A lot has been written about palm kernel based animal feed over the last week since we exposed Fonterra’s ties to rainforest destruction in Indonesia and Malaysia.
I’ve just spent the last couple of hours reading most of the media clippings and it adds up to a lot of column centimetres. There were two main themes (basically for and against the use of palm kernel expeller (PKE) to feed dairy cows) which dominated the headlines. Read more »
Every now and then something really surprising happens. Yesterday was one of those days when news broke that the Government wants to open National Parks, Marine Reserves and Wildlife Sanctuaries to mining. It’s a bit like putting a brothel in a church.
You might think that the whole point to having National Parks, Wilderness Areas, Wildlife Sanctuaries and Marine Reserves is that they wouldn’t be mined. Well, that’s not what the Government thinks. Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee has announced a proposal to allow mining in these areas. Read more »
Today in Parliament there was an extraordinary exchange over the Parliamentary committee reviewing climate change. Apparently, one un-named political party is making a last minute bid to change its minority report outlining their position on the emissions trading scheme. This caused a flurry of arguments over whether this was allowable.
Although the political party that has changed its position over the last few days wasn’t named, Labour MP Charles Chauvel sought leave to table the minority report of the Maori Party. Although he isn’t allowed to breach Parliament’s rules by naming the political party that is making a last minute change in its position, his action made it clear to everyone who it was. In fact, subsequently another Labour MP Chis Hipkins outed the Maori Party on Facebook.
Read more »
A Greenpeace investigation has revealed that the iconic New Zealand dairy giant Fonterra is implicated in Indonesian and Malaysian rainforest destruction, dead orangutans and driving global greenhouse gas emissions.
The right-wing, conservative, climate-denial blog-and-twitosphere is abuzz with the news: Greenpeace admits live on the BBC that it lied about arctic melting.
That’s not true, it’s being promoted by the handful of global warming skeptics still standing, and we’re hitting back. You can help us by tweeting, blogging, and sharing this clarification on Facebook.
Here are the facts. Gerd Leipold, our Executive Director, appeared on BBC’s “HardTalk” the other day and got blindsided with a challenge by journalist Stephen Sackur. Sackur selectively quoted from a Greenpeace “press release” (actually, it was a web story) from July 15th to claim we were misleading the public by exaggerating the impact of climate change on the Arctic. This is the paragraph he referenced:
Ice free Arctic
Bad news is coming from other sources as well. A recent NASA study has shown that the ice cap is not only getting smaller, it’s getting thinner and younger. Sea ice has dramatically thinned between 2004 and 2008. Old ice (over 2 years old) takes longer to melt, and is also much harder to replace. As permanent ice decreases, we are looking at ice-free summers in the Arctic as early as 2030.
Sackur claimed that we were predicting that all the ice in the Arctic — including the massive Greenland ice sheet, which is on land, would be gone by 2030. That’s NOT what we said. When we talk about “ice-free summers” in the Arctic, we’re using the term the same way that NASA and climate scientists the world over use the term: to describe an Arctic free of sea-ice. And Sackur, or his researcher, would have known that if they read the entire article, including the next sentence:
They say you can’t be too thin or too young, but this unfortunately doesn’t apply to the Arctic sea ice.
But here’s how he poses this question to Gerd … read more
Well in a round about way anyway.
Barack Obama’s grandmother now has solar panels on the roof of her home in Kenya, compliments of Greenpeace.
Greenpeace Solar Generation Activists and local youth organisers installed the panels on “Mama Sara’s” home, and also put panels on the Senator Barack Obama School in Kogelo. Read more »
“Bold, supremely provocative and hugely important… a cry from the heart as much as a roar for necessary change” – THE TELEGRAPH (UK)
“Think ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ but with a personality” – LA TIMES
The Age of Stupid, from director Franny Armstrong (McLibel), and Kiwi Producer Lizzie Gillett, stars Pete Postlethwaite as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looking back at news footage and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?
It’s a must see.
Following the extraordinary success of the UK People’s Premiere, The Age of Stupid will be launched simultaneously in Australia and New Zealand at the biggest – and greenest – live film event the two countries have ever seen.
On Weds 19th August, celebrities will arrive at both the Sydney Theatre and at a specially-constructed solar powered tent in downtown Auckland. The Auckland event is being hosted by Oxfam and Greenpeace. The celebrities, who’ll include Sign On ambassadors Lucy Lawless and Keisha Castle-Hughes, will brave the cameras on the green carpet before being welcomed by MC Oliver Driver.
Following the screening of the film, there’ll be a live link up with the Sydney event, before a Q and A with producer Lizzie Gillett, chaired by broadcaster Noelle McCarthy.
Meanwhile, across town, the film will open in all Hoyts cinemas. So there’s no excuse for missing it! See below for screening times.
Screenings
Petone – Lighthouse Cinema - No premiere, lots of screenings - Call (04) 939 2061
There’s some great pics of the Auckland EWO flash mob here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/don_elle/
and of course at http://eyeswideopen.org.nz/videos/
I love it when a plan comes together.
Today we stepped up the pressure on Foodtown to get serious about putting in place a policy that would ensure it will only sell truly sustainable seafood.
We’ve just returned from the Quay St Foodtown in downtown Auckland where two of our activists hung a large banner above the front entrance of the store. The seven metre long banner was painted in the Foodtown blue and white and we used the same font so it appeared that today their company motto was ‘Foodtown costing us our oceans?’
Last week we attempted to attach a much longer banner with the same message on the hull of an orange roughy bottom trawler which we’d chained to the wharf in Auckland to stop it leaving port. That one didn’t go quite as planned because the fisherman on board managed to wrestle it from us before it was fully unraveled. Read more »
