Disillusioned with the organisation he helped found, Patrick Moore is now a vocal opponent of much of the work done by Greenpeace.
SINCE it seems Australians are to have the Greens-Gillard carbon dioxide gas tax imposed on them, it might help to know the origins of the global campaign that’s targeted this essential atmospheric plant nutrient.
As a starting point State Scene examines and highlights recent remarks by Patrick Moore, co-founder and leader of the international campaigning group Greenpeace, and follows this by adding (late) Berkeley University professor Aaron Wildavsky’s assessment of the uniqueness of the global anti-CO2 crusade.
Writing in The Vancouver Sun of January 7, Moore said: “You could call me a Greenpeace dropout, but that is not an entirely accurate description of how or why I left the organisation 15 years after I helped create it.
“I’d like to think Greenpeace left me, rather than the other way around, but that too is not entirely correct.”
He said he and Greenpeace had divergent evolutions.
“I became a sensible environmentalist; Greenpeace became increasingly senseless as it adopted an agenda that is anti-science, anti-business, and downright anti-human,” Moore said.
“The last half of the 20th century was marked by revulsion for war and a new awareness of the environment.
“Beatniks, hippies, eco-freaks and greens in their turn fashioned a new philosophy that embraced peace and ecology as the over-arching principles of a civilised world.
“Spurred by more than 30 years of ever-present fear that global nuclear holocaust would wipe out humanity and much of the living world, we led a new war – a war to save the earth.
“I’ve had the good fortune to be a general in that war.”
Moore claimed victory in a range of “battles” he’d launched, including anti-nuclear testing, moves against culling baby seals, anti-whaling, blocking construction of nuclear plants, and opposing driftnet fishing, to name some.
“Our campaigns were highly successful at changing opinions and energising the public. Through the power of the media and the people, we were steadily influencing government policies and forcing industries to clean up their acts,” he said.
But something unexpected then occurred, something that led Moore to having doubts.
“By 1982, Greenpeace had grown into a full-fledged international movement with offices and staff around the world,” he added.
“We were bringing in $100 million a year in donations and half a dozen campaigns were occurring simultaneously.
“During the early 1980s two things happened that altered my perspective on the direction in which environmentalism, in general, and Greenpeace, in particular, were heading.
“The first was my introduction to the concept of sustainable development at a global meeting of environmentalists.
“The second was the adoption of policies by my fellow Greenpeacers that I considered extremist and irrational.
“These two developments would set the stage for my transformation from a radical activist into a sensible environmentalist.”
In 1982, Moore attended the United Nations Nairobi Conference celebrating the 10th anniversary of the first UN Environment Conference, where he helped draw up a “statement of our collective goals for environmental protection”.
While doing so he noted two “nearly opposing views” emerging.
There was what he describes as “the anti-development perspective of environmentalists” emanating primarily from rich countries like Canada and the US, and “the pro-development perspective of environmentalists” primarily from poorer nations.
He increasingly witnessed the anti-development faction’s uncompromising stances.
“Some activists simply couldn’t make the transition from confrontation to consensus; it was as if they needed a common enemy,” Moore said.
“The collapse of world communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s added to the trend toward extremism.
“The Cold War was over and the peace movement was largely disbanded.
“The peace movement had been mainly Western-based and anti-American in its leanings.
“Many of its members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas.
“To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation than with science or ecology.
“I remember visiting our Toronto office in 1985 and being surprised at how many of the new recruits were sporting army fatigues and red berets in support of the Sandinistas.
“I don’t blame them for seizing the opportunity.
“There was a lot of power in our movement and they saw how it could be turned to serve their agendas of revolutionary change and class struggle.
“But I differed with them because they were extremists who confused the issues and the public about the nature of our environment and our place in it. To this day they use the word ‘industry’ as if it were a swear word.
“The same goes for multinational, chemical, genetic, corporate, globalisation, and a host of other perfectly useful terms.
“Their propaganda campaign is aimed at promoting an ideology that I believe would be extremely damaging to both civilisation and the environment.”
Moore today abides by a range of tenets, including opposition to the global heating panic promoted by ever more ardent and powerful bureaucrats and environmentalist crusaders.
“There’s no cause for alarm about climate change,” Moore says.
“The climate is always changing. Some of the proposed ‘solutions’ would be far worse than any imaginable consequence of global warming, which will likely be mostly positive.
“Cooling is what we should fear.”
Interestingly, Canada’s wheat-growing provinces have experienced three years of lingering snows and they, like Australia, are a major international grain supplier.
Fields remain waterlogged for months.
If this continues, grain prices worldwide will continue rising.
Liberal Senator Nick Minchin recently focused on this crucial question.
“There are many, many scientists who actually think we could be entering a cooling phase, and I for one think that’s more than likely,” Senator Minchin told Sky News.
“We have stabilised in terms of world temperatures.
“There is a very powerful natural cycle at work, and if anything we’re more likely to see a tendency down in global temperatures, rather than up.”
It’s worth noting that those who’ll suffer first and most as food stocks slump will be northern Africans and Middle Easterners, not the coercive and wealthy Greens of Canada and Australia.
Price hikes of food that’s already highly subsidised is sparking much of the rioting in the Islamic world.
Don’t, however, expect that to dissuade climate heating hoax promoters, who seek agendas they want imposed legislatively and by boosting taxes.
For as Professor Wildavsky said, they’ve found a seemingly winning issue to help impose their coercive aspirations.
“Global warming is the mother of environmental scares,” he said.
“In the scope of its consequences for life on planet Earth and the immense size of its remedies, global warming dwarfs all the environmental and safety scares of our time put together.
“Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of realising the environmentalist’s dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favour of smaller populations eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.”
That certainly encapsulates Greens Senator Bob Brown’s growing parliamentary team’s vision that’s got so much sway over one-time Socialist Forum convenor and now prime minister, Julia Gillard, who so willingly dances to a tune Patrick Moore discarded decades ago.
