A Grunberg side-effect

Cute children for the climate

A PR photo taken at the opening on Thursday of an offshore wind farm in Denmark:

Caption supplied:

At the Horns Rev 3 opening, left to right: CEO of Vattenfall Magnus Hall, Chairman of Vattenfall Lars G. Nordström, HRH Crown Prince of Denmark, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, Minister of Climate, Energy and Utilities Dan Jørgensen, and pupils from Hvide Sande School

Credit: Vattenfall, via Recharge

What are the smiling kids doing there? Their contribution to building the wind farm is nil. They were roped in to show that the powerful adults in the back row are Concerned about future generations. Should I blame Greta Grunberg, or John Kerry, who took his scene-stealing granddaughter along to sign the Paris Agreement in New York?

Picky, picky, you say. If it helps and does no harm to the kids, fine. But let’s not mistake charming photo ops for action. To be fair, in this case they had some action to celebrate. The wind farm is for now the largest in Scandinavia, with a nameplate capacity of 407 MW.

There is much more cuteness to come along these lines.

PS: On reflection, there is a clear distinction between the Kerry photo and the Danish one. Kerry’s granddaughter is interacting with him, not the assembled grandees. She is fascinated by Grandpa’s behaviour; he is doing something unusual she does not understand, but it’s clearly very important to him, so she wants to be part of it. In the Danish photo, there is no interaction, the adults are not looking at the kids or talking to them. They are just exploited extras on the stage. Maybe the suits talked to the kids at another time, but it’s not what the photo says.

Author: James Wimberley

James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three. I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia. James Wimberley's occasional publications on the web

3 thoughts on “A Grunberg side-effect”

  1. There’s nothing a nation-state won’t do to mask the essentially tyranny it represents, including occasional good works.

  2. James, you wrote this three years ago at the Kerry signing of the Paris Agreement:

    Update
    A marvelous photo of John Kerry signing the agreement on behalf of the USA – and his granddaughter.

    “Signing on behalf…of his granddaughter.” It seemed like a valid sentiment then, and it still does now. I will be gone long before the human race pays the awful price for the profligacy of the past, but my grandchildren will be the ones paying the price. If it was true three years ago, it seems to me it’s still true now.

    1. I updated this post to make the distinction. I was right then, and more’s the point, so was Kerry.

Comments are closed.