TOM EATON | Mbeki save the Cape ANC? Hell, or at least Antarctica, will freeze over first

At first glance, the current heatwave in Antarctica doesn’t seem to have a lot in common with Thabo Mbeki. The one, after all, is a very distant, very cold thing that is slowly melting into oblivion, and the other is Antarctica.

Both, however, are upsetting facts of life surrounded by intense, deliberate denial.

I can understand why one might want to ignore the unprecedented melting of Antarctica. The facts and figures would be immense and numbing at the best of times. These days they also have to fight their way through a chorus of oil salesmen, bought politicians and Russian bots, all explaining that it’s totally normal for the south pole to be melting at the same time as the north pole, and that there’s nothing weird about parts of Antarctica registering temperatures 40ºC above the average for this time of year.

I certainly don’t blame anyone for scrolling briskly past this story and going back to the latest reports from Ukraine. Compared to the literal disintegration of bits of the planet, war offers a perverse familiarity. In a macabre sort of way, it even offers the comfort of continuity of history: Vladimir Putin may be a bloody tyrant, but he’s simply the latest of a long and ancient line whose existence suggests that there will be many more yet to come.

Sometimes, however, the determination not to discuss the climate feels a bit absurd.

Vladimir Putin may be a bloody tyrant, but he’s simply the latest of a long and ancient line whose existence suggests that there will be many more yet to come.

I’ve now read dozens of explanations of what Putin is doing in Ukraine and why, ranging from the ranting of Stalinist tankies to the cool, amoral bean-counting of energy experts. But almost nowhere in this avalanche of analysis have I heard anyone wonder if climate change — and the immense wheat reserves of Ukraine and its neighbours — might be factoring into Putin’s long-term plans for Russia, a country whose northern reaches have already transformed from permafrost to brushfire at an astonishing rate.

Of course, it’s possible that those discussions are happening outside the news silo in which I live. But if the stuff on my screens every day is even tangentially close to a useful sample, it seems that we’d much rather speculate about the likelihood of nuclear apocalypse than discuss the certainties of climate change.

Again, I suppose there are sensible reasons for this. For starters, the prospect of nuclear Armageddon, with its firestorms and thousand-year fallout, is substantially more compelling than being told that you’re going to have a major problem with rising damp in about 30 years.

I’m being flippant, but it’s also true that the visuals (at least of sea level rise) simply can’t compete with the Hollywood nightmares that have become the norm. Even when we start surrendering parts of cities to the sea, it won’t be because they’re being pounded by the surf but because it’s become too expensive to keep pumping water out of subway stations or parking garages, or no longer viable to insure buildings whose basements are now flooding twice a year rather than twice a decade. The first suburbs we abandon will be bone dry: it will be municipal finances that will be underwater.

It all feels very far away, but I suspect that those first ripples are about to reach SA, lapping gently into the books of our banking system and sloshing across the august institution that is the 20-year home loan.

Since its invention, the mortgage has been a safe bet, based on the sensible assumption that people need somewhere to live and fixed property can’t just disappear.

But what happens when the rising sea levels of the next three or four decades inevitably start reaching back into the financial present?

2060 feels unfathomably — and comfortably — far away, but in banking terms, it’s just two 20-year mortgages from now, both of which are starting to look very shaky.

I don’t want to alarm anyone currently living in a marina or an estuary or near a pretty stretch of beach, but if some of those homes are going to be too expensive to maintain in 2060, and therefore unsellable, will banks even be offering bonds for them in 2040? And if bonds are going to be scarce or extremely expensive in 2040, thereby making the place much less appealing to prospective buyers, should anyone be buying it in 2022? Given the dynamics of long-term debt, just when, exactly, does an unsellable house become unsellable?

I don’t own a property by the sea, but the news from Antarctica drove me deep into denial, which is why I went searching for news of disasters on a much smaller scale. And it was there, seeking refuge in local political news, that I read that Mbeki had been dispatched to the Western Cape over the weekend to locate and then exhume the remains of the ANC in that province.

Mbeki’s visit was an act of almost total futility, but there was something comforting, perhaps even heroic, in the intensity of the denial displayed by everyone involved, from the former president who still believes that he embodies the ANC and is worth listening to, to the comically inept apparatchiks who think they can run a province despite not being able to run a small office.

Because sometimes, when you’re faced by changing world you don’t understand, all you can do is the next thing. And maybe don’t buy on the water ...