In her final column, Dr Jess Berentson-Shaw says we have the skills, ambition and plans to address both problems
Opinion: It's a big week for the climate with the UN Climate Change Conference happening. I do think every COP is an opportunity to keep engaging collectively in rebuilding the ways we live, work and play. And it is a reminder that millions of people across the world are working incredibly hard on implementing the many solutions we have that do work. Thinking of the huge numbers of people who care and are working on this does help in my dark moments.
For many people, however, COP is something that happens to other people over there. Much like climate change, it's not that people don't care, but it just feels far away from our daily lives and something they can't do a lot about.
What does feel very present right now for many people is the everyday struggle to get by. As the costs of eating nourishing, nutritionally dense food, maintaining a home, heating that home, transporting ourselves around, having people care for and educate our kids all get forced upwards, the quality of our life is being eroded. The joy is harder to find and the stress is very real. For those already constrained by poverty it's a bloody disaster.
A cost of living crisis tips those people who have until now been getting through OK, over the edge into poverty. While the reality is that much of our economy is controlled by an increasingly small number of people outside of our country making vast amounts of profit, too many of our policy settings and business practices work to trap people, when the global economy is driven to the brink.
It makes total sense that in this context, people find it hard to prioritise climate action.
But that is a false dichotomy – a narrative problem really. People don't need to choose between people in our government addressing the cost of living or the climate crisis because the cost of living crisis and climate change have many of the same root causes – for example, expensive oil and gas, food systems that deliver profits over the health of people and the land. And hence they have the same solutions. And people need to know that.
As the slide towards elections gathers pace and people in politics, media and god help us polling businesses, use the cost of living crisis to send potential voters into a catatonic state about democracy, people across government, politics, business, civil society must embrace the idea that we can tackle the cost of living crisis and the climate crisis at the same time. Show people they have the skills, ambition and plans to do so. Because people care about both and know we need to address both.
Here are some ideas on where to start, and where to ramp up current initiatives.
Making a transport shift – freeing us from a reliance on expensive oil and gas
We are currently tied to expensive oil and gas products to transport ourselves and our goods – these are products subject to inflationary pressures which also create massive problems for the planet. The common sense thing to do is make a large-scale shift to active and public transport to deal with both issues. For people in governments that means more investment in infrastructure that opens our streets to people riding bikes, walking and taking public transport. It means more investment in subsidies for e-bikes, for families on low incomes, and businesses using e-bikes for cargo for instance, it means more public transport options more often with more money for the people operating it. It also means no more public funds to support the fossil fuel industry – a sunset industry that wants to take us all with it as they go.
Food sovereignty – ensuring more communities benefit from the food we grow in NZ
I can't tell you how nuts I think it is every time I spend $20 on a kilo of cheese that has been made up the road from me. And it's not just the supermarket monopolies that drive cheese prices to the unaffordable. Our global systems of food production and trade extract so much from the local communities who grow it, from the communities who eat it, and the environment – it is a system designed to deliver maximum profit to people with shares in the food industry and minimum nutrition or care to people who grow it and eat it and the land that produces it.
We need to invest in systems of food production that bring ownership and control back to communities – both those who produce it and those who consume it. Being able to source more local food, more often and at a larger scale, is critical for keeping food affordable and accessible. It will only become more important as global crises, including climate-driven ones, affect our food supplies more often. Locally owned, grown and supplied food is also an effective climate change action. Scaling up investments in local farming, urban farms, and crops more reliable in a changing climate all reduce soil, air and water pollution. Assisting farmers with land use shifts in concrete ways is critical. In the end it doesn't matter whether we think people who have made profits farming “should” be helped to shift the way they farm, they need to see what the viable alternatives are, and they need help getting there.
Building the infrastructure of care and connection
As the cost of living is forced upwards there is a group of people who experience a lot of pain in a very particular way – women who do care work, unpaid and paid. Women – the people who do the lion's share of caring for children and older people in their families –find the thing that has to be sacrificed are the hours they pay for childcare and home help (or their own paid work). For those doing care work as a job, already low wages become even more gouged out. Yet the care for children, older people, the education of young people, is all work that doesn't produce vast amounts of carbon pollution. Rather it generates community connections, educational and health benefits across the generations. Investment in care work – paid and unpaid deals somewhat to cost of living while being a climate positive infrastructure investment.
Genuine low cost, low carbon, highly energy efficient homes and buildings
People across most of our governments to date have encouraged the over-investment in homes as a means of wealth creation and that has created a cracker of a problem for our society. Many people don't have a place to call home because we don't have enough of them. Others have homes, but instead of building their wellbeing it is draining them of their mental and physical resources because of the huge costs. And that has suddenly got so much worse.
We are building, but not fast enough and not the right types of buildings. Currently the way we build, and the way we heat and cool buildings, is a major source of carbon pollution, but there are plenty of practices that can be used to overcome these problems. Shifting investment incentives away from the buying and selling of existing housing stock. Instead, directing it into the creation of low-cost homes in urban centres that significantly reduce carbon pollution and cost virtually nothing to heat – such as those built to a passive house standard. That is a no-brainer for preventing cost of living crises in the future and addressing climate change. The government has enormous power – as a contractor of new buildings (schools, hospitals etc) and homes – over building in ways that reduce the costs to people living in them and to the climate.
I know there are so many more of these ideas out there because in Aotearoa we are problem solvers, creative thinkers and explorers of the new. We need people in politics (and their advisors) who embrace the spirit of these values in relation to the climate and cost of living crisis, and a good plan to just get on with it.
This is my last column for Newsroom. It has been a unique opportunity to have this space to write about the things that matter to me and find they also matter to so many of you. My goal in this column was always to leave people with a sense that it is possible for us to build policies, practice, relationships across the places and space we work and live that reflect the deep things that really matter across our communities. I hope I have done that.
For now I am going to spend a bit more of my time with the people I love, and doing the work that matters to me. I'm on Linkedin (along with all the Twitter refugees) and will continue to write when the need takes me.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Our thanks to Jess Berentson-Shaw for five years of insights, writing for Newsroom Pro. We will shortly be announcing a new columnist to fill her large shoes – watch this space!
