The bean counters at the Treasury have warned government that failing to reduce pollution in New Zealand could cost the taxpayer an eye watering, economy wrecking $52 billion. And John Key’s government want to keep the public in the dark about it.

On the eve of the Government delivering yet another broken budget and a seventh consecutive overspend, one of John Key’s ministers yesterday said Treasury should keep the true cost of climate pollution from the public.

When asked about this figure in Parliament, the reply from Tim Groser was “what Treasury got wrong was that it did not use sufficiently sophisticated software to conceal the redacted information”. In other words, don’t front it to the public.

The Government is currently running a hurried consultation on what pollution reduction t... Read more >

With the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris at the end of the year, the government has opened a short public consultation on what target New Zealand should set to reduce its climate pollution.

But it's a sham. Targets without a plan of action are meaningless, and guess what? New Zealand doesn’t have a plan. As things stand, our climate pollution will continue to spiral out of control.

We need an action plan that we can stick to. In the same way the All Blacks focus on winning by training hard, maintaining a healthy diet and living well, New Zealand needs to kick it’s dirty fossil fuel habit and get in shape for a cleaner, brighter future.  

The thing with the targets this government seems to like so much is that they happen in the future and can be missed.

They’re a grand distrac... Read more >

Today, the Labour party are calling upon the Environment Minister, Nick Smith, to come clean on his plans to take away our right to protect our play areas, the forests we tramp in and the rivers we fish in.

The Government has long planned to take the hatchet to the environmental gold standard that is the Resource Management Act (RMA) and roll back our environmental safeguards to make way for more intensive and polluting dairying and fracking.

And they currently want to keep their plans behind closed doors and away from New Zealanders.

Only recently we saw how the government’s efforts to weaken the RMA would have seen the destruction of a 500 year old kauri tree to make way for a driveway. It was a ludicrous decision that was overturned thanks to a massive public outcry and the Titirang... Read more >

Last week, a new joint report crafted by the pointy-headed people at Bloomberg and the United Nations has declared that the uptake in clean energy globally has reached 'industrial' scale. Power sources like solar and wind are now more affordable than fossil fuels as investors around the world shift their money away from polluting energies like coal and oil.

And much of this is happening in the developing world, which is hugely significant because, until now, a long held assumption has been that much of the economic growth in these regions would be heavily reliant on polluting energies.

This report is not an isolated case either: Almost on a weekly basis more and more leading authorities are confirming that action on climate change is not only necessary but it is already happening. Only la... Read more >

It looks like the Government’s plans to open up New Zealand’s deep and clean oceans to dangerous deepwater drilling could be in deep trouble.

Today’s Herald reports that plunging global oil prices have forced explorers to scale back plans in New Zealand. This is not breaking news as such, as the price of oil has been collapsing over the last six months, but we are now starting to see what this actually means for the oil industry. And it’s bad news for them and the Government.

With oil now below $50 a barrel, plans for drilling in risky areas like the Arctic and off our coastlines are looking shakier than the Wellington fault line. The thing is, not only is deepwater drilling dangerous, it’s also very, very expensive. And oil giants looking to drill in New Zealand, like Anadarko and Statoi...