Tauranga MP Simon Bridges is starting to get the feeling Greenpeace dislikes him after the organisation launched a campaign to have him removed as Energy and Resources Minister.

‘Call on John Key to sack Simon Bridges' has so far seen more than 12,000 generic letters sent to the Prime Minister calling for the minister's resignation.

The image fronting the Greenpeace campaign.

The attack on his ministerial ability is a reaction to Simon's approval of the third annual block offer for oil and gas exploration that included a Department of Conservation Forest Park in the South Island.

As part of the third offer for oil and gas exploration, Simon made 40 million hectares of sea and one million hectares of land available for the oil and gas industry.

Part of this included New Zealand's largest forest park - the 200,000 hectare Victoria Forest Park in Greymouth - an area Simon admits to not knowing about at the time.

Greenpeace chief policy advisor Nathan Argent is adamant the blunder should lead to Simon being sacked, labelling him 'utterly, eye-wateringly incompetent”.

'He's handed over millions of hectares of New Zealand, including pristine forest, to the oil and gas industry. He either knew that this included hundreds of thousands of hectares of DOC land, or he didn't know. Either way, that is incompetent,” says Nathan.

'In his rush to do the bidding of the oil industry, he's ignoring our own, cutting-edge clean energy industry, which adds yet another layer of incompetency. The clean energy sector could provide tens of thousands of jobs, and give our economy a multi-billion dollar boost. The oil industry cannot come close to matching these figures.”

The webpage, created last week, already has more than 12,400 emails sent to Prime Minister John Key, calling for him to sack his minister.

Speaking from Wellington today, Simon says he gets the feeling Greenpeace don't like him.

'They have put up massive billboards, run cartoons, done this and that and the other thing against me and as I say I'm beginning to wonder if they don't like me,” says Simon.

'It's their absolute right in a democracy to take a position against a Cabinet minister, but obviously I disagree with most of what they are saying. I actually do agree with them that we do need to have a clean green smarter economy.”

The letter sent to the Prime Minister states that New Zealand deserves better and 'Simon be sacked, and the Government cancels handing over our lands and seas to risky drilling and toxic mining”.

It goes on to say Simon dismissing the potential impacts of mining such an area as 'emotive clap-trap” before later admitting he didn't know the conservation area exists is a bad look.

'These are all signs of a minister that's completely out of his depth and totally out of touch with the things that New Zealanders hold dear,” reads the letter.”

Simon does not believe the contentious portfolio attracts a greater divide of supporters and detractors saying he is just doing the job the voters elected him to do.

'To some extent I think it's always a portfolio that's always going to have some politics around it. I think the vast majority of NZ are supportive of us as a country exploring what lies beneath our feet; they just want to know that it's safe and done to best environmental practice.”