DAVOS, SWITZERLAND -- “Bloody hell,” muttered UK delegate Thomas R. Walpole after hearing he was scheduled to address the World Economic Forum directly after Greta Thunberg. Facing the tough act of following the teenage environmentalist’s passionate plea for revolutionary transformation, the UK Acting Second Junior Deputy Undersecretary of Finance reportedly sought to ensure that his speech on “The Importance of Agricultural Futures in Post-Supranationalist Economic Interchanges” would be equally as enthralling. 

In response to Thunberg’s fiery quote of “Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fueling the flames by the hour,” Walpole valiantly attempted to land the zinger that “capital account surpluses must not be omitted from consideration of inter-regional dynamics of exchange.” He continued that “the young people may be, in Greta’s words, ‘truly unstoppable’, but what is even more unstoppable is the rollout of TTIP’s investor-state dispute arbitration provisions.”

It was met, however, with a considerably cooler reception by the diplomats, business leaders, and public officials in attendance. “I found Greta’s passion far more convincing than Thomas’, who was just reading off PowerPoint slides,” Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid told reporters. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell concurred, adding that “not even that spinny slide animation could make eighty bar graphs seem interesting.”

As his 1.5-hour speech drew to a close, the audience had all followed Greta into the lobby for selfies, leaving no one to hear Walpole’s announcement that Prime Minister Boris Johnson planned on flooding the English Channel with unrefined crude oil to distract from Brexit.