Greenpeace drop out speaks out

In the lobby of a hotel across the street from the Caesar Chavez Memorial Park in Sacramento, California, the co-founder of Greenpeace told me that he dropped out of the group several years ago because to stay in it, he had to abandon science and logic for misinformation, sensationalism and fear.

Dr. Patrick Moore is today the Chairman and Chief Scientists of Green Spirit Strategies Limited in Vancouver, British Columbia – a group he founded in 1991 to develop an environmental policy based on science and logic.

Moore spent 15 years in leadership of Greenpeace after helping to found the group in 1971. The obvious question and the first I asked, was “How do you go from Greenpeace to where you are today, in support of genetically modified food, believing that we are not in a climate change crisis, and proclaiming that wind and solar energy don’t make sense.”

Dr. Moore told me that when he left Greenpeace, those issues did not yet exist.

“I had been involved in a number of issues,” he said. “To stop nuclear war, to save the whales, to reduce the amount of toxic waste we were putting into the air and water, endangered species, and many other campaigns.”

Moore received his PhD in Ecology back in the day, he said, when that word wasn’t even well known. His fellow directors at Greenpeace had no science education like he did. Moore told me,” They didn’t seem to think that mattered very much and started taking us in directions I couldn’t support. I had no choice but to leave Greenpeace.”

Dr. Moore said he saw the writing on the wall, and since he left, they have adopted many positions with which he does not agree.

“I don’t think they are on the right track. I don’t think they have the right philosophy. I don’t think they have the right analysis,” he said. “I think they have fallen into the trap of thinking that human beings are some kind of cancer on the earth that we’d be better off without.”

Moore said because Greenpeace cannot just come out and say human beings are a cancer on the earth, they have to work around that, so end up end up putting proposals forward that he believes will completely cripple our civilization.

“Proposals,” he said, “that will reduce the ability to improve our nutrition and health care; proposals that will take us away from renewable things. They are opposed to forestry and trees are a renewable resource.”

I told Dr. Moore he didn’t sound at all like the environmental wacko I had expected him to be.

“To me,” he said, “common sense is a common term for logic and using science to inform us about what the facts are and then using logic to come to conclusions about what our actions should be – you would think it would be easier than it is. But it is clouded by so many agendas and ideologies and the environmental movement itself has almost become like a religion now based on belief rather than on facts.”

Regarding Greenpeace, he said, “I just think they’ve got it wrong on a whole bunch of fronts.”