TLDR: The Government has released a draft set of questions about who should pay to adapt for climate change and then deal with the expected storm and sea level rises from climate change. Yet again, it is fudging and delaying recommending who should pay in the hope someone else will make those tough political decisions about winners and losers.
Meanwhile, the moral hazards keep growing as developers keep building and banks keep lending on flood plains, beaches, river banks, estuaries and atop cliffs, and land owners keep assuming (with some plausible deniability in the absence of decisions) that someone else will pay — probably the taxpayer in the vague and distant future.
The inaction simply perpetuates expectations that land owners will be able to keep privatising the profits and socialising the losses as the climate changes. A young person would diagnose a collective political cowardice of their elders. Their elders will claim a sensible avoidance of immediate political pain. The climate will ignore both and keep warming. Paid subscribers can see more of the analysis below the paywall fold and in the podcast above.
Elsewhere in the news this morning:
Russia actually cut off its gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria overnight;
Putin threatened “lightening retaliatory action” against NATO states supplying weapons threatening Russia after a British minister said he’d be fine if Britain’s missiles were used to strike targets inside Russia;
The Reserve Bank signalled a DTI limit was not likely before the second half of next year, clearing a path for a delay until after next year’s election; and,
Transpower detailed the winners and the losers from the big repricing of transmission costs to reduce the south’s subsidies of the north.
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