Greta Thunberg's emissions advice

would appear to be a catastrophe in the making - if it has not already happened.  "Everyone should get on to climate change issues and follow her advice," I was told  yesterday. It is one of the many interesting little snippets of conversation it is possible to have with complete strangers when "minding the shop" at the state's Show. 

I did some hours  there yesterday sitting at the information desk in the Handicrafts area. I answered queries about where to find things, why certain things had won prizes, why something had two blue ribbons, how long it might take to make "that quilt". I fielded complaints about the way things had been judged and more about the way things were displayed. At one point I talked to a woman of 96 who has been entering things in the Show for more years than I have been alive. (Her granddaughter might have brought her in a wheelchair but she was still planning her entries for next year.) 

Inevitably I spoke to a number of people I know or had known in the past. Someone introduced herself as a person who had been in the same primary school class as the Black Cat. Another as someone the Senior Cat had taught even more years before that. 

And there were some oddities. There was the man who had just retired and was teaching himself to quilt using only recycled items of clothing. "That's not the way it was done,"he told us of the art works on the walls. Yes, in a way, he was correct. There was the severely autistic boy for whom the sensory overload of the surroundings was getting too much. His carer was getting anxious and looked positively alarmed when I spoke quietly to him and got him to touch what I was working on. I gave him one of the tiny leaves I had just knitted. I need to knit many more and the soft texture was just what he needed. No, he didn't thank me or even look at me but he quietened down and they went on their way. 

And there was the inevitable "climate change" warrior. He wanted to tell me "all about Greta Thunberg and how amazing she is". He went on and on. He was not in the least interested in anything any of us might have to say. He was totally determined to deliver his lecture on the way "a sixteen year old has changed the world". He told us "what she has done is absolutely amazing. It helped to get the present government to take climate change seriously. They need to get her out here to address parliament and get all those deniers to listen."

He had plans of his own too - all taken from Greta Thunberg's activities. Like so many other zealots he had "ideas" that are completely impractical. 

Alarmingly there are people who are so convinced of the rightness of all this they are going to bring about power and water shortages if they are allowed to proceed. Thunberg was sixteen when she started her campaign. She is nineteen now. In three years she may have made some people more aware but she has not solved the world's climate change problems. It is likely she has added to other problems and that there will be other catastrophes as a result.

I was eventually saved from all this by one of the paid security staff coming up with a, "Excuse me but I need you to come and look at this."

I excused myself saying, "This building runs entirely on renewables and recyclables." (It does.) The security person led me off and pointed at something in one of the cabinets asking quietly, "You did need rescuing? He's been doing the same thing all over the place every day."

Yes, I did. I just wish someone would take him up to the roof of the building and show him. It's a very big building indeed and it was planned to be very energy efficient long before anyone had heard of Greta Thunberg.