No more blah, blah, blah

ONE TRIES, WITH INCREASINGLY UNRULY hair, to remain hopeful. Auckland has moved to Covid Alert Level 3.2 (lockdown with bigger picnics and shopping). A daily visit to stare at the Ministry of Health vaccinations data updates is strangely therapeutic.

Watching the second week of the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), aka the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, hope is harder to find. The clichés don’t help: “a critical juncture for humanity” says, Eva Orner’s new documentary about Australia’s devastating Black Summer bushfires, which convincingly lays the disaster on Scott Morrison’s government (and preceding governments) for refusing to address the underlying existential threat. Then again, you have to say our government and preceding governments have mostly ignored that underlying threat, too; last year, New Zealand topped up its domestic coal production with a million tonnes of low-grade, high-emissions, sub-bituminous coal imported from Indonesia to keep the lights on in our homes and businesses.