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a network of gas pipes against a background of a sunrise or sunset against clouds
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OPINIONSocietyAugust 27, 2024

Who to believe in the big gas debate?

Guest writer
a network of gas pipes against a background of a sunrise or sunset against clouds
Photo: Getty Images

Decades of underinvestment by the power companies have landed us in this mess, argues Lisa McLaren – and gas is not the ‘transition fuel’ that will get us out of it.

On the back of yet another big energy announcement from the government, it feels like every person and their dog has had an opinion on the energy debate over the last month. When reading the articles about our electricity crisis on your lunch break, it’s hard to wade through the sea of hot takes and opinions to separate fact from fiction.

One reason for all the muddiness around energy is the lack of transparency in terms of the motives and bias of the people talking about it. Why are people supporting particular ideas? Who do they work for? Who has their ear while hanging out in the Koru Lounge? And why are they trying to convince you that they are presenting the only viable solution? In the age of massive online overwhelm, it can be hard to sort through the political and industry rhetoric to form your own opinion. 

I’ll be upfront from the start – my main motive in writing this piece on the energy crisis is to outline why our energy system doesn’t need gas as a transition fuel, and how decades of underinvestment by the power companies have landed us in this mess. My background is in climate policy and academia, and my bias is that I believe scientists when they tell us that the climate crisis is here and that the whole-of-life emissions from gas are as bad for the climate as coal. We only have a few years to decarbonise – and democratise – our energy system.

Everybody should have the right to clean, affordable electricity. For many in Aotearoa today, we know that’s not the case. Around 300,000 New Zealanders are living in energy hardship – struggling to heat their homes and keep the lights on. Household power bills have increased by 42% over the last 14 years, while renewable electricity generation has stayed around 85% for half a century now. We have so much untapped potential for increasing our renewable energy generation, but the current barriers are corporate greed and a lack of political will. 

The industry giants have starved our energy system of renewables investment, and instead filled the pockets of their shareholders by the eye-watering amount of more than $10 billion this last decade. By paying out excess dividends to shareholders, the four big “gentailers” – Genesis, Mercury, Meridian, and Contact Energy – ensure that there is never sufficient investment capital to expand new renewable generation. Those companies have a perverse incentive to keep fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) in the grid as it hikes power prices, enabling them to make record profits and distribute excess dividends, all of which slows the development of new renewable energy generation.

Whatever the source of the generation (such as hydro, geothermal, solar or gas), the gentailers are paid for the cost of the most expensive source of generation in any 30-minute period. Gas and coal are the most expensive to produce, which incentivises electricity companies to keep supply tight so gas and coal are needed, rather than cheap renewables. Expensive fossil-fuel inputs thus set the price for cheap renewable electricity, keeping profits high and shareholders – including the government – happy. But this kills the climate, and keeps our power bills sky high.

a neutral toned background with powerpoles, grey sky, and some red and blue abstract shapes, looks quite sad
Image: Archi Banal

As a country, we are still stumbling into this climate crisis world like it’s business as usual. If we know that gas is not our future, then why are we still creating new subdivisions and houses which have gas installed? Why aren’t we prioritising getting our gas out of the homes, schools and hospitals that cater to some of those most vulnerable in our community? If gas prices are to continue going through the roof in the coming years, why are we locking ourselves, our communities, and our local industries into paying those exorbitant costs? We’ve seen just this week how vulnerable our workers are to changing energy prices with the closure of two timber mills in the central North Island. 

Yesterday, the government announced it was pushing ahead with fast-tracking consent for a new facility to import LNG (gas). It also committed to reverse the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration by the end of the year. Those with vested interests in the longevity of the fossil fuel industry are naturally coming out in support of gas as a “transition fuel”. But there are a few problems here. First up – it would take well over a decade between overturning the ban and new gas actually coming online for use. Secondly – overseas studies have shown that gas is at least as bad for the climate as coal, when you consider the whole-of-life emissions, and there is a lack of credible data showing this isn’t the case in Aotearoa. So we don’t just have to worry about the gas we are burning – we also have to worry about the gas that is leaked in the process of getting it from the ground to where it is used. Because of how much is leaked during drilling, transportation and so on, we know that gas is at least as bad for the climate as burning coal, and is definitely not a transition fuel.

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    Finally, and most excitingly, increasing our gas supply is simply not needed. The price of solar panels, batteries, wind power, and other associated technologies is plunging. With the right tools and incentives, electricity demand and supply can be managed without the need for new gas exploration. Community energy projects can provide resilience to the grid – and large energy users can be incentivised to dial down their power use when needed. More household solar could mean using less hydro during the day when the sun is shining, freeing up hydro capacity at peak times and reducing need for gas.

    The government could buy out Methanex and replace gas-fired “peaker” plants as soon as possible, to meet peak electricity demand with renewable energy, energy storage and active demand management. Better still, through establishing a Ministry of Green Works, the government could take an active role in building and operating renewable power storage, complementing the role of Transpower as the publicly owned operator of the electricity grid.

    The government, as a majority shareholder of Genesis, Mercury and Meridian, remains the largest player in the electricity sector. This coalition government could rewrite the rules that govern our energy system – as well as use its power as a majority shareholder to force gentailers to invest in building renewable infrastructure. The review of the performance of the electricity market announced on Monday is a perfect time to consider all options, especially the changes that will make the biggest difference.

    If the government continues to pursue expensive, climate-killing gas, rather than develop a forward-thinking, renewables-based energy transition plan, then every New Zealander will know that they don’t have their best interests at heart.

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    “Peak therapy” is behind us. (Image: The Spinoff)
    “Peak therapy” is behind us. (Image: The Spinoff)

    OPINIONSocietyAugust 26, 2024

    Don’t let the backlash to therapy culture stop you from doing therapy

    Guest writer
    “Peak therapy” is behind us. (Image: The Spinoff)
    “Peak therapy” is behind us. (Image: The Spinoff)

    The tide is turning on Insta-therapy. Good riddance, but actual therapy is still good and worth doing.

    If you’ve had a gutsful of therapeutic lingo – “your feelings are valid”, “thank you for holding space”, “I feel seen”, “do the work”, “honour my boundaries”, “Are you in the right headspace to receive information that could possibly hurt you?”, enmeshment, codependence, vulnerability, narcissism, “my trauma”, “my trauma”, “my trauma” – then I have good news for you: the backlash to therapy culture is robust and ascendant. 

    This pronouncement is based mostly on me licking my finger and sticking it in the air, but here are some of the breezes I’m feeling: last year, Time Magazine announced that we’d hit “peak therapy” and The London Evening Standard signalled “the end of therapy speak”. Freddie de Boer, a US-based writer who frequently rails against “therapeutic maximalism”, has written about its weakening grip on the culture. Seerut K. Chawla, a London-based psychotherapist who criticises “Insta-therapy”, has a growing following of almost 300,000 people on Instagram. And on our own shores, Dr Jonathan Shedler, a prominent US-based psychoanalyst, went on Kim Hill’s Saturday Morning show last September to discuss the clinical perils of overusing therapy speak. 

    An anti-Insta therapy slide by psychotherapist Seerut K. Chawla.

    My guess is that, taking into account the lagging pace of social change in Aotearoa relative to the rest of the world, we’ll only have to put up with another couple of years of everything being “valid” and “triggering” before we move on to a new post-therapeutic mode of expression. But as Insta-therapy is hosed off our cultural house, trickling down the same drain as lolcats and ban-men feminism, I am here to make one plea: don’t let the backlash to therapy culture stop you from doing therapy. 

    I can’t wait to see the back of therapy culture. The problems with it are numerous and well articulated by critics like Chawla and deBoer, but in short, therapy culture encourages a person to revel in the status of victimhood; to see their mental health problems as a core part of their identity rather than challenges to overcome; and to hold the people around them (and the world more generally) responsible for meeting their needs and keeping them safe. Therapy culture breeds snowflakes and crybullies, and its preferred parlance is like an email from HR: saccharine and earnest, but also vaguely threatening. 

    But as Chawla and deBoer are both careful to clarify, therapy culture is not the same thing as therapy. Often, the two are more like opposites. Therapy is a private encounter between patient and professional, whereas therapy culture plays out on social media. Therapy is about overcoming difficulty; therapy culture is about claiming the mantle of victimhood. Therapy has room for complexity, nuance and contradiction; therapy culture needs to fit inside a bullet-pointed Instagram carousel. Therapy encourages you to find an internal locus of control; therapy culture tells you what the world should do for you. Therapy doesn’t proselytise; therapy culture never shuts up. 

    If you confuse therapy culture for therapy, you will likely run a mile from both. That’s a shame, and a mistake. 

    It might feel like we live in a touchy-feely, namby-pamby world where every man and his dog is seeing a shrink, but in reality, the vast majority of people aren’t doing therapy at any given time. Pākehā women were the group with the highest rates of therapy attendance in New Zealand last year, but only 9.7% of them consulted a psychologist or counsellor about mental health issues from June 2022 to June 2023, according to Ministry of Health data. For Pacific men it was 2.4%, and for Asian women 1.7%. (We aren’t an outlier: US data from 2019 showed that 11.7% of women participated in counselling or therapy compared to 7.2% of men.)

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    Zoom out from therapy culture, and you’ll see that it’s a blip. Preceding it are decades of beliefs that therapy is for the weak, that therapists are quacks and weirdos, that people should be “man enough” to handle their own problems, and that issues arising in the domestic sphere should be dealt with there and there alone. Recent studies on New Zealanders’ attitudes to therapy are thin on the ground, but a 2021 poll of Americans found that 47% of respondents believe seeking therapy is a sign of weakness. 2021! In America! Maybe the beating heart of therapy culture was flatlining all along.

    I worry that the backlash to therapy culture will cause these older beliefs about therapy to strengthen and resurface. Already, the backlash urges people to consider that therapy culture makes you selfish. How many people will hear this as “therapy makes you selfish”? The idea is already deeply embedded in the culture: in the novels of Sigrid Nunez, in the mutterings of mothers, in the shame-riddled patient herself, who can’t overcome the idea that it’s self-indulgent to be on the couch at all. 

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    Tips and tricks for when your therapist looks like your dad Tip one: let yourself be nurtured by this big old man. Tip two: don’t ask him to adopt you.

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    This is the truth about therapy: with good faith on the part of the patient and requisite skill on the part of the therapist, therapy makes the patient stronger, less self-absorbed, and more prosocial in the long run. Therapy isn’t for the weak. It requires enormous reserves of courage: hour upon hour of excavating the worst things that have ever happened to you and making sense of their impact isn’t easy, to say the least. Therapy also requires (and begets) humility and a focus on others: the job isn’t done if you don’t move the spotlight from the harms done to you, to the harms you visit on others (and yourself). Therapy promotes personal responsibility and growth.

    Remember this as it becomes increasingly unfashionable to talk about “holding space”, “being triggered” and “feeling seen”. Don’t confuse therapy (good) with therapy culture (good riddance). Don’t throw the boundaries out with the bathwater. 

    Society