The apotheosis of St. Greta

‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words’ is perhaps the whitest thing anyone has ever said at the UN. What is the correct answer? Is it (a) Go to your room? Or is it (b) Forgive me, to make it up you, Daddy and I are going to set the entire course of human civilisation on a new track?

The correct answer — if you want to see your name in the Times or get a slot on CNN, and if you want to avoid getting mobbed by climate cultists — is of course, to apologise, mortify the flesh, shove tofu plugs into your every orifice, hail Greta Thunberg as the most radical and relevant UN debutante since Yasser Arafat, and then praise the pigtailed prophet of planetary paranoia for ‘staring down’ the dark emperor of pollution, Donald Trump.

The emissions you can smell aren’t carbon, but methane.