The magical climate thinking of an NRMA billboard
it's true, none of us want to get the joke!
Over the Australian summer the insurance company NRMA ran the below campaign over various billboards, TV and print ads.
Did you see it? In big serif fontage over an image of a billowing bushfire is the message, “Until the climate stops changing”. There is an inferred ellipsis tacked on the end (…) and we are left to assume that in the inconvenient interim (between now and when the climate sorts itself out) NRMA will step in and help us out. You, know, until the fires and floods and cyclones… magically go away. At least that’s how I read it.
Now, as it turns out the billboard is part of campaign that features a bunch of similar-vibe messages, including:
“Until Mother Nature calls ahead.”
“Until every home is everything proof.”
I learned this when I Googled the details of the campaign after seeing the above billboard from the B Line Bus, suspended over Military Rd. I wanted to establish whether the agency responsible had rocks in their head. Or had the Fossil Fuel industry on their books.
I couldn’t tell. But I did work out the campaign is all meant to be a bit of a knowing joke. As in, of course the climate crisis won’t suddenly stabilise, and of course homes won’t magically fend off fires or float in floods. Ergo, you should insure the bejesus out of your existence. Preferably with NRMA.
But I don’t think - and correct me if I’m wrong - we are a nation, nor a species for that matter, that fully gets that particular knowing joke.
We still believe the magic will happen.
We do in fact believe the climate will stop changing some time …soon?
Frankly, we don’t want to get the joke.
But before we go further…
I haven’t dismissed my initial rocks in head theory. I mean, Australia is set to become an “uninsurable nation” precisely because the climate won’t stop changing.
Brace yourself for this italicised breakout bit of statistic:
One in 25 Australian properties will be uninsurable by 2030 due to the increasing risk of floods and fires etc, with figures as high as nine out of 10 in the worst affected suburbs.
So what is NRMA thinking? What are we all thinking?
(PS. I’m guessing some of you might want to find out if your home is a statistic. You can check out the Climate Council’s interactive Climate Risk Map that outlines risk by suburb, LGA or electorate based on low, medium and high emissions scenarios and across decades.)
But, back to my point - none of us want to get the joke!
It’s not just the deniers who fail to appreciate the ironic subtext and instead cling to the belief that the climate will somehow-in-some-magical-not-too-distant-future stabilise.
Even those of us in the climate activism and climate science spaces hang on to the magic. We know that the kind of mass mobilisation required to keep temperatures under 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures is literally (in the literal sense of the word) impossible. And we know that even if we (magically) pulled off said mass mobilisation, we still won’t make it. It’s too late. Australia just hit 1.47C. A future of 2-3C is most likely (the podcast chat with David Wallace Wells below explains this). Yet we keep talking the 1.5C rhetoric.
Because hope dangles. And magic is all we got left. We have to keep both hope and magic on the table, alongside the truth, a paradoxical and cognitive dissonant scenario captured by a New York Times headline from a while: “Stopping Climate Change is Hopeless. Let’s Do it.”
As I wrote in Wild and Precious:
We hang on to the potential of humanity, don’t we. Which is a beautiful thing. Until it’s not. We’ve all done that thing where we’ve woken up and realised we were in love with our lover’s potential, not the man or woman as they actually exist right now. I have done it twice. As I often put it to friends, somewhat irreverently (as a way to cope with my shame), I was polishing turds.
Anyway. I think this could be where we are at with our relationship with the planet. We are waking up to the sad truth of magical potentials.
Because things are only going to get wobblier, the spell won’t hold
As these things often go, I write this as a new report has advised that the violent swinging from floods to fire to floods again of the past four years is not only going to continue, it’s going to get more aggressive. Bureau of Meteorology modelling says we are about to be hit with an El Niño patterning within months of La Niña passing sometime this year. We are being warned to expect drought, heatwaves and bushfires. Again. All made worse by the intense growth that’s resulted from so much rain.
And so it all swings.
There will be no respite. No “back to normal”. No “When the climate stops changing”… dot dot dot.
To get a fuller understanding of the issue, I recommend this Guardian podcast.
The shallow bowl of water metaphor
When talking about this with my foster daughter (and others), I’ve used my shallow bowl of water analogy. I first wrote about it in a blog post in 2013 (the year my foster daughter was born) to describe how living with a mental disorder like bipolar is akin to carrying around a shallow bowl of water - filled to the brim - for the rest of your life.
It’s the same with living on a planet. Planets and minds are brimful, delicate things. And if we disrupt them and get wobbly in our actions, the water will slosh and back forth, back and forth, creating increasing instability. We slosh from one extreme to another, the first a reaction to the next. I make the point that when you have bipolar, it comes with a resonpobilhty to learn to tread super carefully otherwise we wind up sloshing everything all over everyone and we lose it all.
Beyond magical thinking
No one is going to come and save us. We will absolutely cross the 1.5C threshold well before 2100. Things will only get wobblier.
We stand here as flawed men and women who may well be at our potential already.
And so, as many a self-help guru would ask at such a juncture in an effort to get their disciples comfortable with being a grownup, What are we going to do about it?
Get real, is probably the only answer.
I’m going to leave us all with one idea to this effect. The wonderful Bill McKibben is entirely grownup about our changing world and advises parents to encourage their kids to pivot from studying the status jobs of yore (which could be taken over by AI) and to become electricians. All those Rewiring Nations programs being rolled out will need millions of such “doers’.
Wild with Sarah Wilson is back for 2023!
I’m kicking off the next series with a dead-set nourishing and emotional conversation with the actor Yael Stone (Orange is the New Black). We’ve known each other on Instagram for a while, but finally met a few weeks ago. We discuss how much we love “wokism” intricacies, the complexities of the Geoffrey Rush case and how getting arrested as “a middle-class white lady” does no one any good. Be warned, this episode gets raw. I hope you like it.
Sarah xx
Thanks again for another lovely newsletter.
One development I wanted to share with you / this community is ChatGPT. Would be keen to hear everyone's thoughts.
I have a rolling list where I campaign to governments, councils, businesses etc on environmental issues like fossil fuel subsidies, carbon offsetting regulations, single use plastics, illegal logging, petrol powered leaf blowers (to the council + Bunnings) etc. I try to write and send one of these letters per week and I had lost all hope of ever getting through the list entirely.
Chat GPT did all of them in under 30 mins. And they were useable. I added a few extra sentences or links to personalise them and provide additional info but otherwise the AI said everything I would have said and more. And yes, I still had to do the research of finding the person to write to, sending it all off etc but one big chunk of work was done for me. I feel like the washing machine has just been invented for me!
I share many of the concerns that have come up about the ethics of AI that you've spoken about in previous podcasts. I certainly don't want to live in some of the future scenarios people are gleefully drumming up.
But now people can't say they have no time to write a letter to their local MP, or petition a company to be more sustainable, eco-friendly - chatGPT can do it for us for the moment.
The insurance industry play a good game - painting themselves as a quasi emergency service - but it’s all in the small print. With bushfire, for example, what is fire damage? For many heat damage, without damage from flames, doesn’t count. That small print will get tighter and tighter, so while there will be those that are uninsurable, there will surely be greater and greater numbers of policyholders who lack an adequate level cover when the worst happens. And, most don’t check until it’s too late.