There’s no doubt now that the fossil fuel divestment campaign is having some serious bite. Last weekend, thousands of individuals, investors, institutions and even the UK Parliament* took part in Global Divestment Day. Our challenge is vast and urgent: To limit warming to no more than 2 degrees, at least 80% of known fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground. 

While New Zealand might seem far removed from the power-base of the fossil fuel industry overseas, the reality is that our money is tightly wound up in propping up the fossil fuel industry. It’s time to break that link between you and the fossil fuel industry. 

Make your money powerful: Invest in divestment. Click here to invest in 350 Aotearoa to bring divestment to fever pitch in New Zealand this year.

The events across the country last weekend were just a taster of what lies ahead: We’re now calling on our banks to stop funding fossil fuels. Most New Zealand banks have made strong statements about their commitment to tackling climate change, yet many of them continue to invest billions of dollars in the industry causing climate change. It’s time that we as customers bring this contradiction to the attention of our banks, and demonstrate that they have to either pick you, or pick fossil fuels. We’ll email you next week about beginning that engagement with your bank, and following that we’ll launch our much anticipated “NZ Banks and Fossil Fuels” report, which will lay out how much money, and by which banks is invested in fossil fuels, as well as highlight those banks that don’t invest in fossil fuels. This will help you make informed choices about which banks are taking climate change seriously.

We’ve launched a crowdfunding campaign to enable us to sustain our efforts throughout this year.We believe in the power of our crowd – will you chip in and help us exceed our target?

For the record, this is what happened just last weekend for divestment in Aotearoa (check out the photos at the bottom of this email too):

• Christchurch City Holdings (ie the Christchurch City Council) announced it would exclude fossil fuels from its investments, which was celebrated by a picnic party
• The Tertiary Education Union announced it will divest its investment fund of fossil fuels
• We saw a flashmob of “oil executives vs the banks” in Auckland, followed by a talk by business journalist Rod Oram
• Picnic parties against fossil fuels in Matauri Bay, Northland and Hamilton
• Citizens in Dunedin presented their city council with Valentine’s cards encouraging them to finalise their vote to divest.
• While not strictly divestment related, in Wellington we co-hosted Sir Geoffrey Palmer for his talk about ‘New Zealand’s Defective Law on Climate Change’.