New Zealand’s transport system relies on fossil fuels. The technologies that heat our homes and businesses aren’t much better. What will it take to transition them towards zero-carbon alternatives? Dr. Richard Meade from Cognitus Economic Insight has tackled the question of Achieving a Timely, Efficient, Equitable and Orderly Transition to Net-Zero Emissions for Transport and Heating in New Zealand, a discussion document commissioned by Vector, Powerco, and First Gas.

A teaser: There are roles in this transition for fossil fuel incumbents and for infrastructure monopolies. Dr. Meade speaks with Ross Inglis on ThisClimate Business.

The job of transitioning the primary sector from cows to plants will be a long but necessary journey. So if you were looking for someone to show the way, you’d do worse than Jade Grey. He’s managed a farm and a supermarket butchery ran a meat processing plant in China, and launched a chain of pizza stores in Beijing called Gung Ho! Pizza, which was China's first B Corp certified Food and Beverage company.

Now Jade and his family are back in New Zealand to launch Off-Piste Provisions, a plant-based food start-up dedicated to making Aotearoa as famous for its plant-protein as it is for meat. His first product is plant-based beef jerky and he joins me now to chew the um, fat. This interview first appeared on Vincent’s other podcast The Feed NZ – a podcast all about the future of food.

Every year, New Zealanders drive 35 billion kilometres by car – the equivalent of Earth to Mars and back 325 times. Māori and Pasifika miss out far more than other groups on visiting GPs because of lack of transport.

Transport accounts for 43% of New Zealand's carbon dioxide emissions, and more than half of these come from private vehicles. This country’s transport system has problems. Finding solutions to them was the task of Te Ara Matatika, or The Fair Path, a report released in November by the Helen Clark Foundation and consultancy WSP.

We asked author Holly Walker to explain how we can transition to an equitable and low-carbon transport system.

There’s a thing called the SIN List. Standing for Substitute It Now, the list identifies the chemicals in our textiles, furniture, food, and daily life that are slowly poisoning us, killing our bodies and environment.

Replacing that list with nature-based alternatives is the mission of Humblebee, the ambitious biotech startup of Veronica Harwood Stevenson. You may have heard of Humblebee, sometimes described as one of NZ’s hottest biotech start-ups. Now fives years into the journey the Wellington company is trying to replicate a cellophane-like substance found in bees' nests to create a harmless bioplastic.

Humblebee has scored some wins. It’s sequenced the protein in question, poised to manufacture its synthetic alternative, and in the throes of a $13m capital raise. Vincent caught up with Veronica to discuss biology, bees bums, and babies.

I speak with Dr Terri-Ann Berry, Associate Professor at Auckland’s Unitec and the co-founder of the Environmental Solutions Research Centre and the aptly named Sustainable Construction Avengers.

Each year, the construction and demolition industry creates 1.7 million tonnes of waste – making up 60% of total landfill. So much of that waste is recoverable, recyclable, and unnecessary. No one cares more about solving that problem than Dr Terri-Ann Berry, Associate Professor at Auckland’s Unitec and the co-founder of the Environmental Solutions Research Centre and the aptly named Sustainable Construction Avengers. The centre works with students, industry, and scientists to tackle waste at its source and solve intractable problems such as the mounting pile of plastic that comes from construction sites.

This week Vincent is joined by Professor Dave Frame, Director of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute (CCRI) at Victoria University and a lead author on the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is the third part of our series on IPCC report, so Vincent asked if Dave could give us an insider’s view of how the IPCC works, on the science of warming and the role of methane in global heating a topic of huge importance to NZ. 

We’d be hard-pressed to find someone more qualified. Dave has a background in physics, philosophy, and policy. Previous posts have included research positions at the University of Oxford's Departments of Physics and Geography, and as Deputy Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. He has also worked at the New Zealand Treasury, and served on secondment at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Dave Frame Profile | Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington (wgtn.ac.nz)

Reports — IPCC

In more than 150 cities around the world, Covid 19 has been what you might call a shot in the arm for walking and cycling. To encourage social distancing, they added cycleways, extended footpaths and replaced parking spots with outdoor seating. What did New Zealand do? For the answer, we spoke to researcher Dr Kirsty Wild, co-author of a Waka Kotahi report into streetscape reallocation in this country as a response to the pandemic.

Buildings are responsible for around 20 percent of New Zealand’s carbon footprint. Which makes the building sector a critical part of the ambition to be  net-zero by 2050. And yet our homes are notoriously damp, cold, and energy inefficient. And get this, the construction sector emits the equivalent of one million cars on the road every year. Who knew? Andrew Eagles does. The chief executive of the NZ Green Building Council spoke to Vincent about what’s going wrong and what’s right in the built environment.

Olivia Wannan is one of a handful of New Zealand journalists to attend COP26 in Glasgow, rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful to watch as the world’s climate policy is argued and hopefully agreed to. Oliva is a climate reporter for Stuff.co.nz and she joined Vincent on the close of day five to talk about protestors, methane, and Indonesian reticence.

If you think you're seeing more e-bikes on the roads, you're not wrong. In New Zealand, their sales are soaring. But it wasn't always this way; the e-bike revolution started with motivated people and, in this country, one of the early movers was Mike Tritt, a former Greenpeace staffer who founded the retail chain Electrify NZ. Mike talked with co-host Ross Inglis about the business of e-bikes and what needs to happen next in terms of policy and infrastructure.