João Menezes & Associados/ GTEPS / Pecuária Já

Greta Thunberg campaigns to save the planet by getting you off meat, milk and aeroplanes, and she is not a serious person. She became the most famous environmentalist on earth by not going to school. That was the qualification. She sat outside the Swedish parliament on Fridays, and within a year presidents were queueing up to be told off by a fifteen-year-old. She has been put forward for the Nobel Peace Prize several times, for services to Fridays. She does not fly, on principle. So in 2019 she crossed the Atlantic to address the United Nations on a racing yacht belonging to a member of Monaco's royal family, sponsored by BMW, with a bucket for a lavatory. It was announced as a zero-carbon voyage. Crew then flew to New York to sail the boat home, and the skipper flew back. The trip that saved one plane ticket required several. She crossed Germany by train and posted a photograph of herself on the floor of the carriage among her luggage, a martyr to overcrowded rail. The railway company replied, very politely, that she had been in first class. In 2018 she shared a warning that humanity would be wiped out unless fossil fuels were stopped within five years. In 2023, the five years being up and humanity being conspicuously still here, the post was deleted. She converted her parents to veganism, by her own account, by making them feel guilty until they gave in. Her mother, an opera singer, gave up her international career because it involved airports. She has told the world that going plant-based could save 8 billion tonnes of carbon a year, which is the sort of number you reach when you have never met a hill. Researchers who ran the sum for the United States, deleting every farm animal in the country, got a cut of 2.6% and a population short of nutrients. Then, in 2023, she went to Norway to protest against a wind farm. It had been built on the grazing land of the Sami, and she sat in the snow outside a ministry to defend the ancient right of a people to herd reindeer, which they do for the meat. Europe's most famous vegan was carried off by police for obstructing renewable energy on behalf of livestock farmers. So the position, as far as anyone can piece it together, is that animals on grass are destroying the planet unless they have antlers, flying is a crime unless you are the crew, and the end of the world is five years away and has been since 2018. She told the leaders of the world they had stolen her childhood. They gave her a standing ovation and flew home. The only food system she has ever physically put her body in front of to protect is a herd of animals on open pasture. She has not noticed, and it would be a shame to tell her.