CO2 necessary for life, says Greenpeace co-founder

015 One of the co-founders of Greenpeace turned pro-nuclear, Patrick Moore talks about the future of South Africa as a nuclear country. 030308. Picture: Bongiwe Mchunu

015 One of the co-founders of Greenpeace turned pro-nuclear, Patrick Moore talks about the future of South Africa as a nuclear country. 030308. Picture: Bongiwe Mchunu

Published Oct 28, 2015

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When people think they have all the answers, they divide everyone else into those who are with us (the enlightened ones) and those who are against us (the damned). Those that believers hate the most are the black sheep who have left the flock.

In religious terms, they are heretics. Among environmentalists, they are “deniers”. This is a word coined to equate sceptics with those who claim Auschwitz had no gas chambers. It is a brilliant but mendacious piece of propaganda.

Ironically, one prominent “denier” is a founder member of Greenpeace, and one of the first scientists to study ecology (he has a doctorate), which is a branch of the natural sciences that says everything on earth is interconnected – the philosophical cornerstone of early environmentalism.

This man’s environmental credentials are impeccable. He was in that small group of Canadians who campaigned successfully against nuclear bomb tests, who succeeded in ending the barbaric practice of clubbing baby seals to death, who was a Greenpeace member on the Rainbow Warrior when it was bombed and sunk by the French secret service.

He was there when the name Greenpeace was coined, and he was a prime mover in the successful campaign to end whale hunting.

Not exactly the profile of a “denier”, one would think.

What made him anathema was that he left Greenpeace because it was moving to an unscientific path, and as the only member of the board of directors with a science degree, he felt he could not continue. As far as those who remained, his principled decision to leave Greenpeace was tantamount to a cardinal denying the divinity of Christ.

That was in 1986. Greenpeace has since morphed into something like a Californian cult while growing into a rich organisation, on a par with some multinational companies.

‘Eco-Judas’

From its early beginnings when a handful (including him) defied the US government by sailing an old fishing boat into a nuclear exclusion zone off Alaska to stop a hydrogen bomb test, Greenpeace now sails a 3 000 horsepower (HP) ship and a speedboat with 200HP outboard engines.

Environmentalists have attacked this man. He has been called the “Eco-Judas”, a “ well-greased greenwasher”, a “corporate shill”, a “Pinot Grigio wine-sipping, atom-peddling sharpie”, a “flip-flopper and a sell-out”, “the Luke Skywalker who became Darth Vader”, and – in a move that Stalin would have been proud of – Greenpeace removed his name from the list of original members who protested nuclear testing in the Aleutian Islands.

One would think that Patrick Moore (PhD Ecology, University of British Columbia, Canada, the former president of Greenpeace, Canada), was as bad as Hitler. What has he done to deserve such opprobrium from the Green left? Why has he fallen from grace?

One must first realise that by the time he resigned in 1986, Greenpeace had moved far from its small Canadian origins. It had been taken over by a group of Californian eco-activists who threw science out the window and went almost entirely in the direction of anti-business propaganda and spin, becoming brilliant at it, creating new standards of imaginative invective.

Dr Moore’s sins began with his resignation. It was followed by other departures from the Green catechism. He did so in public, the very sphere that Greenpeace felt it owned. He said things like:

“There is no definitive scientific proof, through real-world observation, that carbon dioxide is responsible for any of the slight warming of the global climate that has occurred during the past 300 years, since the peak of the Little Ice Age.

“If there were such a proof through testing and replication, it would have been written down for all to see”. (London, October 15, 2015).

The key phrase here is “through testing and replication”, which is at the core of good science.

His previous Green crimes were saying that the idea that industrial emissions are the dominant influence on climate is simply a hypothesis, and that far from being a poison, carbon dioxide’s presence in the atmosphere is the building block of life. Without it, the Earth would be a dead planet.

Soldiering on

Dr Moore has said that while Greenpeace began as a humanitarian pressure group against nuclear weapons, it has “drifted into a belief that humans are the enemies of the Earth”.

Today, Dr Moore is soldiering on, now on the side of those who see private enterprise as the swiftest way of bringing people out of poverty.

An example is the genetic modification of rice, which has aroused environmentalists to paroxysms of outrage, using a skull and cross bones to scare people off a food that would save millions of children from an early death from vitamin A deficiency.

Dr Moore cares not a jot for ad hominem attacks, however wittily crafted, and often gives as good as he gets.

When Greenpeace shouts about ending our “addiction to oil” he says: “I would not mind so much if Greenpeace rode bicycles to their sailing ships and rowed their little boats into the (oil) rigs to hang organic cotton banners. We did not have an H-bomb on board the boat that sailed on the first Greenpeace campaign against nuclear testing.”

With pronouncements like this, Dr Moore had better beware he does not wind up (in his own words) in a Gulag with a rabid environmentalist as his jailer.

* Keith Bryer is a retired communications consultant.

** The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.

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