Greenpeace New Zealand Weblog

The Climate Challenge welcomes two new schools this month with Auckland Girls Grammar and Rangi Ruru Intermediate in Christhurch joining the challenge. There are some wonderful examples of kids getting involved and it’s great to see people sponsoring them but we need more! This kind of dedication needs support and recognition.

We also need more schools on board. I understand that teachers and students alike have very busy schedules, with many topics to cover and extra curriculum activities/sports etc, but a shift in consciousness is still necessary, and its important to highlight it and promote it where it is happening.

That’s why I like the Climate Challenge project. The kids I meet are tomorrow’s MP’s, business leaders, farmers, councilors etc, an understanding of our planet’s limitations and solutions to how we can live sustainably needs to become second nature to the way we live, the way we do business, the way we grow food and produce materials and the way we raise our children.
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Greenpeace fundraiser Chris talks through our Smartfarming campaign.

Greenpeace took its Smartfarming message to the Central North Island at the weekend, with a presence at the hugely successful three-day Taupo ECOshow. Attended by about 3,000 people from all over the country and host to some fantastic international speakers, the lakeside event involved interactive workshops, presentations, product showcasing and stalls. The theme was ‘choosing sustainability’, with a real focus on taking positive and proactive solutions to the environmental challenges we face. And it followed hot the heels of the launch of Greenpeace’s new “smartfarming” web pages (www.greenpeace.org.nz/smartfarming) and cows-on-buses campaign. Read more »

Youtube and One News have teamed up to present a political debate where you can submit questions via video to be played to leaders Helen Clark and John Key in the debate.

So far the best is this bedraggled polar bear in a Grey Lynn swimming pool, calling for action on climate change …

if you want to see this (or any of the others) played on TV ONE you need to vote. Go to http://nz.youtube.com/debate, click on the VOTE tab, type ‘arctic’ into the search, click on the polar bear thumbnail and then hit the thumbs up button.

It’s definitely worth making climate change a feature of the debate, given that it’s the biggest, overarching issue facing the globe. The more New Zealand’s leaders are forced to front up over the issue the better.

It’s not quite snakes on planes, but Greenpeace’s new advertising campaign featuring cows on buses certainly gives new meaning to the term “movable feast” (if you’re not a vegetarian that is). The ads are intended to highlight the work we’re doing on climate change and agriculture.

The making of cows on buses
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From a distance, they look like nothing more than thin red lines on the horizon, easily lost amid the tumbling blue of the Atlantic Ocean. But get closer and the significance of the 140m-long tubes, 10 years in the making by a British company and now floating in the sea off the coast of Portugal, becomes apparent: they are the beginning of an entirely new industry in the hunt for clean power.

Wave power is seen by some as the holy grail of renewable energy but it hasn’t become a commercial reality - until now that is - the world’s first commercial wave power farm has gone live in Portugal using pelamis sea snakes.

There’s been talk about harnessing the power of the ocean around NZ for sime time with the most recent attempt being the Crest Energy in the Kaipara.

Early in 2007  PGP director Chris Curlett said he thought “the first wave farm could be fully commissioned in New Zealand within the next two-and-a-half to three years. And that would be operational, feeding power direct into the grid … There’s no question that New Zealand’s got the most marvellous wave pattern for marine energy all the way up the west coast.” Read more »

Bunny McDiarmid

Originally published in the Christchurch Press
By Bunny McDiarmid
Executive Director - Greenpeace NZ

Taking action on climate change is proving a hard thing for some to stomach in New Zealand, largely because the problem for us lies predominantly with agriculture. It’s the elephant in the room, except it’s a cow. Just to confuse matters, the cow is sometimes referred to as a “golden goose”. But what if the goose was laying itself into an early grave and dragging clean green New Zealand down with it?
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This is a fascinating look behind the scenes of the Greenpeace US homeless polar bears campaign.

This is a must watch!

Pupils at one of the schools taking part in Greenpeace’s Climate Challenge ( www.greenpeace.org.nz/theclimatechallenge ) have put together a video called “Turning down the Heat”. It’s all about figuring out the characteristics of a great environmentalist (which bytheway are found to be: DETERMINATION, IMPACT. KNOWLEDGE, COMMITTMENT and (being) ADVENTUROUS). They also get down to figuring out what New Zealanders can do to help tackle climate change.
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This opinion piece from Bunny McDiarmid our Executive Director is published in the NZ Herald today …

When the Emissions Trading Bill passed last week, Greenpeace sighed with relief. Not so much because this particular piece of legislation is now law, but because politicians can finally stop squabbling over it and get on with implementing stronger, more immediate climate policies.

The bill is a small, necessary step towards New Zealand making a valid contribution to global climate change. But it’s too generous to agriculture and other big polluters and won’t result in the deep emission cuts required.

In the time political leaders have been playing politics over the climate and our biggest polluting companies have been campaigning for massive public subsidies, the Arctic ice cap entered a “death spiral”.

The Arctic Ocean could be totally free of summer ice by 2020. For the first time, it’s possible to sail right around the North Pole.

Meanwhile, it was roundly concluded that a string of particularly ferocious natural disasters worldwide is in line with climate change projections.

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