This feels like March 2020

And how our car electrification scheme got shot in the head

Kia ora fam,

Sorry I’ve been a bit sluggish this week, missing out last week’s column, the household had covid (a joy, truly) and my brain has only slowly clambered back into normality again. It’s been a wild ol’ time.

It’s been a weird time to get ill, there’s nothing so shitty as being sick and stuck in your head when it coincides with something like a oil crisis. It feels as though all the media I read at the moment is just a various rehashing of, ‘This is FCCCCKEDDDD.’

And that’s not a fun cycle to get yourself stuck in.

Actually, the funk of being ill plus the absolute WTF is happening anxiety of the impending oil crisis very much prompted me to write this week’s column -

It feels like March 2020 right now.

It’s actually about how we cope with times of collective anxiety and terror. I was talking to my Dad about feeling as though we’re perched on the edge of another great 2020-era style massive shake down of reality.

(Like, what if we have no petrol in May? What happens then? At the moment, the ships that the Government annoucned had got through into NZ actually had already cleared the Strait of Hormuz before it was blockaded. So really, what we want to know is what happens to the ships trying to pass the straight now. And, as they’re not getting through, what happens next…)

And anyway, Dad actually had a fairly good insight that stopped me this week. He grew up in England, in 70s and 80s, in the era of black outs, three day work weeks, ambulances being driven by the army, IRA bombings, and all these periods of massive social and civil unrest that are completely foreign to me.

And he pointed out to me that anyone my age - and up to about 50 ish - has never really experienced any period of massive social and civil upheaval like that in NZ.

(Obviously Muldoon's era had car free days, and there was the whole wee deal of the country being bankrupt, but if you’re sorta 50 and below this is the first big period of civil upheaval NZ has gone through. We had a GFC, obviously, but we’ve never really had blackouts or power rationing.)

And so I did realize is that a large part of my current anxiety - aside from the very practical implications of petrol skyrocketing and trying to scrape out a living on 55k a year in a cost of living crisis - is that none of this has happened before for me. Whereas Dad was a bit more chill. And very much took the view that, Verity, you can’t change that kinda stuff. You can only change your reaction to it…

And that’s an attitude I took when writing this week’s column.

I went back, thought about how we’re all hanging out to see if oil is going to get through the Straits of Hormuz again) when really….we can ‘t do anything about that. Can’t really do much to influence how competent - or incompetent - this Government is for planning our fuel strategy either. Can’t do anything about the prospect of car-free days. The only thing I can do is change how I react to it.

And that right there reminded me of Seneca, stoicism, and a branch of philosophy that came into existence right in the crazy ass days of the fall of Rome.

I like Stoicism precisely for this reason. It was created at a time when their problems would make our current problems look like a Jump Jam session.

And that means that it’s very practically useful for people experiencing major civil upheaval for the first time. I mean, if it worked in Nero’s Rome, it works for us right?

I didn’t have space to go into the this in the column, but I’d highly highly recommend the classic by Seneca, On The Shortness of Life. (Or, if you want a modern day person to explain this to you, Brigid Delaney’s book How Not To Worry.)

Plus, Letters To Seneca. (That’s kinda like general letters he wrote to friends on how to cope with all kinds of crazy shit, like, say, your son dying and being overcome with paralytic grief so you can’t live life anymore. He was kinda like a really wise Agony Aunt whose thinking on the practicalities of living through chaos went on to shape centuries of thought. Wild, hey.)

I guess I recommend all this stuff because it’s super easy to spiral out about WTF is happening - or going to happen - especially since we’ve all got Covid front of mind. So I wanted to write about that - and hopefully give you a few things to read that might help. They certainly helped me.

(I also don’t think there’s a helluva lot of commentary on how to cope with this constant chaos feeling in modern society. So if anyone’s got any more modern philosophy they’d recommend, holler at me, fam.)

Last week, I wrote about how the Government were specifically warned last year that a war would severely impact our fuel supply.

And were specifically told to electrify (and increase trucking and diesel storage) to protect ourselves against this.

And they did not.

In fact, they destroyed our electrification efforts of our vehicles.

I could not believe it. They had a WHOLE year to plan for this…and did the opposite to it. And now we’re suffering the price of that.

I was absolutely spitting mad last week when writing that column.

Because to me, electrification of our cars (and industry) is the number one solution both to situations like this - but also to meet the growing needs of our future energy demands (for when fossil fuels run out, as they will) and also because things like solar power would actually save us poor normal saps shit tonnes of money on our solar.

(BTW, don’t get fooled by headlines that imply that switching to solar somehow doesn’t save you money. I’d be really careful when you read those - most of the time it’s because the power company installed the solar wrong. The solar tech is all g - it’s the power company that needs closer inspection there. These articles tell you that in about paragraph 6. So keep a keen eye on those!)

I’m not sure what we do with all this frustration at how our Government is playing out. I understand we can vote them out, of course, but I’m not a helluva lot more enthused by Labour right now either.

But trust me, if there’s one thing I understand it’s how to turn frustration into excellent columns. So if there’s a silver lining to the funk, its’s that I’ll get y’all some good columns out of this.

Keep fighting the good fight.

Much love as ever,

Vee xo