Following my earlier post on Oxfam’s Pacific Islands paper I’ve come across an interesting report  in the National Business Review on New Zealand and Australian responses in climate change discussions at the Pacific Islands Forum.Â
Continue reading “Rudd and Key on islands future”
Author: Bryan Walker
Walking the Green talk
Watching Stephen Sackur’s BBC Hard Talk interview with the retiring head of Greenpeace this week I was reminded of why I feel thankful that Greenpeace campaigns so hard and so persistently on climate change. The adversarial style of Hard Talk often grates, and it certainly did when Sackur accused Gerd Leipold of alarmism and even managed to manufacture the impression that Greenpeace claims that the whole Greenland ice sheet will have melted by 2030. Leipold refused to be sidetracked into defending the organisation against silly accusations, but held the line on the seriousness of the science and the need for political responses to be adequate to the science. Half measures won’t work.
Saving island lives
New Zealand politicians are engrossed in working out how persuasive a case they can make for lenient treatment in any post-Kyoto agreement. One hopes they can find time to consider the Pacific nations who are already suffering effects from climate change. Oxfam has followed up its overview report on the effects of climate change on developing countries, discussed earlier on Hot Topic, with a report specific to our own region The Future is Here: Climate Change in the Pacific. Basically the report says to Australia and New Zealand: here in your own backyard are people already suffering the consequences of global warming; you are among the rich countries most responsible for what is happening; there are things you need to do to help Pacific nations combat and adapt to climate change.
Ice concentrates ministerial minds
Connie Hedegaard, the livewire Danish Minister for Climate and Energy (yes they are twinned in Denmark – would that they still were in NZ), will not be to blame if the Copenhagen talks, which she is to host, founder. I have been watching the BBC’s Hard Talk programme the last couple of evenings. Interviewer Stephen Sackur has been to Greenland, to Ilulissat, where Hedegaard had invited some 30 ministers on climate change to an informal conference at a place where the effects of global warming on Greenland ice flow are all too apparent. She explained to Sackur in the excerpt from this interview  (second clip down the page – the first is only introductory) her hope that, in remote and secluded Ilulissat, the ministers, working in the knowledge that everything was off the record, would find some trust and common ground. Continue reading “Ice concentrates ministerial minds”
South Island partnership in renewable biofuel
An interesting item of news concerning Aquaflow, the Blenheim algae farming company written about previously on Hot Topic here and here. They are combining efforts with another South Island company Solray Energy on the conversion of the harvested algae into fuel.
The Aquaflow operation in the Marlborough sewage ponds does two things – produces wild algae biomass from which oil can be extracted, and at the same time results in a discharged water which has been cleaned by the process to WHO irrigation standards. The process of converting the biomass to fuel is obviously a key factor in the effectiveness of using naturally occurring algae. Solray has separately developed a reactor and extraction process to detoxify algae and deliver a crude oil and other co-products, with the oil capable of being refined as biofuel. It says it can convert all of the algae – not just the fatty acids – into the crude oil. Their new reactor can process several tonnes of harvested microalgae per day. It sounds a promising partnership. Continue reading “South Island partnership in renewable biofuel”