https://coalaction.org.nz/network/350/honey-i-shrunk-the-board Keep the Coal in the Hole! Mon, 17 Nov 2014 21:35:11 +0000 hourly 1 https://coalaction.org.nz/network/350/honey-i-shrunk-the-board#comment-111 Mon, 17 Nov 2014 21:35:11 +0000 http://coalactionnetworkaotearoa.wordpress.com/?p=18198#comment-111 What a fine example of witty creative non-violent protest!
On 11th Nov I made an oral submission to back up my earlier written one that gave me the right to be heard by the DMC of the EPA’s OMV offshore oil & gas mining – 80km off South Taranaki – under the new investor-friendly EEZ & CS (Environmental Protection) Act. What a learning experience in weasel words! In arguing that the “adaptive management” mandated by the Act should be instead a Precautionary Approach given the threat to a “critically endangered species”(www.mauisdolphin.com), I was advised ” Mauis Dolphin is not a species. It is a sub-species. It is a population”. Because climate change is explicitly written out of the Act, I argued from an “evaluative” rather than an “assessment of the (operational) technicalities. So I framed my submission on ethical change in the “Social Licence to Operate”, pointing to the social facts of the divestment campaign. The OMV Maari decision is a Mauis Dolphin decision and a policy decision, given the weasel draughting of the EEZ (2012) Act, designed to pre-empt challenge of the privilege of the Exclusive Economic Zone property right on the basis of the biodiversity protection that under International Convention of law of the sea demands as a condition of the EEZ privilege.

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