There’s a lot of talk about the benefits of moving to a green, sustainable economy but details on what that looks like in practice in New Zealand are often frustratingly thin. Greenpeace is releasing a report – The Future is Here – that puts meat on the bones. The main thing is getting us off expensive, polluting, imported oil and on to clean, local energy.
We spend over $8 billion a year – nearly our whole current deficit – importing climate-changing causing fossil fuels. The ever-rising cost of oil means we’re now spending nearly triple the amount on imports that we were a decade ago for the same amount of stuff.
Replacing these with local, clean energy saves the environment, saves us money, and creates jobs here – 27,000 by Greenpeace’s reckoning. It’ll require government investment in the infrastructure – particularly in a low-carbon transport system. But that’s got to be better than National’s ‘plan’, which lost us 30,000jobs in the last year alone.
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