The Spinoff: Where do I send conservatives the bill for climate change?

Read the original article on the Spinoff

It seems almost impossible to believe, but until two years ago New Zealand’s most expensive weather-related event, from an insurance point of view, was a big hailstorm in Timaru that cost $170 million. Now, of course, things happen at 10x magnification. The Auckland Anniversary floods and Cyclone Gabrielle each led to insured losses of around $2 billion. And – here’s a cheerful thought – such events will only become more frequent and more expensive, as the planet heats and the atmosphere comes to hold more moisture.

Which leads, inexorably, to my current preoccupation: where do I send conservatives the bill for climate change?

In just one news bulletin this morning, two instances of soaring climate-change-related costs: the bill for repairing roads after the terrible Tasman floods is around $1 million every two days, and the damage those floods did to agriculture will drive up vegetable prices around the country. Yesterday a homeowner was on RNZ’s Morning Report lamenting a landslip that had caused massive damage to their house: another cost. After each major flood, public bodies have to repair bridges, community halls, communication infrastructure, and so on: yet more costs. Heatwaves, too, cause droughts and losses to farmers: cost upon cost.

Where, then, do I send conservatives the bill?

Some will try to argue that weather is just weather: floods, cyclones and droughts have always happened. But the scientific consensus is clear: climate change makes all these events much worse. It renders them more likely to happen and, when they do happen, more devastating. A couple of years ago scientists, using a methodology called extreme event attribution, calculated that climate change was costing the globe $16 million an hour, and was set to cost up to $3.1 trillion – that’s right, trillion – a year by 2050, as hurricanes, floods and heatwaves all worsen.

Here at home, scientists in 2018 estimated that climate change had already caused at least $840 million worth of damage in a decade, and in truth probably much more than that. The Treasury, meanwhile, has calculated that climate change’s worsening of extreme weather events could cost the state 3.8% of GDP by 2061, while GDP itself could be around 1% lower. Governments, families and firms will all have to spend billions of dollars repairing totally avoidable damage.

Clearly, then, there is a bill to be paid. So where are the conservatives stepping up to accept it?

I ask this because, for the 40 years since the world was first alerted to climate change, right-wingers have consistently been the ones most opposed to doing anything about it. As the documentary Hot Air reveals, in the early 1990s Simon Upton, the minister for the environment, wanted to introduce a carbon tax, but was thwarted by the likes of the New Zealand Initiative – in its former guise as the Business Roundtable – bringing in climate deniers to disrupt the debate.

As Upton explains in the documentary, one of the Roundtable’s “experts” claimed that addressing climate change was a form of social engineering akin to – wait for it – eugenics. “My eyebrows raised at that point,” says Upton, who tried to push on regardless. But this lobbying, allied to the usual right-wing campaigns by business and farming interests, derailed his well-laid plans.

It could be argued that left-wing governments haven’t always had a great record on climate change: emissions rose under Helen Clark, for instance. But her government did introduce the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), and if she didn’t go further, it was substantially because of opposition from – you guessed it – the right. Remember National MP Shane Ardern driving a tractor up parliament steps to protest against the ETS? That’s the story of this issue, over and over: left-wing governments trying to do more in the teeth of right-wing opposition, and right-wing governments doing very little despite being urged to do more by left-wing ones.

I return, then, to my theme: where do I send conservatives the bill?

New Zealand right-wingers might argue that their actions, however unhelpful, have been essentially irrelevant, given that virtually all globe-heating emissions are created offshore. And that’s fair enough. They can forward on a big piece of the bill to World Conservative Headquarters, which I imagine as a large and imposing edifice, albeit crumbling around the edges and with some increasingly lunatic fringing.

I’m happy, in short, for Kiwi conservatives to pass on part of the bill – just as long as I know where to send it in the first place.

Domestic right-wingers might feel this argument is a bit too sweeping. Hashtag Not All Conservatives, etc. And that’s true, up to a point. Just look at Upton: he was a conservative, and doing his best. Ditto, at different times, Guy Salmon, Todd Muller and the like. It’s such a shame, then, that – to reprise the old joke about lawyers – 95% of conservatives are giving the remaining 5% a bad name.

There’s a great irony here, in that conservatives are supposed to be strong in a couple of areas, including – you know – conserving things (the planet, for instance). Saving money, too. But although the costs of mitigating climate change have always been vastly lower than the costs of not doing so, this point has somehow eluded the ostensible fiscal conservatives among us.

If there’s one thing that I know conservatives like, though, it’s personal responsibility. They’re always talking about the costs that “feckless” poor people impose on the rest of us, constantly attacking left-wing governments for treating taxpayers “like an ATM”. And so, as the Tasman region reels from the devastation, as hundreds of homes are flooded each year, and as we face the prospect of this fiscal picture deteriorating with each passing decade, I’m sure that everyone on the right who has ever opposed or downplayed the need for climate action will step forward to take responsibility.

And then, at last, I might know where to send the bill.