Oops! Is This Green Math?

New Zealand's Green Party issued a press statement attacking any expansion of mining in New Zealand. In their press release they said:

It was reported by Radio New Zealand this morning that Cabinet will consider a mining proposal on Monday. This was going to lifting (sic.) mining protection from half a billion hectares of land with high conservation value, but would now only propose lifting protection from around 7,000 hectares.

Of course they meant to say "was going to lift mining protection" but the grammar aside (I won't through rocks from my glass house) they did protest removing "protection" from "half a billion hectares of land."

One hundred hectares are one square kilometer. Half a billion hectares, or 500,000,000 hectares is equal to about 1.9 million square miles. The problem with the Green Party math is that New Zealand is only around 103,000 square miles in size in total. It sounds to me as if the Green Party was tutored in math by the IPCC.