What'll we do with the drunken sailor..

Recently, we were treated to the latest in "Global Warming Climate Change Rising Temps and Oceanic Levels" concern trolling: The 16-year-old who was going to eschew BOAC or SAS and sail her mega-zillion dollar yacht to a U.N. climate change conference and scare-fest in New York. Per the story..

Something about this saga and related tales was unclear. It was implied -- in all of the stories I read -- that the young 16-year-old was going to be sailing single-handedly. I may have missed the details but it now appears that she was squired by several adult male crew members. (See the picture and story above.)

So, where exactly is the eco-challenge of a 16-year-old coming to a conference in the company of other experienced sailors?

Another blog points out the hypocrisy of the underlying trip -- whether crewed by a young girl or older experienced men.

Meanwhile, for the UN Summit on climate in New York, a 16-year-old Swedish girl is making news for her refusal to fly commercial to the event because of the carbon emissions. Instead, the teenager will take a two week trip to New York City aboard a solar powered racing yacht. The tricked out yacht is a sustainable method of transportation — so long as the Earth sustains a 1:1 ratio of billionaires funding electric yachts for hitch hikers to people wanting to travel from Europe to the United States. And the boat travel is super convenient so long as your work allots you four weeks of extra PTO to drift aimlessly through the ocean.

The teen’s extreme commitment to climate change would be admirable, if it wasn’t so stupid and vain. If she truly was concerned about finding an eco-friendly way to participate in a conference in 2019, she’d just teleconference in like a normal person. In a world with Skype, Facetime, and WhatsApp, a person who only cared about the environment would opt to push a button on their phone rather than spend two weeks floating in the middle of the ocean surrounded by nothing but saltwater and whale piss.

But while the transport hypocrisy is fun to mock, it is indicative of a bigger problem with these conferences — they come off as a group of rich people, with incredibly high standards of living, telling poor people to lower their already low standard of living for the sake of climate change.

Absolutely correct! If she wanted to protest conditions allegedly responsible for global warming or climate change or whatever you care to call it these days, she could have remained in her "undisclosed location" the U.K. (or from Stockholm for that matter) and written caustic screeds condemning Leonard Di Caprio and the rest of the beautiful people flying their gas-belching private jets to Sicily or New York or Paris to clink glasses of champagne and lecture we mouth-breathing, mirror-fogging proles who grunt and toil for our daily crust.

For we sinning climate-change-deniers, the only way we could wring any more schadenfreude out of this would be if Di Caprio himself ferried the girl back to Stockholm in his private jet.