Shane Te Pou – A warm night in Budapest, and a warning I can’t shake

It’s 8pm here in Budapest, 28 degrees, a lovely breeze coming off the river. I’m sitting down to write this with a glass of something cold, and honestly, it’s a perfect evening.

This is my second summer living in Eastern Europe. Last year was manageable — warm, sure, but nothing that made the locals freak

This year has been something else entirely. Every second week there’s been another heat record broken somewhere in Europe

It’s not just a hot summer anymore. It feels like a different climate .

And heat like that doesn’t just make you sweaty and irritable. It kills people, quietly, in their own homes. Most of them aren’t young, fit people caught out on a hike. They’re elderly folk, alone in flats with no air conditioning, in a part of the world that was never built for this kind of heat. Add power cuts into the mix, right when people need a fan or a cold drink most, and it stops being an inconvenience. For someone old and on their own, that’s how people die.

Where there’s heat like this, there’s fire. France, Spain, Greece , Croatia in the UK -you’re literally on fire all had blazes this year that forced entire towns to empty out overnight — families driving through smoke with whatever they could grab, thinking they’d be back in a few days, and some of them still aren’t home. He was the other thing about heat and fire. It doesn’t matter if your rich or poor climate change affects all.

Belgium is a wealthy country with strong infrastructure, yet the recent heatwave still claimed more than 1,700 lives. Then the heat and dry conditions helped fuel a wildfire that burned around 3,000 hectares

What also doesn’t get talked about enough is what’s actually lost. Old forest, wildlife, vegetation that’s been there longer than any of us — burn that away and it’s not growing back next spring. It’s decades, if it comes back at all.

Now flip the calendar. Go back to December and January, and Europe swung the other way completely — the worst snow in years, freezing temperatures, roads shut, people caught out in the cold. That’s the pattern now. Not gentle warming.

A hard swing to one extreme, then a hard swing to the other, inside the same twelve months.

Back here in Hungary, the thing that’s stuck with me most is the Danube. This river has cooled the country’s only nuclear power plant for well over forty years without ever properly shutting it down. This year it very nearly did. The water dropped so low the plant could barely keep running, and this one plant supplies close to half the country’s electricity. A river running dry nearly took a nation’s power down with it. And as it dropped, it gave up its dead — old shipwrecks from the Second World War, sitting there in the mud, exposed after decades hidden under the water.

The climate crisis isn’t coming. It’s here.

Which makes me think hard about home. We’ve had our own version of this on the East Coast — floods t that used to come once a century now landing every few years. And it’s not just the water and the mud anymore, it’s the money. Insurance is getting harder to find in some areas, and without insurance, no bank back a mortgage. That’s not weather anymore. That’s a family’s biggest asset quietly disappearing on them. In some cases literally falling off the cliff.

So what’s the answer Whānau Renewables aren’t a fantasy. Aotearoa already runs on mostly clean electricity, and that’s something to be proud of. But I keep thinking about Norway, and not just because they’ve gone hard into wind and solar. It’s how they got there. When they found oil, they didn’t just tax through minimal royalties and let someone else own the field. They kept ownership of it themselves. Aotearoa still does it the other way — a company finds the oil, keeps the field, and simply pays us a cut. Norway kept the resource and built one of the largest sovereign funds in the world off the back of it, and used that same fund to help pay its way into renewables. That’s not luck. That’s a country choosing ownership over rent, and thinking a generation or two further ahead than most of us bother to.

Look to our whanaunga across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa too — the low islands fighting the tide right now. In my tamariki’s lifetime, maybe sooner, we’re going to see climate refugees from our own part of the world. That’s not just people losing a house. That’s the death of a culture, a history, a language tied to a whenua that no longer exists.

We have the chance to do better.

So here’s where I’ll leave it. My generation has let our kids down on this one. We’ve talked a big game about the environment and dragged our feet , and the bill’s now landing on our kids doorstep, not ours. The one real favour we can do them is get out of the way and hand them the management of this crisis. They already know what to do. They know what’s right. Being environmentally conscious isn’t some new trend for them — it’s part of who they are, the same way it should be part of who we are as a country. I grew up with good public health and good public education handed to me by the generation before, built on an egalitarian idea of looking after each other. Dealing with the climate crisis needs to become exactly that: part of our DNA as a nation, not an afterthought we leave for the next lot to sort out.

Shane Te Pou is a political commentator and Māori broadcaster. It is TDBs privilege to platform his political analysis for the Election.