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ZeroNOW Launch Success

Tuesday 26 January 2010, 8:54AM

By ZeroNOW

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PALMERSTON NORTH

Wellington Anniversary Day was one out of the book. After two days of long weekend wind and rain, finally on Anniversary Day Monday, the clouds cleared and the sun shone. It made for an ideal day to the launch the ZeroNOW initiative at Te Manawa in Palmerston North.

“ZeroNOW is about what is being done now to address carbon gas emissions and our dependence on fossil fuels,” explains Jon Hogan, one of the organisers of the ZeroNOW initiative.

“If everybody, every business, every organisation, every school, every club and every household, did their bit to save even a small percentage, and they did the same again next year, then again the year after that. By 2020, we’ll be well ahead of any of the percentages discussed in Copenhagen, and it won’t have cost us a cent in ETS schemes and taxes.”

While the world’s quickest electric motorcycle, Killacycle, may have been “the star” attraction, there were quite a few exhibits demonstrating the work being done in the field of alternative and renewable resource energy in New Zealand. Bicycles powered by obsolete lap-top computer batteries to a silent running electric Mini. Plenty to stimulate discussion amongst the many blokes who’d taken time out from their sheds.

Although Killacycle was a stationery display in Palmerston North, it sat alongside a nitro burning monster and holder of the New Zealand Drag Bike Record. On the final weekend of January, these two machines will line up on the drag strip at Meremere at the 4 and Rotary National Meet, to contest which is the faster over the quarter mile.