I WENT to Tarrawingee the other day for a women and climate change workshop.

Sure helped change the climate all right.

Tarrawingee is east of Wangaratta in Victoria. I drove

It was 554km there and back, about the equivalent of releasing 159kg of carbon dioxide or, in Victorian Government advertising speak, about eight black balloons (1 black balloon = 50g CO2).

Should I have stayed home, missed the workshop and talked by phone instead?

That's the thing about climate change and any well-intentioned bid to try to halt the process: it invariably involves travel by a CO2 emitting source, especially in the country.

About 50 women, a baby and a boy named Callum were there.

Asked what we might do to help stem the tide of rising greenhouse gases, we all thought hard.

Run a sustainable lifestyle course, somebody suggested. Conduct house and office water and energy audits and broker discounted rates to get those audits done right across your community, said another.

Another group will instigate a "Watch your Waste" project at school that bans packaging in lunches.

Don't drive, ride a horse, said pre-school aged Callum gleefully. Will he be so gleeful when he discovers that horses emit methane, making them greenhouse gas emitters too?

Still, Callum showed more imagination and savvy, climate-wise, than the executives of ailing US car companies. Their recent trip to ask taxpayers to bail them out to the tune of billions of dollars was by Lear jet. (Now that's a helluva lot black balloons.)

If ever there was evidence that those blokes just don't get it, here was it. And these are the leaders of our time.

Those guys should be laughed out of town but fear (of lost jobs, closed factories etc) keeps them employed at handsome rates.

Yet jobs don't have to be lost. They just have to be different. Factories don't have to be closed, just refitted. Why haven't they done it?

Back at Tarrawingee and quite by contrast guest speaker, Victorian Women's Trust executive director Mary Crooks and her sidekick Liz McAloon, travelled by train from Melbourne to nearby Wangaratta, doing the final few kilometres to Tarrawingee by car. The train was late. But at least they led by example.

"We won't get the requisite change (from climate polluting to non-climate polluting habits) until women are driving that change, because they're the ones who make the decisions about appliances and water use in the household," thundered Mary.

Women's Health Goulburn North East chief executive Susie Reid told us that research shows the group most interested in climate change are women.

She urged us to keep gathering, and to notice who's absent and ask them to the next gathering.

"As you tighten your belts the one thing you must not give up is gathering," she said.

Sound words those, but how do we reduce our black balloon equivalents in the meantime?

That's up to those Lear jet-using, overpaid unimaginative car company executives. What they need is a men and climate change conference. A boy named Callum could help them out, too.