It’s almost like we shouldn’t leave the climate crisis to the market

In the news this week, SolarZero, the pioneering solar installation and subscription company, went into liquidation. Details in the Herald.

US investment company Black Rock are the current owners of SolarZero, they bought it 2022. Black Rock are also the company that the recent Labour government partnered with for the government’s climate investment fund. Because hey, global capitalists want to be green, and can be trusted to look after nature, right?

Other people can do the analysis on why SolarZero fell over. I will note that the Herald piece has zero mentions of the climate crisis, so I expect most of what will get said will be divorced from why SolarZero existed in the first place. Hint, it wasn’t just another investment opportunity.

James Shaw did his best in setting up a range of structures and processes to help New Zealand transition to a post-carbon economy, so we would meet our international obligations in preventing the worst of the climate catastrophe and we would have more resilience in what is already locked in. Merely swapping fossil fuels for green tech won’t save us (it’s energy intensive and we’re already in serious overshoot), but we do need a certain level of renewables to make transition viable and it makes sense for parties in parliament to work with what they’ve got.

The problem with Shaw’s vision of using the tools of capitalism to shift out of overshoot is that it was dependent on a big enough percentage of the population understand the climate crisis well enough to vote for progressive parties who will actually progress. Instead we have a regressive death cult in charge of the country, and New Zealand citizens seem more concerned about maintaining a certain lifestyle than say preventing their grandkids from having the worst life imaginable.

The solutions to the climate crisis lie in the Powerdown, where we take the best of our long human history of technology, integrate it into sustainability and resiliency models, stop all the consumerist bullshit and learn to live within our means. We cannot buy and sell our way out of environmental destruction, we have seen over and over again that this doesn’t work.

But we can still have good lives. They will just look quite different to what we have now. The blocks to resolving the climate and ecology crises are social and political, not technical or economic. In New Zealand, we have a high percentage of people that want more action on climate. What we lack is enough leadership and vision that acknowledges the seriousness of the situation and shows us a way through. Labour have been dragging the chain with its clinging to neoliberal centrism, but it’s the left and swing voters that keep giving them the power to do this. We have plenty of people here that know what to do, we’re just not giving the power to the right people.

The best work at the moment is happening in communities. When the shit hits the fan and our capitalist society starts to more noticeably collapse, being able to work with a wide range of people in our communities is what will get us through. The good news is that every community in New Zealand now has many people who have some understanding of the Powerdown or similar concepts, and have been developing the structures and process by which we get to survive.

I feel for the SolarZero employees who were blindsided this week, and for the customers who don’t know what is going to happen to their investment and contract. It’s going to be harder for people to trust solar going forward, which of course serves the death cult. But the whole reliance on the market was never going to get us out of the mess we are in, because the Market is God mentality is the main driver of the problem.

If it’s all too depressing, go read the things that are working (follow the tags),

Doughnut Economics

Regenerative Agriculture

Hope Punk

What if…?