April 13, 2023

From 6 am this morning, climate activists from Extinction Rebellion and Greenpeace staged non-violent civil disobedience outside dairy giant Fonterra’s headquarters in Fanshawe St in Auckland’s CBD.

Large footprints were painted around the building, to symbolise the large greenhouse emission footprint of the country’s biggest polluter.

‘As ordinary citizens we are driven to rebel,’ says Caril Cowan Extinction Rebellion’s Spokesperson. ‘Decades of protest marches, delegations, lobbying, petitions and other conventional tactics have failed to avert the climate crisis. We will not sit by as powerful corporations keep spewing greenhouse gases, and successive governments take only token action.’

We are already experiencing the effects of a 1.2 degree postindustrial temperature increase, with cyclones and unprecedented floods in the North Island adding to droughts, floods and fires around the world and acidification of the oceans. Now we in Aotearoa New Zealand, too, have climate crisis deaths and internally displaced people (read ‘refugees’).

Without slashing gross emissions immediately we will keep careering towards 2.4 degrees by the end of the century, and points of no return. Current policies fail New Zealand’s own commitments under the Paris Agreement target of less than 2 degrees, preferably 1.5 degrees. Devastating as they were, Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland Anniversary floods will be followed by worse events and more frequently. Climate chaos will become the norm if we don’t stop fuelling it with carbon and methane.

Extinction Rebellion Tāmaki Makaurau calls on the Government to stop mouthing the climate emergency and get serious about dairy. The ‘elephant in the room’ of New Zealand’s emissions gestures is actually a cow. A government of leaders, not followers, could require that Fonterra actively, urgently and publicly bind itself to a specific business plan to cut their emissions through stopoing coal immediately, assisting farmers to transisiont to regenerative farming and halving the herd.

Extinction Rebellion worldwide calls for Citizen’s Assemblies as a new step in democracy to prevent elites and dysfunctional so-called democracy overruling the people’s real desire for meaningful climate action. In Aotearoa/New Zealand Extinction Rebellion Tāmaki Makaurau calls for constitutional change consistent with Te Tiriti o Waitangi as per Matike Mai Aotearoa – The Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation.

As long as the Government bows to Big Dairy and Big Oil putting profit above the ecosystem all lives depend on, the people will continue to organize through Extinction Rebellion and other groups. If you take for granted women’s suffrage, a world without chattel slavery, or even just the 40-hour working week, know that these came from the same kinds of civil resistance we are driven to. The system condemned and criminalized them, too. Worse, nature dictates that climate action cannot wait. You can’t just wait for the safe distance of history to endorse this cause. Join us now.

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