Climate Defence Tour: Hawkes Bay
The Climate Defence Tour is currently in Hawke’s Bay, which is in the midst of a drought. This May is shaping up to be the driest since 1951 and farmers are starting to sell off stock. This is one of the predicted effects of climate change on New Zealand – a wetter West Coast and a dryer East Coast that will keep getting worse in severity and frequency as climate change worsens. Of course one swallow does not a summer make, but these are the kinds of events we can expect more of.
In the Hawke’s Bay we set a Climate Defence Tour record giving our PowerPoint slideshow three times in one day – to agriculture and viticulture students; the sustainability group at EIT; as well as the public meeting in the evening in Hastings. The sustainability group had just completed a carbon audit of the campus where they measured their emissions as the first step to start making reductions and going carbon neutral. Not surprisingly in a car-dominated region, staff and student commuting to the campus was the largest source of greenhouse gases.
We followed the public meeting today with a workshop discussing what the region can do about climate change and looked at waste issues; coastal development; the lack of public transport options; and tree planting. We also talked about ways to work on solutions in the community such as doing film showings on environmental issues; hosting a sustainability expo; and keeping up the great work of the local environment centre.
We also met up with the team at Prometheus Ethical Finance, who are the New Zealand’s largest ethical finance company. They provide loans and finance to sustainable and fair initiatives such as organic farmers, and people who want to install a solar water heater or composting toilet. They also run a deposit facility that only invests in projects that make a positive contribution to society. Often we just hand over money to banks or to investment firms with out thinking of where that money is being invested. As we have seen with the NZ Super Fund some of that money is going towards nuclear weapons and cluster bomb manufacture as well as environmental destruction, investments that the similar Norway Pension fund, that has an ethical investment policy, won’t touch. With the projected boost in savings as a result of the expanded Kiwi Saver scheme, we have to ask where that money is going and whether or not savers will be given the option in depositing their savings with a company that has an ethical investment policy.
May 24th, 2007 at 2:35 am
It is surprisinging that Hawke’s Bay is a car-dominated region. In 1947 Labour proposed building a motorway to unite Napier and Hastings. Sixty years later it is still hasn’t been completed with all the safety features expected on a motorway. Bob Semple empahasised the fact that the main benefit to be derived from motorways was a 75% reduction in casualties. Typically subsequent politicians became fixated on monumental urban motorways, monuments to themselves of course. And they did this despite the Roading Investigation Committee warning, in 1954, that urban motorway construction should be halted because even if registration and heavy vehicles fees were doubled and all the petrol tax was spent on highways there still would be barely enough highway funds to fix the serious problems with rural highways.
For some unfathomable reason the only urban motorways included in the Ministry of Works “ten year regional plans” (1946) that have actually been substantially completed are those in Wellington. And the rest of the country had to lose $500 million of their petrol taxes to pay for the blimin things.