Sorry, but we ARE doing our bit, Greta!

VISITING my mother the other week, I spotted a thin green bag bulging with vegetable peelings perched on the draining board. ‘What’s that, Mum?’ I asked. ‘It’s for the recycling,’ she said, shocked I could even ask such a question. ‘Don’t you recycle your veg peelings?’

I mumbled something about good intentions and not getting round to it as much as I would like, and she shook her head.

Every time I go to see my mum, we conduct some variation of this same conversation. Because while she may be an entirely different generation to the Greta Thunbergs of the world, my mother takes doing her bit seriously.

There is the aforementioned food waste, carefully deposited in compostable bags and placed in the outside brown bin. All paper, packaging and plastic is regularly ferried to the blue bin, while shopping is done in sturdy, recyclable bags.

Even the house itself is lit with energyefficient bulbs, all of which are used sparingly.

And yet it is people of my mother’s generation, and indeed my own, who are often made to feel the guiltiest about not doing enough to tackle climate change.

Take Thunberg herself, now 18 years old, who had extremely stern words for the grownups of the world back in 2019 when she addressed the United Nations in New York.

‘You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!’ she shouted.

‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying.’

Thunberg will be in Glasgow this week, along with hundreds of world leaders and thousands of climate change delegates (not to mention an as yet unknown number of protesters) as part of Cop26, the UN climate change conference whose catchy slogan is ‘climate has no borders’.

It is an enormously big deal, not just for Scotland, but for the world. The decisions made in Glasgow next week will impact how climate change is tackled for years to come and aim to shift global policy on the environment. Time, as we keep being told, is running out. Action must come now.

And yet for those of us who are not on the front line, who are not government officials or policy makers and won’t be buzzing around the Hydro next week with our recycled water bottles and our ethically sourced hemp suits having important meetings about the melting of the Polar ice caps, it is hard not to feel just a little bit helpless in the face of such robust and at times terrifying rhetoric.

Perhaps it’s because as a Glaswegian myself who feels strangely detached from the whole thing – the city has been decked out in the blue and green colours of the conference yet it will mostly be held behind closed doors and the inexplicable number of road closures makes it tricky to even leave point A, never mind get to point B – I feel not only shut out of the process but utterly confused about what to do next.

Recycling more of my vegetable peelings aside (and really, the road to the recycling bin honestly is paved with good intentions), what is there to be done?

Because I genuinely believe that most people try to do their bit. In fact, the recent uproar about bins in Glasgow shows, to some extent at least, just how much of a desire there is to put everything away correctly and recycle where possible.

Meanwhile, the pandemic has reduced everyone’s carbon footprint over the past 18 months and more people than ever are now talking about taking their holidays close to home long term, rather than jetting off abroad.

Sales of electric cars and bikes area on the rise and people are increasingly switched on (sorry) to green energy alternatives in the home. As I say, most of us are trying.

So why, then, do the likes of Thunberg and her tribe of earnest young followers make us feel terribly guilty about failing them, when we’re attempting to do our best?

Is what we are doing really any less effective than the actions of Extinction Rebellion, who have promised to protest in Glasgow during the summit next week, saying: ‘We will sing and dance and lock arms against despair and remind the world there is so much worth rebelling for’? I honestly don’t know.

Because here is the kicker. While my mum is diligently placing her vegetable tops in a compostable bag or I am wrestling with the ethics of washing out my used jam jars, over in China – a country so uninvested in next week’s summit that their president, Xi Jinping, cannot even be bothered to come (he will, instead, address the conference by video link) – it would appear they don’t give two parsnip peelings about climate change.

CHINA now has 1,000 coal-fired power stations. The Ningdong Energy and Chemical Industry Base, one of the biggest industrial complexes in the world, is twothirds the size of the city of Los Angeles. Two-thirds the size!

It’s almost unimaginable, but to put it into perspective, this one base is home to mines which produce 130million metric tonnes of coal a year, around the same as the annual total dug from all 233 deep mines still in use in Britain when coal was at its peak in the 1970s.

This, surely, is where the real anger should be directed. Except of course that it can’t be, because it would appear to be falling on deaf ears. Perhaps they’re just too far down the coal mine to hear it.

So next week, when our leaders step forward to lecture us on climate change, when protesters attempt to cause chaos to the good people of Glasgow and Thunberg appears to give us all another stern telling off, remind yourself that actually, you are doing your bit.

Despite what others might have us believe.