Bristol's iconic College Green was turned to mud on Friday as tens of thousands of young (and not so young) people pitched up to be seen with Greta Thunberg as she delivered her usual folksy mix of doom 'n' gloom: "The Earth is burning ..." sort of thing; drowning, more like. It's said that it is likely to cost the city council some £20,000 + to restore the Green to grass. Perhaps they should leave it as mud as a visual metaphor for their muddled policies – and put the money saved towards replacing the 64 diesel vans they've bought over the last two years.
Two of the local young organisers were on the BBC's Points West on Friday evening. The BBC's presenters poked the Thunberg bubble to see how robust it was by asking a couple of awkward questions about what she had said. This included:
"This emergency is being completely ignored by politicians, the media and those in power."
A presented said, "That's simply not true, is it?"
One of the 17 year old's responded by saying that when Greta says "completely" she didn't mean completely in the sense that you (the readers of this post) would understand the word: "... she means more on a wider sense of things in terms of the scale of the issues. ... She feels that the actions coming forward are not big enough for the problem."
There is something in this response and I'd be the last to completely disagree with it. This applies to city councils such as Bristol as well as the UK's many governments. Having willed the ends (net-zero by 2050 for example), they struggle to discern the means to achieve this whilst taking the governed along with them. Understandably, given its complexity, this is something that Greta Thunberg and her followers have little or nothing to say about.
The two youngsters were impressive. Their media-training is obviously working well.
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