Tag: oil exploration

Carbon News 28/10/14: oil drilling, honey and crowd-funding green coke

Hunt for oil anchors govt’s environment plan

The National Party is leading off its environmental package for its new term in power with plans to encourage more oil exploration — despite the burning of fossil fuels being the single biggest cause of climate change.

Honey hits the jackpot for steep-land believer

In 2010, Taranaki farmer Neil Walker was enthusiastic about the potential for a combination of carbon farming and beekeeping to rejuvenate steep-land farming. Four years on, he is still buying cheap land and planting it in tree crops, despite carbon prices being less than a third of what they were back then.

Green-coke pioneer puts faith in public-funding

Clean-coal company CarbonScape is the first clean-tech company in New Zealand to use crowd-funding to raise capital. The Blenheim-based start-up launched a bid last week on the Snowball Effect platform to raise at least $400,000 dollars.

Good tyres tread lightly on the earth

New Zealand could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 6000 tonnes a year by installing fuel-efficient tyres on the nation’s fleet of light vehicles. And at the same time, businesses and private-vehicle owners could shave up to 7 per cent off their fuel bills. Continue reading “Carbon News 28/10/14: oil drilling, honey and crowd-funding green coke”

Labour’s dodgy drilling policy avoids climate reality

In his interview on TV3’s The Nation last weekend David Shearer declared a Labour Party policy on oil and gas drilling which, like the Government’s, fails to confront the reality of climate change. Drilling will continue. The approval processes will be improved, the regulations will be tight, the money gained will be used well, but drilling will continue. He acknowledged that “at the end of the day” fossil fuels are out. They cannot continue to be our future. But we can use them to transition to renewables. They can remain a strand in our development. ”There’s a potential there and while there’s a potential we should be looking at it.”

Transition is a word which acquires a convenient elasticity in the language of those who argue for the continued exploration for fossil fuels. We all realise that the change from fossil energy can’t happen overnight. There has to be a period of transition. But to use that fact to justify continued new exploration and development of fossil fuels is to rob the transition of all urgency and treat it rather as something we will need to gradually prepare for as fossil reserves are finally exhausted.

The message from the science is clear. If we burn more than a third of the fossil fuel reserves already discovered we will cause a level of warming likely to prove catastrophic for human society. Continue reading “Labour’s dodgy drilling policy avoids climate reality”