Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore is hitting back at environmentalists he believes are using “scare tactics” to convince people the world is on the verge of collapse.
In his new book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist, Moore traces his “green” roots back to the founding of Greenpeace and explains why extremist and irrational policies caused him to abandoned the organization in the 1980s in favour of a science-based approach to environmentalism.
In a recent interview with Business in Vancouver, Moore, who was born and raised on the West Coast, sounded off on today’s environmentalists, the importance of the forest industry and global warming, which he thinks is a ploy.
I wanted to provide for people the alternative interpretation of many of these environmental issues we are bombarded with today.
I think the mainstream environmental movement went off the rails on a lot of issues, particularly through the 1980s when the extremist element in the movement emerged, and when I believe science and logic were abandoned.
Well there is a spectrum, of course. Greenpeace is not the most radical fringe because they are peaceful, as their name implies, but many of their policies are on the extreme fringe. I thought environmentalism was about “renewable,” or at least that was a big part of it. So when you really analyze it and you look at what they’re for and what they’re against it’s insane.
One the one hand they’re saying we have to stop using fossil fuels; on the other hand they’re against nuclear power. These illogical and contradictory aspects are what make it very hard for industry to deal with them in any kind of rational way. I think a lot of these campaigns are basically activist agendas; they don’t really have anything to do with benefitting the environment. The movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that have more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalization than anything to do with science or ecology.
The forestry industry has gotten a pretty bad rap for past environmental policies. You’re in favour of it. Why?
The forest industry did need to reform just like all industries did coming out of the ’60s and ’70s. As awareness of the environment came into being and as people realized it was important to take the environment into account, it became necessary for the forest industry to reform itself, which it did through the 1990s. But the activists behaved as though the solution was to ban forestry. They’re very good at banning, but they’re not very good at reforms, which balance the need for wood and renewable materials and energy with the need to protect the values of the forest and biodiversity. Forestry is essential to civilization; it has been since the beginning. Wood is essential for construction. Whereas steel and concrete have to be made in factories with huge inputs of fossil fuel energy, wood is made in a factory called the forest by solar power.
Hydroelectric is the most desirable form of electrical energy, but personally I would rather see one Site C than 20 run-of-river projects. I think hydro is wonderful, and I don’t think it’s going to destroy the ecosystem.
Well, we have this carbon tax, right? Only we’re shipping coal and gas all over the place; we’re mining huge amounts of it. We’re importing $3 billion of oil from Alberta. It’s just so insane that people can’t see how illogical this situation is, and yet we’re banning uranium mining but it’s OK to mine coal and gas in a province that has a carbon tax. So the carbon tax ends up being window dressing.
Oh, pretty calm actually. Greenpeace keeps trying to convince people that I wasn’t a co-founder of Greenpeace, but the history seems to be pretty clear on that. When I was working with the Forest Alliance, some of them said, “Patrick Moore is trading on his history with Greenpeace,” as if I should sort of expunge that 15 years of my life. But I said, “No, actually you’re the ones who are trading on my history in Greenpeace,” because when these people joined Greenpeace it had already been built. When I left it was because I saw people who had no science taking the organization in directions that were just plain wrong.
Yes. We should be paying less attention to their scare campaigns, and we should be looking at these things in a much more sober, scientific and logical light. The one area where science has really gone wingding is on the climate change subject.
Now, it’s becoming clear that we’ve been manipulated by the scientists. The so-called climate scientists have become activists in droves. But that’s all going to come down like a house of cards. If I could make one prediction that would be it: that the general public is becoming more and more skeptical of this scenario of doom and gloom, that we’re all going to fry and the sea level is going to come up and drown us, Al Gore’s story, you know? This thing isn’t going to happen. It was never going to happen. The climate has always been changing.