Shout out to all the people in the Nelson district dealing with devastating and life changing floods. These are immediate and long term struggles that people and communities will need support with. Donations can be made to the Mayoral Relief Fund.
Watching the Texas floods, and then the two back to back Nelson floods, I’ve been wondering if we’re getting closer to the point where New Zealand will start to prioritise climate action as well as our other day to day and political concerns around cost of living, the health system, international wars and rising fascism.
The argument goes that people won’t act until it affects them personally. Which is a massive problem for climate action because we need to act well ahead of time to prevent the kind of runaway climate collapse that will make the cost of living crisis, health system woes, international wars, rising fascism and our current flood emergencies look like kindergarten. Seriously.
So here comes the pointy end in New Zealand. Christopher Luxon, Prime Minister in a climate crisis denying government, in response to the Nelson floods, is now saying that the government won’t be doing financial bail outs in the future.
This is not news, obviously there has to be an end point to bail outs in an escalating and long term pattern of emergencies, and insurance companies were some of the first to say this can’t last forever. But Luxon’s unintentionally doing us a favour here. People who’ve put their eggs in the property ownership basket, strongly backed by the personal responsibility brigade, as opposed to say social democracy where we all help each other out, will be starting to worry and that worry may wake people up to the need to support collective climate action.
Particularly worrying will be this kind of framing,
The report recommended individuals should be responsible for knowing the risks and making their own decisions about whether to move away from high-risk areas.
I haven’t read the report, but how do the many people living in New Zealand’s rather large unstable and high risk landscape sell up and move somewhere safer? Who would they sell to?
The other thing Luxon has inadvertently done is end the debate about did climate change cause this flood? Good luck arguing that your flooded house wasn’t a result of climate change and should therefore be bailed out financially. It’s all climate change now.
The good news here is this:
we still have time to take action to avert utter catastrophe
adaptation and mitigation are two sides of the same coin. New Zealand is well placed globally to survive the climate disruption already locked in (low population, mild climate, geographical isolation, lots of food and resource growing land), but no-one is surviving runaway climate change. We need to mitigate as well as adapt, and fortunately, transition will work best when we do both.
every time there is a shocking climate event, we have a window to change the narrative towards a future of engagement and action rather than NACTF blather and denial that we will pay for later (some more than others).
I really hope Labour, the Greens and Te Pati Māori come out with strong words this week on the need to mitigate and adapt and look after each other.
What’s also important here is to present options for futures were things work out. We are inundated with stories of how bad things are, of climate and societal collapse, as well as rising fascism and global conflict, but that inundation is largely a function of mainstream and social media controlling the narratives (and who owns them). In New Zealand we have great potential to be world leaders on transition, on Just Transition (looks hard at Labour), and models of adaptation alongside mitigation, as well as regeneration.
The biggest challenges now are cognitive dissonance, political fuckery, and resignation. The myth that what New Zealand does doesn’t matter because of our size is still around and apparently needs explaining again. But these are all choices and things we can solve, they’re not impossibilities. The real issue here is political will and imagination, and not relying on parliamentary parties alone.
Front page image from Nelson App, from 2022 (!)
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