Greenpeace New Zealand Weblog

Bill Gates calls for zero carbon emissions by 2050. Photo: Nancy Duarte.

Bill Gates, when asked to give “the talk of his life – in 18 minutes” at the TED Talks conference last week, set a startling precedent for business leaders, choosing energy and climate as his subject – by calling for nothing less than zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Gates’ commitment to stopping climate change couldn’t come at a more urgent juncture and it’s a major development for 3 reasons. Read more »

2009 has been a hard year for everyone, and we wouldn’t have made it without our supporters. We would like to thank you for sticking with us through the tough times, and hope you’ll be staying with us in the future. You can read the wrap-up from the Copenhagen climate summit here. World leaders walked away without a treaty that protects the climate. They’re not done yet, but neither are we so waych this space!

On behalf of all Greenpeace:  Thank you.

Greenpeace International ED, Kumi Naidoo, delivered a passionate speech at the launch of the Global Day of Action March in Copenhagen 12 Dec. 2009. “Yes we can, yes we must and yes we will deliver a fair efficient and legally binding treaty to protect the future of our children!”

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.
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On the Q & A show a few days ago Nick Smith made some pretty wild claims about the supposed costs to New Zealanders if NZ was to comit to the ‘40 per cent by 2020 on 1990 levels’ emissions that the scientists say is required.

Of course he didn’t say anything about the potential costs of not doing enough to avert climate change but what he did say turned out to be blatently false scaremongering.

Keith Ng over at publicaddress.net provides a beautifully succinct analysis of the flaws in Nick’s argument in a blog titled ‘Nick Smith. Spanking. Now.‘ The ensuing discussion is also worth a look (and is where I got the title of this blog).

You can listen to Keith talking about this over at wammo.

I have to confess, I haven’t achieved much today – illness and
tiredness have caught up with me. There’s a virus doing the rounds of
delegates at the negotiations as we have all become more tired and
it’s got me. So I’ve had a quiet day. When you’re at something like
this, you don’t want to waste a moment so it’s easy to overwork and
it’s also frustrating to feel less than 100%.

I missed the big event of the day when my Greenpeace colleagues set
off a large alarm outside the Maritim Hotel to highlight that failure
of countries, including New Zealand, to show the level of urgency
required to tackle climate change. There is no sense of urgency here whatsoever. Read more »

If you’re in Auckland tomrrow you might want to check out Oxfam’s climate change action stall in QEII square (opposite Britomart), Downtown Auckland.

Watch, as a world renowned ice sculptor creates a life size ice sculpture of John Key. As the ice sculpture melts John Key will really feel the heat!

Like Greenpeace this year, Oxfam is working to put pressure on the NZ Government to support a fair and equitable deal on climate change at the UN conference in Copenhagen, December 2009.

Much like our Sign On campaign Oxfam is asking the Government to work together with other developed countries to:

1. Work within the United Nations to ensure that the needs of the world’s poorest people are at the heart of a new global climate change deal.
2. Cut our emissions first, fastest and furthest so that global emissions peak by 2015 and fall at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.
3. Provide the money and technology needed, independent of existing aid commitments, to help vulnerable people in poor countries adapt to changing climates.
4. Reduce emissions to at least 40% below 1990 levels by 2020.

Greenpeace Political Adviser Geoff Keey is back in Bonn for the latest round of UN climate talks in the lead up to Copenhagen in December. Here begins his account of the ins and outs of the most crucial negotiations of our time….

Is New Zealand taking the piss?

That was the question someone asked of me today about New Zealand’s approach to the climate change negotiations.

After months of procrastination, New Zealand has announced to delegates here at Bonn that it will offer a 2020 target for cuts in greenhouse gas pollution, but not yet. Read more »

With a BBQ hosted by Lucy Lawless, a lifeboat named Copenhagen, and poem by Rhys Darby titled Global Warning (watch this space for the video) we launched a new campaign called Sign On over the weekend.

With a host of big name climate ambassadors including Stephen Tindall, Geoff Ross, Robyn Malcolm and Francesca Price to name a few, we kicked off what could be our most important campaign to date.

So not the usual Greenpeace approach but these are unusual times.

Climate change is now happening faster than anyone expected. Normally reserved scientists are raising the alarm. In December this year world leaders will gather in Copenhagen to Sign On to a global agreement for action. For NZ to do its bit to help avoid catastrophic impacts, Prime Minister John Key needs to go to Copenhagen and Sign On to reduce New Zealand’s emissions by 40 per cent by 2020.

This is the message the Sign On ambassadors echo and it is what thousands of New Zealanders are already supporting via the Sign On website www.signon.org.nz

We need you to Sign On and we need you to tell your friends and family to Sign On too. This year is our window of opportunity to turn climate change around.

By December we need hundreds of thousands of kiwis standing alongside us and our climate ambassadors in supporting John Key to do the right thing at Copenhagen.

All the ambassadors made videos which you can watch here

Last summer, for the first time in recorded history, boats could circumnavigate the North Pole. To the oblivious observer, this might seem like a good thing. Perhaps some green entrepreneur will build resorts on Finland’s Svalbard Islands. However, as we know, there’s a dark side…

The year 2009 may be the tipping point in human history when society responds to or ignores global warming. The UN climate meeting scheduled for Copenhagen in December may be humanity’s last chance to avoid total chaos. It is too late to avoid some climate chaos.

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