IF EVER there were a monster that crawled from the deep and loomed over us, threatening and scaring us into numbness and fear, it's climate change.

The Big CC is coming at us full force.

It has our politicians bickering like school kids and big greenhouse gas emitters behaving like bullies, haranguing the vulnerable (elected politicians) into handouts, all of which leaves the rest of us mute, powerless and sometimes so frozen with fear that we pretend CC is not going on at all, or that we can't do anything about it so why bother.

"What about the one billion people living (and relying on the snow melt) in the giant valleys of the Himalayas, who won't have water for six months of the year," Greens Senator Christine Milne said last week, after emerging from the parliamentary debacle that was the debate over the scuttled emissions trading scheme.

"We have only one community of interest and that is to survive."

Phew! That's scary stuff, but so far as I can see, the scaremongering (even if those things are likely) has not yet convinced 22 million Australians enough to get changes through our parliament.

In fact, in the quiet of night many of us wonder if we as individuals can do anything at all.

Well here's a tale of two women who said phooey to that.

Jane Knight is a mother and social ecologist from central Victoria.

Fifteen years ago she began working with Greenpeace, but eventually the anger, sense of outrage, guilt and self-righteousness that is often the cloak of protesters and activists wore her down.

It was a dark energy.

Her turning point came when she realised her focus was 90 per cent on the bad stuff and just 10 per cent on the good stuff.

She determined to turn that around and her husband gave her no end of opportunity.

He'd wash the dishes but never the cutlery.

"It became a power struggle," says Jane.

"I'd nit-pick about what he wouldn't do. I switched that around to feel grateful and appreciative for what he did do."

In that moment, in one whoosh of her tea towel, her sense of disempowerment disappeared. (Well, perhaps it took a few whoooshes!)

"To encourage and appreciate and support and celebrate what people are doing is 10 times more powerful than fear and criticism," says Jane, who now works on building strong and resilient communities.

Ditto for Sydney's Natalie Isaacs, a former cosmetics maker who started a campaign to get a million women in Australia, (that's one in eight adult females), to commit to emitting one less tonne of carbon dioxide.

That's equal to taking 240,000 cars off the road.

Since women now make up 51 per cent of Australia's population, and make 70 per cent of the household purchasing decisions and are tops at networking, Natalie figured she'd get with the strength.

The site 1millionwomen.com.au offers a CO2 counting guide for things such as turning off the second fridge, growing food at home, only buying local, in-season food, not buying packaged stuff, turning vegetarian or giving up red meat.

The Country Women's Association is supporting the campaign.

It may be small but it's something.

And maybe political and corporate leaders will catch on to the idea eventually.