WELLINGTON PROTEST: Midland Park, outside Fonterra’s office at 157 Lambton Quay, at 1 pm on Friday 28 May.

New Zealand’s largest company, Fonterra, is the major culprit in New Zealand’s most critical environmental and climate problems.

Fonterra, and its farmers, profit from dumping their pollution and waste, for free, into our atmosphere, water and soil.

This is the cause of worsening climate change, unswimmable rivers and undrinkable waters, along with poor animal welfare, tropical deforestation, loss of amenity and biodiversity, and health risks to Kiwis, from premature and breastfeeding infants, to adults risking gastrointestinal illness, including colorectal cancer.

Put simply, Fonterra is at the centre of a web of destruction caused by too many cows, in the wrong places.

Between 1990 and 2019, dairy cattle numbers increased by 82% nationally, from 3.4 million to 6.3 million. Dairy cattle increased almost tenfold in Canterbury (from 113,000 to 1.2 million).

The thin, dry and stony soils of Canterbury, the Mackenzie Basin and Otago are totally unsuitable for intensive dairying, which exists  only through unsustainable inputs of irrigation water, synthetic nitrogen fertilisers and imported feed such as palm kernel.

Photo: Duncan Brown

Intensive dairying also produces copious quantities of two dangerous climate-changing gases, methane and nitrous oxide, in addition to the carbon dioxide produced by Fonterra’s powdered milk factories, which burn about 500,000 tonnes of coal every year.

The waste water from those factories is dumped onto neighbouring, cow-free, “ghost farms”, and is so polluting that farmers and their neighbours dare not drink from their wells, nor eat from their veggie gardens.

New Zealand’s animal overstocking is so bad, that New Zealand risks having trade barriers imposed on us by more environmentally-aware countries, especially since agriculture remains outside the Emissions Trading Scheme.

Fonterra’s toxic rip-off of New Zealand’s environment and people must stop!

We call on Fonterra and its farmer owners to reduce cow numbers by 50% nationwide, and reduce them to 1990 levels in the worst-affected regions of Canterbury, the Mackenzie Basin and Otago.

We also call on Fonterra to stop burning coal by 2027, not a decade later as it currently proposes.

AUCKLAND PROTEST: Victoria Park, cnr Halsey & Fanshawe St, opposite Fonterra HQ at 109 Fanshawe St, at 3 pm on Friday 28 May.

WELLINGTON PROTEST: Midland Park, outside Fonterra’s office at 157 Lambton Quay, at 1 pm on Friday 28 May.

To join the nationwide protest movement, contact your local elected officials, newspapers and trade unions; post on social media and support groups such as:

Coal Action Network Aotearoa (CANA):  www.coalaction.org.nz

Aotearoa Water Action (AWA): www.aotearoawateraction.org.nz

Extinction Rebellion (XR):  extinctionrebellion.nz/christchurch/water-campaign/

The post Protest Fonterra, New Zealand’s Worst Polluter, this Friday, 28th May 2021 appeared first on Coal Action Network Aotearoa.

Jeanette Fitzsimons trying (and failing) to get arrested at Fonterra’s Clandeboye dairy factory in Canterbury, 2017.

On Wednesday night 4 March we held our fortnightly Zoom call for an hour and a half, a standing CANA meeting for the last ten years. Jeanette was on the call, as usual, her sunburned farmer’s face beaming at us from Pakaraka farm.  24 hours later she was gone.

This blog has taken a while to post: her death took our collective breath away. It’s a long read, but we felt important to set out the important work Jeanette has done on coal.

We have been talking with each other in the days and hours since, and know that her death has motivated all of us with renewed conviction to continue her work, and her (and our) goal for the end of coal in Aotearoa, and no new coal mines.  Keeping the coal in the hole. We have huge shoulders to stand on, a legacy that we have to continue. Not just for Jeanette, of course, but for us and the future generations she cared so much about.

In this blog we attempt to summarise her extensive work with CANA. We will be posting again in the coming days with more personal takes from our team, because we all have our own memories, and stories to tell.  And because she was so dear not only to us but to the wider movement.

When she stepped down from her role as co-leader of the Green Party, the climate activist movement in Aotearoa was Jeanette’s lucky beneficiary: her stated “retirement” goal was to stop coal mines in New Zealand.  I put “retirement” in inverted commas because of course she was anything BUT retired.

When climate scientist Dr James Hansen visited in 2011, Jeanette toured the country with him, reaching out to all her contacts across Aotearoa, tapping into her extensive networks.  Hansen, the man who alerted the US Senate about climate change in 1978,  carried a strong message about the need to act on climate, and the need to stop burning coal as soon as possible.  At that point, with the support of the National government Solid Energy was planning to exploit the dirty lignite coal under fertile Southland farmland, and she was determined to stop it.

Jeanette with climate scientist Prof. James Hansen at the end of the 2011 NZ tour

By the end of the tour, hundreds had signed up to get involved with stopping coal. Being Jeanette, though, she didn’t want to set up a central group that coordinated all the others: she wanted each to have their own autonomy to act as they saw fit. SO typical of Jeanette’s philosophy of inspiring local activism.  [Extra:  Jeanette’s interview with Sustainable Lens during the tour]

It is also a testament to her that she refused to be the main spokesperson for CANA at the beginning: she didn’t want to take the limelight off CANA and onto herself: her image was still very much that of the Green Party and she didn’t want that to undermine CANA.  So she took a back seat, but was very much a driving force behind all our work, mentoring us all.

One of her aims in setting up our coal “action” group was to get arrested. Indeed she told me the only reason she had accepted her NZ Order of Merit was so that this would make an even bigger splash when she chained herself to a bulldozer.  We collectively failed her.

Jeanette was always a step ahead of all of us. Her research skills brought so much credibility to our work: her “can you make steel without coal” paper is still one of our most popular on the website (we are in the process of updating it).

Launching the Jobs Without Coal report.

She led our “Jobs without coal” report (and its update), and went to Blackball to launch it – the CANA call for a “just transition” was picked up far and wide, and her leadership in this area kick-started a national conversation.  She undertook some great research for that paper: going through the census figures and finding that indeed coal did not keep small communities alive: indeed, it was the opposite – she found the communities around coal mines are largely much poorer compared with the national average.

In 2013 Solid Energy was struggling, and as part of its divestment in order to keep itself afloat, it dumped its Southland lignite plans. It limped on, with major layoffs from its mines in the two years preceeding, and the following year Jeanette’s piece in the Dominion Post was prescient, calling for a Just Transition for Solid’s workers.

Our campaign against Bathurst Resources’ plans to mine on the Denniston plateau became our next big focus.  Forest and Bird’s fantastic legal challenges delayed Bathurst’s Denniston plans long enough for them to coincide with the coal price tanking, and while the company managed to clear the “overburden” at the mine, it couldn’t develop the resource, as we predicted, and was itself teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Forest and Bird’s campaign was a national one, and we joined with all the other coal groups in urging the government to step in and stop the mine.

Wahine Toa: Jeanette, Catherine Delahunty and Debs Martin on the Denniston Plateau in 2014. Photo: Pete Lusk

We joined with 350.org and launched a campaign against their bankers: Westpac.  Jeanette was there at our launch outside Westpac’s main branch in Auckland.  (Not arrested). Jeanette also loved a good sticker, and we were very proud of our little Westpac logo-turned-coal-truck ones.

Jeanette at the Westpac campaign launch

Jeanette saw the writing on the wall and started to look at what was keeping the coal industry alive, and Fonterra was in her sights.  If we wanted to stop Bathurst, and the expansion of coal in Aotearoa, we would have to go after its clients, and by far the biggest was Fonterra.

Indeed it was Jeanette’s work that led us to the conclusion that Fonterra burned more coal than Huntly power station – it was our second-largest coal user in the country.  This is now an accepted fact and quoted by many.  (She was wearing her Fonterra Quit Coal T-shirt on the day she died.)

In 2015 Fonterra announced it was planning to develop its own coal mine at Mangatangi – or Mangatawhiri in the Waikato, and Jeanette was out at the weekends with Auckland Coal Action – and meeting with Fonterra to discuss the madness of this scheme.  The protests drove Fonterra to dump the idea as it managed to persuade Solid Energy to re-open the old Rotowaro mine.  We found out about this in March, and Jeanette’s blog announcing it drew ire from Fonterra and Solid Energy who denied such a thing. By September, the company confirmed what we’d announced for them in March.

She took part in a day of action with pamphlets and little bags of woodchips at the big Waikato Fieldays event just outside Hamilton. Again, she wasn’t arrested.

Jeanette at the Fieldays With Auckland coal action. Photo: Mark Taylor, Fairfax.

Of course Jeanette wasn’t just going to focus only on the coal use – she dove in deep, seeking out agricultural economists and other experts and looked at the bigger picture, advocating a reduction in cow numbers, with the solid argument that it would have little economic impact, but a big impact on reducing emissions.

In 2016 Fonterra applied for a consent to build two more coal-fired boilers at its dairy factory at Studholme, in North Otago just outside Waimate.  Jeanette led CANA’s very strong opposition, rallying experts on both the size of dairy herds, and on biomass, and giving our main submission.  We were partially successful” halfway through the hearing, Fonterra reduced its application from two to one boilers – quite a big victory for us.

Our leaflet on the Fonterra coal boiler plans at Waimate, written by Jeanette.

Jeanette was scathing of Fonterra’s statements to the Studholme hearing that it only had enough wood waste to co-fire only 20 percent biomass in each boiler. Her ire was only exacerbated when they reduced their application to one boiler – yet still maintained that number of 20 percent – one would think that would be increased to 40% with only one boiler, right?

At the end of the day: today, we forced Fonterra to first announce it would stop building coal-fired power plants by 2035, then to up that to state it would not build ANY new coal plants from now on.  It has a special page on its website about coal (see my rebuttal of that here), and is now tinkering around the edges of its climate policy to give the impression it is taking a lot of action.  It even managed to get EECA to pay for some of its coal conversion, which outraged Jeanette, EECA’s founder.  She died without having written her promised next letter to Fonterra, but it’s ok, we’ve got this Jeanette.

There is so much else to say about her work with CANA, and so much we have missed out,  such as the campaign against Christchurch Hospital’s planned coal-fired boiler (it’s now building a biomass boiler), the action at Clandeboye dairy factory in 2017, our CANA Summerfests, and the special times we as CANA spent on the farm with her and Harry at our regular hui.

But the Zero Carbon Act does deserve a mention, along with the policies she was advocating around climate change.  We submitted as CANA but Jeanette made her own carefully thought-out submission. She was totally right when she argued that the ZCA would not prevent a single emission: it is merely a framework into which policies must be inserted. She hated the ETS (instead favouring a coal price), and in her last days and weeks was absolutely furious at the government’s latest infrastructure spending announcement that had such a huge focus on roads.  None of us could understand how this had gotten past the new “climate lens” through which all big decisions made by the Government would be viewed, announced by James Shaw during the latest climate talks.

Jeanette always had other projects on the go – all of us were very busy at CANA and with our lives, yet we were only one part of her busy life.  We’d get a little glimpse into it on our fortnightly calls as we did our “round” at the beginning of each call.

She was heavily involved in the Supreme Court case challenging the RMA’s ridiculous clause that ruled out anybody considering a project’s impact on the climate during the consenting process: unfortunately the West Coast Environment Network lost the case, but she never let up on that front.

The demand on her time from across the country was huge. She diligently responded to every single email she received: one thing she is now relieved of is her ongoing battle with her inbox.  She loved hosting the Young Greens at the farm every year and, before she died, had just finished a youtube series for the Greens on the history of the party.

The CANA team at our hui on Pakaraka farm, 2013.

And during all of this she was doing what she loved best – her day-to-day work on the farm with her beloved Harry:  milking the cow every morning, picking chestnuts, making chestnut flour, selling their wares at the Thames market every Saturday morning,  picking olives and making that delicious olive oil, swimming in the gorgeous Kauaeranga River, practising the violin and spending as much time with her grandchildren in Wellington as she could.

This blog barely touches on who she was: her nurturing of others, especially the young, her wisdom, her ideals and ability to think outside the box, her gentle but forceful self.  Suffice to say we at CANA are heartbroken that we have lost our taonga, our wahine toa, our friend.  We will carry on the fight for you, Jeanette.

Haere ki te po, e te wahine whakaaro nui.

Go into the night, wise woman.

The post Jeanette Fitzsimons, the coal campaigner appeared first on Coal Action Network Aotearoa.

Coal Action Network Aotearoa (CANA) today welcomed Fonterra’s commitment to build no new coal plants, a “no brainer” for the climate crisis the world faces. The group has been urging this transition for six years now and says it is glad Fonterra has listened.

However, the group warned the dairy giant should also not turn to gas as an alternative, as it had almost the same carbon footprint as coal.   Any new fossil fuel plant will have an expected life of 40 years, taking us well past the carbon zero target date.   In terms of alternatives, there are large quantities of waste wood from forestry just left to rot which could be put to use on some sites.

CANA protest outside Fonterra’s Clandeboye plant in mid-Canterbury, 2017.

Fonterra vies with Huntly power station as the country’s second-largest coal user, burning upwards of 534,000 tonnes of coal a year (these are 2015 figures).

“With this commitment to get out of coal, Fonterra has joined other members of the dairy industry, and we welcome it,” said Cindy Baxter of CANA. “Given the climate crisis it is time to stop drying milk with coal, something that has appalled visitors to the country – but they cannot make the switch to gas”

Fonterra’s coal use had possibly peaked anyway, according to CANA.  It has only been operating its Lichfield milk drying plant (powered by coal) for half the time in the last year, and while it had consent for a new coal-fired boiler at Studholme, outside Waimate in the South Island, there wasn’t enough milk being produced in the region to warrant the cost of building it.

This week the Interim Climate Change Commission recommended that the country phase out the use of fossil fuels from process heat,  starting with coal.

“What we now need from Fonterra is transparency about its coal use, and a clear phase-out plan, said CANA member Jeanette Fitzsimons.

“We need to know which plants will be converted when, using wood waste rather than electricity wherever this is available.  The coal industry needs this clarity, so it can plan a Just Transition away from this dirty fuel.”

Coal Action Network has been campaigning against Fonterra’s coal use for at least six years, after it found that Bathurst Mining was mining domestic coal to sell to the dairy giant to keep itself afloat after plummeting coking coal prices made it uneconomic to mine the Denniston Plateau on the West Coast.

Alongside the rise in dairy production has been the rise in the number of coal mines across New Zealand – in 2015 Fonterra persuaded Solid Energy to re-open the Kopako mine in the Waikato to supply it with coal.  In the South Island Bathurst has re-opened the Canterbury Coal mine at Glentunnel and expanded its operations at Nightcaps in Southland.

As a result of the Fonterra and other dairy company contracts, Bathurst scraped through the coal price crisis and was able, with Talley’s, to stump up the cash to buy out Solid Energy’s West Coast Assets.

“It’s time Fonterra stopped propping up New Zealand’s coal industry,” said Fitzsimons.

For further background information on Fonterra and coal, see two recent blogs:
Fonterra puts coal on a spin cycle

Fonterra, a useful step forward?

The post Fonterra’s halt on new coal welcome: don’t dash for gas appeared first on Coal Action Network Aotearoa.

In April,  the media reported that Fonterra has carried out a trial of burning 100% waste wood in one of its boilers at Te Awamutu, a large coal-fired milk drying plant in the Waikato. (The rest of the boilers at that plant run on gas.)

We very much hope that this is the start of Fonterra delivering on their promises to reduce their fossil fuel use in meaningful ways.

For some six years CANA has been challenging Fonterra to replace the coal in its milk drying plants with renewables, especially with waste wood which is abundant in the forestry industry, much of it left to rot on skid sites after logging. The dairy industry is the second largest user of coal in this country and most of that is Fonterra. But our efforts over the years have been answered by claims that it isn’t technically possible; then that it is too expensive; then that there isn’t enough waste wood, none of this accompanied by any numbers.

Three years ago CANA met at his request with Robert Spurway, Chief Operating Officer, Global Operations, who reports directly to the CEO, and his Fonterra colleagues.. We were hopeful of finding some common ground, but there seemed to be none.  He repeated that Fonterra’s growth was paramount. We replied that the climate we leave to our children is paramount for us. I met with the late John Wilson, chair of their Shareholders’ Council, and put our case to him. He replied that his farmer shareholders just wouldn’t accept our suggestions.

As climate change became front and centre of public debate, Fonterra announced it would convert its smallest plant at Stirling to electricity.

Meanwhile the company had sought and received consent for a huge new drying plant at Studholme which would burn “up to” 20% wood in a mix with coal. “Up to” means they could use anything from 0% to 20%. They refused to answer our questions – or release advice – about what information they had  on how much wood there was within a reasonable distance of the plant (up to 100 km is the usual cut off), and would not release their “request for proposals” they issued to the wood industry.

We suspect Fonterra  only asked for quotes for 20%. Any benefit from that wood would have been swamped by the huge increase in their coal burn in two very large boilers. We remain confused about why, when they cut the boilers down from two to one, the remaining boiler couldn’t co-fire with 40% biomass, if, as they said at the hearing,  availability of wood was the problem.

Next, Fonterra announced it would reduce emissions at its  tiny Brightwater plant near Nelson, co-firing its coal boiler with wood (funded by the taxpayer). CANA has had extensive discussions with engineers who design and work with wood fired boilers and we are told that co-firing is an inefficient and not very clean burning option. Boilers work best when they are designed for a particular fuel and are fed that consistently. They don’t perform well on mixes, particularly if the mix is changed according to prices at the time.

That the company managed to get precious EECA funding for this conversion is extraordinary. What’s more disappointing is the fact that this plant is right in the middle of Nelson’s horticultural area and in a forestry region: a biomass bonanza in terms of availability.

CANA has been in email discussion with Fonterra’s Carolyn Mortland, Fonterra’s Director of Sustainability, who says the newly-converted boiler at  Te Awamutu is 43MW – much larger than anything else they have attempted, and will be 100% run on wood pellets.

Pellets were chosen rather than the much cheaper wood chip or green waste because Fonterra doesn’t have the capital to buy a new, purpose-built boiler and are converting an existing coal boiler. This means  they must keep the fuel very dry to get the high temperatures they need. So: a very high running cost boiler, but minimising the capital cost of the conversion. (Fonterra has always struggled with the requirement to pay out most of its earnings to the shareholder farmers in the milk price. It therefore has little in the way of retained earnings, as well as very high debt so can’t borrow the capital it would need to finance a new high quality boiler.)

Wood pellets being used by Fonterra instead of coal.

Pellets also have a very high embedded energy cost, from grinding, compression, drying and transport.

We enquired whether the plant could revert to running on coal if that was the cheapest option. We are told that would take a re-conversion of the hardware – possible but not fast enough to change from day to day. So it seems we can assume that boiler will run 100% on wood, which is good news and a step in the right direction.

But there won’t be sufficient pellets for Fonterra to entirely “Quit Coal”, which is our ask of the company in the face of the climate crisis..   

Fonterra has promised a 30% cut in emissions by 2030 and net zero by 2050.   For that to happen, it needs to do several things:

• The Fonterra Board needs to make the decision to never build the huge coal-fired Studholme plant, consented but not constructed, and to never build any more coal boilers at all. Fonterra’s commitment at the moment is to build no new coil boilers from 2030.
• instead, Fonterra should focus on less volume and higher value milk products
• Improve its financial management to the point where a bank will lend the company  enough to replace its oldest boilers with new ones designed to run cleanly on any kind of biomass waste, much cheaper in the long run, with no risk of insufficient fuel;
• Support their farmer suppliers to reduce cow numbers by 20%, as some already have, leading to more milk production per cow, healthier animals, lower greenhouse gases, and higher profits.

We would like to see a schedule of proposed plant conversions and replacements, starting obviously with the oldest and least efficient, and eventually including their gas fired plant, leading to carbon zero in 2050. It is a very big ask, but that is NZ policy now, and essential to get the climate on a safe track.

Replacing 43 MW of coal (about half the size of the Darfield plant and much bigger than Stirling and Brightwater combined) with 100% wood is not trivial, but there is still a long way to go.

In terms of quitting coal, Fonterra is 8% down, 92% to go. CANA looks forward to welcoming the next step along this path – soon.

The post Fonterra: a useful step forward? appeared first on Coal Action Network Aotearoa.