Once upon a time, approximately 600 years BC, there lived a chap called Aesop who wrote anthropomorphic fables about animal characters.

Perhaps the most famous of all is the one about the ant and the grasshopper, in which the ant works hard all summer storing up treats to help him get by during the bleakness of winter while the grasshopper does nothing of the sort and enjoys the bounty of summer for what it is.

We all know this. We all know that it is an allegory in which the ant represents those who look to the future and make plans for it, and the grasshopper represents those who imagine that the future will look after itself, or that there's more than enough time yet to get in place what we need to have in place.

So the grasshopper is all those heads of state in Glasgow last month for COP26 who decided that our home is too big a thing to think about right now and it's better to put it off till next year when our brains have grown big enough to think that hard.

Mostly, of course, they are worried about how much saving the planet will damage the economy.
". . . there is no coastal city in the world that would not, over time, be swamped at ruinous cost to life and economies.”