I wish I could tell them that yes, it came close, but we did save the Denniston Plateau. I wish I could say to my grandkids that, looking back, by 2013 the tide was turning. Maybe it was the movement to divest from fossil fuels that clinched it, as Bill McKibben’s 350 campaign began to grow that year from a little ripple to a wave, linking with the climate movements sprouting like so many connected gas wells across the landscape, across the world, rolling together into a tsunami that even reached New Zealand’s West Coast – at about the same time as the beautiful Denniston Plateau was abandoned to its fate by the highest court in our land.

Maybe the tanking of the coal price helped clinch it, as Solid Energy’s 2013 financial report revealed the full extent of the brutal Hand of the Market on the lives of workers. And maybe, the unfortunate consequence of egotistical power fuelled by an ideologically blinded government, some people just got too greedy.

Or maybe we finally got mad enough.

There was a feeling, I’d tell my grandkids if I could, that we were on the edge of a turning, a wind change, of one of those moments where history is made. It was the end of coal, coming to pass in the nick of time to save the planet.

In my favourite dream I’d say to them, yes, I was there yelling my heart out at the 2013 Wellington Petroleum Summit, calling for climate justice, for them to leave some world for you. Back then, those men in their ill-fitting suits thought they had it all. They, in their striped shirts, spotted ties and corporate cabs. They, with their faces set to studious indifference towards the brightly painted truth, dancing before their eyes on placards and banners across the fence.

We were starting to get mad enough to act, I’d tell my grandkids. They were selling off our power companies from under us. They spied on us, arrested us, tried to silence us. They turned our own lawmakers and lawkeepers into enemies of the future. They auctioned off our oceans as if they were lifeless commodities. They drilled, mined and fracked even as record floods and droughts hit their precious GDP square in the guts.

Then they got ready to dig up the Denniston Plateau, with its precious sandstone pavements, giant snails and tiny trees, for coal – yes, even in 2013 – coal, the most polluting fossil fuel of them all. In those days workers still clung to the hollow promises of out-of-town benefactors and dispatchers of their fortunes. They needed jobs and couldn’t see beyond coal; that only beyond coal would they control their own destinies.

We hadn’t yet begun driving the corporate fat cats and their backers off our precious lands and oceans.

This is what I wish I could tell them next: that’s when we got mad enough, I’d say. We rose up. We “got free” as the Greenpeace campaign urged us back then. “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty” said Dr Ranginui Walker. We got organised and we resisted.

We went to Denniston. We went out onto the oceans. On the farms we locked our gates. In the cities we occupied their stuffy offices. We camped outside parliament and made a ruckus. We made them listen. We want future, we said, and we’ve had enough of you being in charge. There’s no more time to waste.

We should have moved much sooner. We wasted so much time, and that is unforgivable. But – in my favourite dream I’ll say to my grandkids: we saved Denniston for you.

The post What’ll I tell the grandkids, thirty years from now? appeared first on Coal Action Network Aotearoa.

My granddaughter and I and her parents will be on the steps of Parliament for two afternoons, starting on Wednesday.

On Thursday 1 March from 12 noon until about 2pm, we hope to be joined there by many other grandparents and grandchildren, also great-aunts and –uncles and other mature New Zealanders – “G-Force”, and all those who would like the opportunity to protest against our continuing slide towards runaway climate change.

For almost the first time, the human race has the power to extinguish our planet’s capacity to support life. All we have to do to accomplish this ultimate catastrophe, is to continue to burn all the world’s coal reserves. According to a recent study, this would result in global temperature rising at least 15 degrees Centigrade!!.

The authors of this study conclude that we are not going to “run out” of fossil fuels; long before then, we will run out of liveable planet.

As “props” we will have a large blue ball, painted to represent planet Earth, with its green and tawny land masses and its ice caps. And a sign saying “Too Precious to Fry”. And a few other signs, many of them relating to coal, e.g. “Save the Climate / No New Coal!”.

Those joining us, feel free to bring your own signs. We will gather under a banner saying “We Care What Sort Of World Our Grandchildren Inherit!”

We are hoping that we will hear briefly from Green MP Gareth Hughes, and from Dr Martin Manning of Victoria University’s Climate Change Research Institute.

It would be great if Wellington people can go along and support Jill and other members of G-Force at Thursday lunchtime.

The post G-Force Against Climate Change – Demo On The Steps Of Parliament appeared first on Coal Action Network Aotearoa.