Comment: Climate change “is a possibility that must be faced, however horrifying the prospect might be. The Planning Council undertook this study of the impacts on New Zealand because it felt the possibility should be examined rather than ignored.
“The issues for New Zealand are very different from those most commonly perceived. Knowing what they are should encourage our efforts to prevent climate change and give us some basis for coping should prevention fail.
“The highest priority in the face of the threat of climate change must always be given to prevention.”
Some fellow octogenarians will recognise the language and the liberties I have taken here. It’s 1987 and New Zealand after Nuclear War has just been published by the Planning Council for the Ministry for the Environment.
That is the year the fourth Labour government under Prime Minister David Lange passed the Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act.
The Act remains as a milestone in our history and a go-to for our perception of ourselves as not to be bullied. The extraordinarily comprehensive survival strategies and predictions in this small book’s 17 chapters have both a dated naivety and a terrible relevance.
Here’s what the writers foresaw:
“Nuclear war-induced disturbances to the environment would include virtually every environmental problem of concern today – habitat destruction, species extinction, air pollutants, toxic chemicals, acid rain, ozone depletion – only on a scale of totally unprecedented extent and destruction.”
“That it is possible,” they wrote, “means that the likelihood is greater than zero.”
Their premise was supported by a groundswell of popular perception that the nuclear arms race could well lead to another Hiroshima or Nagasaki. In 1986 a survey carried out for the Defence Committee of Inquiry found that 82 percent of New Zealanders were “strongly of the opinion that there should be some preparation or plans being made for coping with the aftermath of a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere”.
This was the age of fear. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had been formed in the UK in the early 1960s and was active here. By 1984, 86 cities had been declared nuclear free by local councils.
All aspects of daily life would be affected: communications would be vulnerable; health and energy systems would be profoundly affected; food could be scarce; transport systems would be disrupted.
Loss of major export markets, they noted, would have a profound effect on the agricultural sector.
What are we seeing now?
We were all familiar with the meaning of “nuclear winter” – smoke and dust from the fires of a nuclear war would form a cloud thick enough to block the sun’s warmth from many parts of the globe, lowering temperatures by 3-5 degrees.
And of the term EMP – an electromagnetic pulse produced when a nuclear explosion occurs. The higher above the ground the greater the surface area affected by the pulse, damaging or destroying electrical apparatus, ripping out transmission lines and burning out electrical circuits. Imagine being forced to pump petrol by hand from petrol station storage tanks.
Is AI our equivalent dread?
How would we accommodate the large number of refugees forced to leave their devastated homes? As we watch the Pacific Islands incrementally slip into the sea, how welcoming will we be to those bearing the brunt of our own extravagant lifestyles – albeit in ignorance?
The text is littered with gems of wisdom for today. “There would be an urgent need to prevent wastage of supplies. Resolving issues of allocation and maintaining an equitable rationing system would be a high priority … Rationing would reduce wastage … public transport uses fuel more efficiently than cars and rail is more efficient than road. Coastal shipping could be expanded …”
Oil for lubrication, they suggested, given our livestock numbers and our dairying, could be produced from butter fat and tallow. Or, we could research the possibility of producing our own rubber – if the guayule shrub proved viable.
If that was the age of fear then what do we call this? Heatwaves are killing people, the forests are disappearing, natural diversity is impoverished to the extent that domesticated animals outnumber wild ones, as do domestic fowls wild birds. The oceans are warming and as the ice melts, sea levels will rise. There’s no “if” about any of this.
Yet the percentage of the population in the latest poll who say they are “concerned” about these changes, mirrors those in the 1980s frightened by the mere possibility of nuclear war. How did those activists get their message across? How was it such a bold action for Lange and the Labour Party? How is it still there?
They had the Planning council. We’ve had the Climate Change Commission and the Zero Carbon Act since 2019. Have we used them?
Our 21st century strategies for survival are beset by who will pay for what elements of adaptation. They presuppose business as usual: communities will be moved to higher ground; horticulture won’t be allowed on flood plains; transport of goods and people will be by EVs along rerouted roads; the planes will fly; we will need heaps more electricity to keep the air conditioners running for those who have them.
This is a cynical view. It’s an activist’s response to the context in which this campaign is being waged. A generation ago we planned for the worst. It’s a climate truism that policies that are good for the earth are good for people. It’s cheaper and healthier to eat plant-based protein. For how much longer will we allow cattle numbers to increase and accept the pollution of our fresh waterways along with the heating effects of their methane?
Here’s the last word, from David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth: “the question of how bad things will get is not actually a test of the science; it is a bet on human activity. How much will we do to stall disaster, and how quickly? Those are the only questions that matter.”
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