PRESS RELEASE: Climaction
AUCKLAND 18.8.2008

"$990 to find out if your children will have a world worth living in!?"

Emissions Trading, Carbon capture and storage, Clean Coal, green certification schemes, carbon positive investments, compliant carbon markets, and voluntary carbon offsetting... what the hell is all this!?, who's planning it and what has this got to do with me? Well, if you turned up to the 4th Australia-New Zealand Climate & Business conference today without a NZ$990 ticket to get inside you would have been none the wiser as to what New Zealand and Australia's biggest Climate polluters are planning on doing in response to the most alarming social crisis the world has ever faced.

However, despite our lack of funding; a few of us from 'Climaction' [an Auckland based group of climate activists] decided to go along to the conference anyway and one individual managed to sneak inside when security weren't watching as the rest of us gave out flyers warning passers that they were entering a deadly greenwash contaminated zone. Our friend inside had the pleasure of listening to some green-industry reps talk about what they're planning to do to save us all and in between the schmoozing, the business card exchanges and auderves Joanna Silver informed "us" about how TZ1 Market (a subsidiary of the New Zealand stock exchange) can facilitate our company's trading in carbon credits which will boost our company's green image and assure our customers the planet is safe as long as they keep on buying our stuff. Joanna also let us know that the price of carbon credits won't reach a level that will actually encourage New Zealand's polluting companies to reduce their own emissions until around 2030. So it looks like business as usual with a silvery green lining for the foreseeable future. Hooray for marketing!!

If you've changed your lightbulbs recently or decided to get yourself one of those reusable green bags from Foodtown then good on you, but you may want to consider that although New Zealand has one of the highest carbon footprints per person in the entire world, the vast majority of our greenhouse gases are created by massive companies like Fonterra, Comalco / Rio Tinto, Solid Energy and Genesis Energy who have more influence over the New Zealand climate protection policy than you can shake a lightbulb at.

So should we be concerned that these mega-polluting giants are the ones who get to tell Helen Clarke, Kevin Rudd and the rest of us whats good for the climate? We certainly think so and would like to invite everyone else who agrees to join us this Wednesday for the final day of the conference.

What? Protest at the 4th Australia-New Zealand Climate Change & Business Conference Wednesday 5pm - 7pm at Sky City. Come tell the policy-makers and corporations that you are more interested in stopping dangerous climate chaos than making money out of it.

Who? Climaction is a radical climate change coalition that advocates system change, not climate change and looks forward to a time when real people are involved in the decision making that affects us all.
visit http://climaction.blogspot.com/

Why? The real culprits of climate chaos are the very corporations that sponsor and organise these conferences. Asking these people to look after our world is a bit like asking a monkey to mind a banana.

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