WORRIED ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE? USE SUNSCREEN

While there have been lots of stories about ‘the heatwave’, there has been little effort to highlight the dangers of climate change.

THIS WEEK Christchurch will be apparently baking under an angry sun. Today it predicted to be something in the region of 32c. Which is prickly heat territory, among other things.

It’s going to be a similar story in most parts of New Zealand and the media has whipped up a number of stories about ‘the heatwave’. It’s a ‘hangover’ of the diabolical temperatures that Australia has recently been experiencing, resulting in more bushfires and power outages.

Unfortunately there has been little effort to link the high temperatures to climate change. In fact one talkback host, I think it was the right wing Sean Plunkett, who suggested that the high temperatures could only be interpreted as part of ‘the new normal’.

He isn’t the only person though to suggest that climate change is something that we can merely accommodate ourselves to. It’s a short step from this view to assuming that we all we can do to fight climate change is stay indoors and wear plenty of sunscreen. Or, in the case of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Climate Change minister James Shaw, promote the ‘business opportunities’ that climate change apparently offers the corporate sector.

It was barely two months that the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change released a five hundred page report that starkly warned that we have less than twelve years to effectively tackle climate change. Yet the media, even as we suffer under the heat, has failed to even mention this report. It would rather talk about the effectiveness of sunscreens.

In the United States socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, referring to the report, warned that the world would end in twelve years if we don’t start to aggressively deal with climate change now. That’s how the mainstream media framed it anyway. What she actually said in an interview was this:

“Millenials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like ‘the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how we’re going to pay for it?’

She proceeded to attack the political establishment, Republican and Democrats, for failing to take seriously the existential threat posed by climate change.

Once again I ask, where are our Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s?