Security camera captures moment family flee their Twyford home and the Ngaruroro River breaches stop bank after Cyclone Gabrielle. Video / Iain Trotter
OPINION
What a few weeks it has been – floods in Northland and Auckland, then Cyclone Gabrielle.
What’s next? There will be a next. Severe storms have always been around – I was in Wellington for the Wahine storm, and in Whanganui we still felt the effects of Cyclone Bola in 1988.
Cyclone Bola was probably the first harbinger of climate change, but at that stage, it didn’t have the credentials to “prove” connections. It was labelled as a one-in-100-year event.
It should have been a wake-up call about climate change. If only.
One could say that Gabrielle was the chickens coming home to roost, but Gabrielle was more like thousands of roosters and was the dawn waking up them – and many climate change deniers.
The southern end of Lake Tutira after Cyclone Bola, in March 1988.
Photo / The Daily Telegraph
The country needs a lot of help to clean up after Gabrielle and the Government is acting to help with this, but the cleanup will do little to fix longer-term climate change mitigation, which is the real issue.
The Government cutting back climate commitments agreed under Jacinda Adern is not going to improve things in the longer term, it’s just kicking the can down the road. The trouble is it won’t be long before the can disappears down a washout on an East Coast road.
I see the present Government’s recent slash and burn of policies as more about politics than critical issues like climate change. Fixing roads is important, but a waste of effort if we don’t tackle the causes.
What we need now is a government with real guts to do the right thing. A recent poll showed 75 per cent of Kiwis see climate change as urgent.
For the past 100 years or more, we have been borrowing, without permission or collateral, from the Bank of the Environment without paying interest. We’ve squandered that loan on numerous fripperies, from luxury yachts for a few people to cheap clothing for the masses.
Recently, there have been some international bank failures, but not as many as during the 2008 financial crash, when there was universal panic in finance circles.
Something had to be done. Congress, at the urgent request of then US President George W Bush, passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), authorising US$700 billion to save banks that were “too big to fail”.
The bank sectors repaid the money by December 2009, and TARP actually returned a profit to taxpayers. Phew, that’s a relief.
What if there were another crisis, possibly more global than even the war in Ukraine, that is really urgent and will have long-term effects for the whole planet?
Surely the US could find $700b to save another struggling bank? How about funding to save the Bank of Planet Earth? For at least 100 years we have been robbing this bank for everything we can, from fisheries to gold, with no interest. We are rapidly pushing this bank towards failure.
This bank is definitely too big to fail and the payback will be massive – a planet we can live on. When the US banks were failing, the catchphrase from the banks was “They are too big to fail”.
I would venture to suggest the Bank of Planet Earth is far more worth saving than any bank.
