Yesterday, the Mail on Sunday’s headline hit the sweet spot of a three-circle Venn diagram of MoS obsessions: attacking the BBC, migration and Net Zero. Apparently the Beeb, by teaching kids about climate change and Net Zero was “brainwashing” them with “extreme left wing bias”. Never mind that Net Zero was introduced into law by a Conservative Prime Minister, but hey… I’m sure they were delighted with their day’s work, but what do they tell their kids when they get home from work?

The week before last I was a judge on a schools’ project to develop new technology to help society – Sustainability was one of the three objective. The kids had just a morning to work up their ideas and present them to us – in fact only about 90 minutes after all the preamble and icebreakers. The winners dreamt up autonomous river drones to remove plastic pollution – when their batteries started running low, they’d retreat back to charging stations which used the river’s flow to generate electricity. I don’t know enough about microhydro to know if that would work in practice, but, conceptually, it was a bloody brilliant idea on the spur of the moment.

I do get tired of the constant flow of negativity aimed at any attempt to leave a better world for our grandkids. The same people would have complained about the Clean Air Act or the Water Framework Directive that did so much to clean up the air we breathe and the water we paddle in at the seaside. They certainly campaigned hard against relatively minor changes like energy efficient light bulbs, alternative weekly bin collections and any cycle lane that’s ever been installed. I think back to those kids nervously presenting their brilliant ideas to us at the school and pray their creativity and positivity will not be crushed under a relentless steamroller of cynicism and fear-mongering.