The $64Bn Climate Change Race 🏃♂️🌲
This blog was distributed to our first 200+ backers via email.
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Kia ora,
May the 4th be with you! We have just finished out April and an update from the trenches is due for you.
TLDR;
In February the team submitted a proposal to the Westpac, Government Innovation Fund which has a focus on “Financing and incentivising the decarbonisation of Aotearoa”. Unfortunately our application for ~$150,000NZD of funding towards Regenerate NZ didn’t make it to the next stage. It was a shame the fund could not give us feedback on our application but it was a great excercise for the team to continually getting clearer on our aspirations.
We have just rolled over $24,000+ in the Regenerate NZ wallet. We are stoked to see our small but mighty weekly contributions adding up and getting us closer towards our $100k goal we have set.
We have recently started circulating what we call a “soft launch investment pack” to get further feedback on our structure and proposal for all parties. Our mission this month is to consolidate our feedback further from our first test group of experts and then release this document to you all this month.
Our select picks for May 4th reading on all things trees and carbon...
🌲🤑 Is a $64 billion shift coming to the ETS?
You may have seen in the media recently, debate about Carbon Farming using Pine trees and potential lobbying to remove Pinus Radiata from the ETS.
The legendary Sean Weaver at Ekos sums it up well here...
"What the Government's proposing to do would take our sprinters off the field, and put them on the sidelines. Our sprinters are our exotic forests, [and] our long distance runners are our native forests. And actually, we need them both.”
You can dive deeper in this Stuff article that explores the topic more holistically.
Turns out New Zealand is the second highest polluter in the world per capita... 🔥🌲🧊
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released another hair-raising report, this time on Mitigation of Climate Change and lumped NZ along with Australia & Japan as the second highest emitters per capita.
Climate Change minister James Shaw addressed this report on Radio NZ, and no he did not mince his words:
"We are one of the highest emitting countries in the world on a per-capita basis and what that means is we're now in a situation where having essentially fluffed around for three decades the cuts that we need to make over are now far steeper than they would have been…Our country has squandered the past 30 years"
As summarised by Ben Reid, the race is on for New Zealand to..
(1) Transition even more rapidly away from fossil fuels,
(2) Reduce overall energy demand and
(3) Grow more trees / develop direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) technologies which absorb and fix carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at massive, massive scale.
Thanks @BenReid (one of our earliest backers) for enlightening us to the state of NZ’s action on climate change (or lack there of)... You can read more on this topic and other futuristic trends on Bens Substack, it’s a great weekly update!
Have a superb week,
Jonny & Alex
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This blog was distributed to our first 200+ backers via email.
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