They don’t magically appear and magically make the air cleaner. They are extremely “high-touch” on the production side and very expensive to produce, often exposed to economic bottlenecks.

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Add it up. Specialized high-performance machines. Disposed rubber by the tens of thousands. Continuous heavy freight movement - air cargo and endless streams of diesel-chugging 18-wheelers. Global or continental calendars built for spectacle, not efficiency. No other major sport moves this much heavy, time-critical, non-fungible equipment this often. Motorsport is a permanent traveling industrial carnival that exists to burn energy as performance art.

If these crying liberals really cared about the planet, wouldn’t this be a sports industry they vehemently boycott?

Imagine PETA buying box seats at the Kentucky Derby, hosting a massive buffet of foie gras and caviar, and then cheering on the horse pumped up with the most Lasix - that’s what we have with liberals in motorsport.

Lewis Hamilton, with his cause célèbre on climate change, was literally preaching “global warming” while wearing a jersey emblazoned with the logo of Malaysia's national oil and gas company during his years at Mercedes. Now he does it while sporting a Royal Dutch Shell logo. It’s absolutely laughable. Then he claims to fight for equality in motorsport while he makes a girl hold an umbrella over his head and run around with treats for his dog. No, I’m not making this up. Go watch!

How do the climate-conscious square this? The same way they square their private jets to the climate conferences.

“It’s only one percent of the total footprint—the cars are efficient hybrids now.”

True. The cars are a rounding error. The logistics and the spectacle are the emissions. But they still buy the ticket to events sponsored by oil and gas refining giants.

“Net zero by 2030 / 2035.”

Oh joy - they buy sustainable aviation fuel certificates, switch some of their trucks to biofuel, install some solar panels at a few tracks, and call it progress. The freighters still fly. The tires still get shredded. The gargantuan show still rolls.

“Technology transfer to road cars.”

Racing has always pushed engineering. That does not erase the racing season’s burn. It is the classic “we had to destroy the village to save it” defense applied to carbon. Doesn’t play. Not even close.

“The economic impact and the jobs.”

Suddenly the same people who want to shut down pipelines and agricultural farms (and now data centers) discover that some industries are too culturally important to touch. Imagine that! BTW, Lewis Hamilton preaches while wearing an AWS logo as well - can’t make it up…

Look, cognitive dissonance here is the real fuel. These liberals will lecture you about your gas stove while they stream the Miami Grand Prix from a climate-controlled living room and talk about the “incredible engineering.” They will demand you sacrifice comfort and freedom so the climate models improve by a fraction of a degree, then cheer as twenty cars dump a ton of carbon-crud into the atmosphere for their entertainment.

This is not about loving speed or engineering or the smell of race fuel. Plenty of fans do that without the lecture. This is about the selective blindness of a class that treats environmentalism as moral theater and not consistent principle. It’s never consistent principle. Ever.

Motorsport is loud, masculine, hierarchical, and unapologetically wasteful of resources in the pursuit of excellence and spectacle. That is exactly why it should make the low-carbon priesthood uncomfortable. Instead, they buy merch and argue about the relative merits of a Lewis Hamilton and whatever social cause he’s on this weekend - while the refinery fires burn brightly. You can’t write a funnier script - it’s Mel Brooks meets Franz Kafka.

The dirty air is not hidden; it’s the product. The only question left? How long can the preachers and pundits of purity keep pretending they don’t see the smoke?

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Enjoy the spectacle. And the next time you see a race car having to pit and re-fuel after only 18 laps, say a prayer for a liberal. He/she/they/ze are gonna need it!

Todd