July 31, 2019
Austrian oil explorer gets poster pressure
The pressure is coming on Austrian oil giant OMV, which is drilling off Taranaki and is soon to move its rig to drill another 10 exploratory wells off Otago.
Posters have gone up around the country calling for it to stop its activities and leave.
Greenpeace campaigner says OMV, which bought the New Zealand assets and licenses of Shell, is one of 100 companies responsible for over 70 percent of climate emissions.
He says while people try to argue that fossil fuels are still an essential part of the energy mix, in large part that's because companies like OMV have spent the past 30 years denying their own science about climate change and funding junk science and lobbying to cloud the issue.
"We know who these companies are so we need to put the heat on them. They are the villains in this piece. They are the ones who have kept us in the situation we are in and they are the ones we need to discredit and change the power structure so they don't decide our future, the people decide our future, and we make sure it is a clean energy future," Mr Abel says.
He says environmentalists and iwi have chased the other oil explorers out of Aotearoa, and OMV is the last one left.
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