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promoted primary 619 on longevity

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819 youtube star?!

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baaaacck

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In Penn & Teller's first season of their documentary television show, Bullshit, Hill was interviewed and her motivations were questioned by Penn Jillette and Patrick Moore, a former founder of Greenpeace.[22]

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mma 4 24

google is profiting from PragerU’s climate denial ads on its search engine

Special PROGRAMSCLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ILANA BERGER

PUBLISHED 04/16/24

Google is allowing right-wing propaganda organization PragerU to run climate-denying ads on its search engine even though the tech giant previously committed to prohibiting ads that feature claims that contradict the “well-established scientific consensus” about climate change.

In 2021, Google updated its ad policy to prohibit ads for or on content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”

Yet, nearly three years later, Google is still profiting from ads that contain climate change misinformation.

When Media Matters searched for phrases like “climate change,” “global warming,” and “climate crisis” on Google Search, the search engine returned PragerU ads that promised its website reveals “the truth about climate change” — or what it calls the “fake climate catastrophe.”

“Climate policies are causing inflation and keeping poor countries trapped in poverty,” the ad-description text read. “Get the facts with our Climate Change and Energy playlist.”

[ggl screenshots see monetize ads]

When clicked on, the ads lead Google Search users to a video on PragerU’s website titled “Do We Have to Destroy the Earth to Save It?” In the video, anti-renewable energy activist Michael Shellenberger tells the audience that “pushing the planet toward wind and solar energy would actually cause more harm to the environment than good.” (While all extractive processes have environmental impacts, scientists agree that the consequencesof burning fossil fuels on the climate along with the declining costs of both renewable energy and renewable-energy storage make those cleaner technologies essential to a sustainable energy future.)

Shellenberger is known for spreading misinformation about wind energy and downplaying the impacts of climate change. In 2020, Shellenberger wrote an article in which he claimed that “climate change is not making natural disasters worse.” A 2022 report produced by hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists argued that climate change has increased the intensity — and in some cases the frequency — of extreme weather events.” Shellenberger has also defended former President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that “windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before” and “driving them [whales] crazy.” In 2023, he produced a documentary that alleged — again, without concrete evidence — that “government officials have been lying” about the role offshore wind turbine construction has played in causing whale deaths.

The video featuring Shellenberger is one of 30 videos on PragerU’s “Get The Truth About The Climate” playlist.

Other videos on the playlist feature an assortment of well-known climate deniers, including former BP chief scientist Steve Koonin and nuclear energy consultant Patrick Moore, who has repeatedly and falsely claimed that he co-founded Greenpeace.

In a video titled “Is there really a climate emergency?” Koonin claims that climate change is not settled science, an argument he also detailed in a 2021 book called Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

Another video on the playlist called “The truth about CO2” features Moore, who claims that rising CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere do not present a danger to humans and that “we're already seeing the positive effects of increased carbon dioxide now.” “We should celebrate CO2 as the giver of life that it is,” Moore adds.

Video

CitationPragerU ad in Google's search engine, accessed April 4, 2024

PragerU is deeply rooted in climate change denial

Along with the Daily Wire, PragerU is financially dependent on generous donations from fossil fuel billionaire Farris Wilks.

Recently, PragerU Kids, a PragerU offshoot that produces conservative “educational” content targeted at school age children, has partnered with five different states to bring right-wing propaganda into public school classrooms.

Media Matters reviewed PragerU Kids’ ”educational” content and found it was rife with misinformation about climate change. In one video, a cartoon narrator explains why embracing climate denialism is akin to participating in the Warsaw uprising, when Polish Jews attempted to liberate Warsaw from German occupation during WWII.

Since 2021, researchers have demonstrated that Google has failed to follow through on its promise to address climate denial. One study found 100 monetized YouTube videos that seemingly violated Google’s climate change misinformation policy. The videos had accrued more than 18 million views. Despite those seeming policy violations, only eight of the hundreds of climate-denying videos studied were eventually demonetized. Google has also profited significantly from ads placed by fossil fuel companies attempting to “greenwash” their reputations as drivers of the climate crisis.

  1. ### Climate solutions coverage on broadcast news programs declined in 2023

04/16/24 9:49

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9 2024

Patrick Moore - Carbon and Climate Catastrophe Steamboat Institute

27K views

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H0OxmF7fak)

rww 1 24

Former Fox host Tucker Carlson is platforming disgraced climate denier Willie Soon, an aerospace engineer known for accepting over $1 million from fossil fuel companies for writing publications he referred to as “deliverables.”

Carlson invited Soon, a former researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, on his exclusive program on X (formerly Twitter) for an interview on January 9. The two amplified long-debunked hypotheses about what is causing climate change, and clips from the interview have already been viewed over 1 million times on TikTok, likely by a young audience that might not be familiar with Soon’s controversies, which came to light back in 2015.

The spread of these videos highlights TikTok’s ongoing climate misinformation problem, even as it has begun implementing a new policy banning content that “undermines well-established scientific consensus, such as denying the existence of climate change or the factors that contribute to it.”

Though experts dismissed Soon’s false claims, clips of his interview with Carlson have gained traction on TikTok, a social media platform popular with young users
The interview is part of a larger trend of major right-wing media outlets relying more on long-debunked climate deniers
Willie Soon has been exposed for unethically promoting flawed science
Soon has for years been a go-to source for media and lawmakers keen on protecting fossil fuel interests

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mma 12 23

:{In 2023, as climate-driven disasters plagued countries around the world and the COP28 climate change conference saw the adoption of a historic (though reportedly “loophole”-ridden) agreement referencing a transition away from fossil fuels for the first time, right-wing media remained committed to hindering progress

. Three concerning trends emerged in their strategies, which included facilitating comebacks for long-discredited climate deniers, cheering on violence against climate activists, and attributing deadly climate-driven events to conspiracies or religious calamity.}:

Right-wing media facilitated comebacks for long-discredited climate deniers.

Discredited climate deniers like Judith Curry, Patrick Moore, Anthony Watts, and Gregory Wrightstone, who have been vocal for decades, received renewed attention in 2023 from right-wing media figures, who seemed to be turning to views that stray further and further from established science.

Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, consulted for oil and gas companies during her time in academia. She resigned from Georgia Tech in 2017 citing climate “craziness” and has been called out by other climate scientists for taking public positions reliant on debunked climate change denialarguments.

Patrick Moore is a former nuclear energy consultant and climate change denier who falsely claims he is a co-founder of Greenpeace. Anthony Watts runs a junk science climate denier blog and is a senior fellow at the fossil fuel-funded Heartland Institute. Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist who worked for the natural gas industry for 20 years, started a consulting firm for energy companies, and is now the executive director of a climate change denial non-profit.

Right-wing media attempted to justify violence against climate activists engaging in non-violent direct action.

In 2023, activist groups doubled down on demands for a global transition away from fossil fuels. Their tactics included throwing paint or food on famous works of art and property, infiltrating cultural events, and obstructing busy roads, provoking outrage from right-wing media.

Conspiracy theorists and right-wing Christian media figures spread misinformation about extreme weather events, often suggesting they were planned or indicative of a religious event.

Conspiracy theorists spread misinformation about the causes of extreme weather events, often suggesting they are orchestrated occurrences. In parallel, conservative Christian media figures reject the scientific consensus on human-driven climate change, attributing such events to divine will and interpreting them as “demonic attacks,” manifestations of biblical prophecy, or signs of the End Times.

2024 will be another crucial year for climate action, with the U.S.’s climate leadership and goals hinging on the election. While a recent CNN poll found that two-thirds of U.S. adults are concerned about the impacts of climate change in their communities, we can expect to see right-wing media assist GOP efforts to delegitimize and derail Biden’s landmark climate policy, the Inflation Reduction Act. In tandem, bad actors will also likely continue to shift the focus from these devastating impacts in order to vilify those speaking out about them, creating the potential for even more violence.

  1. ### Matt Walsh blames two protesters shot in Panama for their own deaths

11/10/23 4:28 PM EST

  1. ### TikTok is driving conspiracy theories about Canada's wildfires

06/14/23 12:45 PM EDT

  1. ### Right wing media cheers on violence against climate activists

:{:{08/07/23}:

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mma 2 23

Over the past several days Fox networks have aired numerous segments insinuating that the recent deaths of whales across New York and New Jersey beaches are due to the development of offshore wind turbines.

There is no evidence to back up these claims.

NOAA Fisheries, the office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration responsible for the management of marine life, specifically addressed the question on January 24. NOAA stated that the recent whale deaths are “not related to offshore wind development.” The agency further wrote, “Of the whales examined, about 40 percent had evidence of human interaction, either ship strike or entanglement. Vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are the greatest human threats to large whales.” Indeed, nearly 3,000 ships passed through the Port of New York and New Jersey, near where whale deaths are occurring, in the last year — “a figure that vastly undercounts all the ocean traffic in the region and dwarfs the number of vessels that have anything to do with offshore wind.”

Importantly, NOAA Fisheries noted climate change as a contributing factor in the whale deaths. The world’s oceans are rapidly warming, with temperatures reaching a record high in 2022. This is forcing a change in the migration patterns of marine life, including whales, and “can lead to increased interactions with humans as some whales move closer to near shore habitats,” the agency writes.

Additionally, there aren’t even any wind turbines off of the coast of New Jersey. The whale deaths have also been happening at an increased rate since at least 2016, the NOAA reports, which long predates any offshore wind development in the region.

This is not stopping Fox from promulgating claims that offshore wind is killing these whales

On the January 30 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Tucker Carlson sarcastically mocked a Politico article which stated that “there is no evidence the wind work and whale deaths are linked.”

“We have no idea why a dozen whales just turned up dead on the beaches of New Jersey,” Carlson said. “Does it have anything to do with the construction of wind turbines off the coast? ‘That's speculation,’ Politico reported. ‘Probably climate change.’ So the story was ridiculous, but what we didn’t get at first was that Politico was paid to run it.”

Carlson took issue with the fact that the article was featured in a newsletter sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council, later calling Politico “prostitutes” for publishing another article sponsored by offshore wind turbine manufacturers. In reality, Politico’s energy newsletters are typically sponsored by energy companies, not environmental groups — with the vast majority of these sponsorships coming from fossil fuel companies.

The next night, Carlson stated that “so-called green NGOs, supported of course by the people they give money to in the Biden administration, are backing the construction of massive offshore wind turbines that appear to bekilling large numbers of whales.” Carlson then hosted a local Republican politician from Nassau County, New York, who called “going all-electric” a “danger to our America,” and stated that “there will always be fossil fuels, at least in my lifetime.”

Carlson’s two recent segments follow a January 13 segment detailing “The Biden whale extinction.” (Another chyron during that episode read “Green New Deal wind farms are killing whales.”)

Questions about offshore wind development were also raised on Fox during the January 31 editions of both America’s Newsroom, with reporter Alexis McAdams stating, “As the whale deaths continue, some lawmakers and activists are calling for a hold on the preparations for offshore wind projects,” and The Story, with guest anchor Trace Gallagher stating, “It's the eighth whale to die along the shore of New Jersey and New York in the last two months, fueling the debate about whether the deaths are natural or maybe related to nearby offshore wind projects and the push to go green.”

Several more such segments covering the whale deaths ran on February 1. On Fox Business’ Varney & Co., correspondent Madison Alworth discussed the costs of offshore wind development without noting the massive economic benefits to local and state communities before stating, “All of this is the cost of this clean energy, but as you heard these conservationists saying it's costing our environment even more, and we're already seeing that expense.”

“Not in my backyard,” concluded host Stuart Varney.

Another segment on The Story began with Gallagher stating that, “The mayors of a dozen New Jersey towns [are] now calling for an immediate halt on plans to build thousands of offshore wind turbines as coastal communities raise concerns about the number of whales washing up dead on nearby beaches and soaring financial costs threaten the push to go green.”

Later, Alworth began a segment on Special Report with Bret Baier by claiming “conservationists say that offshore wind turbines are far from clean and may be doing more harm than good for the environment.” She ended the report by again mentioning the economic costs associated with wind turbines and none of the financial benefits.

Finally, Jesse Watters Primetime ran two segments linking offshore wind development to the whale deaths. In one, Alworth cited “conservationists” concerned with whale deaths saying “this clean energy might not be clean at all,” and she again brought up the economic costs of wind turbines without mentioning their benefits. In the second, host Jesse Watters interviewed ex-Greenpeace Canada member Patrick Moore to rail against renewable energy and complain that Greenpeace has been compromised by wind companies. Watters ended the segment by stating that wind turbines are “not good for the Jersey shore, for the Atlantic Ocean, and, as you said, it's not great for consumers either.”

Fox’s guests are not scientists — they have fossil fuel connections and an interest in blocking renewable energy development

Moore is a climate science denier who has consulted for polluting companies. He also (falsely) claims that he is a founder of Greenpeace, which allows Fox to paint him as a credible guest on climate, energy, and environmental issues.

Watters also tried this trick — obfuscating the credibility of an environmental advocate — in an earlier segment on offshore wind and whale deaths. On January 11, Mike Dean of Protect Our Coast NJ was labeled as an “ocean advocate,” and Dean went on to baselessly blame wind development for whale deaths, declaring, “The harms with these projects and the costs are limitless, and it’s really hard to find any benefits at all.” Fox did not note that Dean’s group appears to be backed by the Caesar Rodney Institute, a libertarian think tank with a history of hostility toward climate and environmental policies. The institute has also received funding from the fossil fuel industry, which has a long history of blocking renewable energy projects.

On the January 13 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson hostedMeghan Lapp, a fisheries liaison for the fishing company Seafreeze. Lapp claimed, without evidence, thatoffshore wind development means “essentially carpet bombing the ocean floor with intense sound.” In fact, Lapp has been appearing on Fox News since at least 2019 insinuating that offshore wind development is killing whales. She even appeared in Carlson’s 2021 anti-wind documentary which was chock full of misinformation and debunked talking points.

What has not been mentioned on Fox, and what has been excellently reported on by climate writer Michael Thomas, is that Lapp is a fossil fuel industry ally. Her campaign to stop offshore wind development has beenbankrolled by T:(style="background-color:#ff9900ff"):}::{exas Public Policy Foundatio**n, a fossil fuel-funded think tank that has fought climate policies tooth and nail. TPPF, of course, has spent decades advocating for offshore oil drilling — choosing to downplay the horrific environmental impacts of that practice while embellishing the impacts of offshore wind development.

Finally, Bonnie Brady of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association appeared on the aforementioned Varney & Co., The Story, and Special Report segments on February 1. Brady, like Lapp, is being backed by TPPFin her campaign to stop offshore wind development. Last year, both Lapp and Brady appeared in a TPPF film entitled “A Heavy Wind: The Threat to an American Heritage,” which detailed commercial fishermen fighting offshore wind projects.

One recent Fox segment interspersed with their offshore wind coverage illustrates the complete hypocrisy of Fox’s climate-related programming

During Fox’s fearmongering about offshore wind development on February 1, America Reports ran a segment with Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) that sang the praises of the Willow Project, a major oil and gas drilling project in Alaska’s national petroleum reserve. Sullivan called the project “actually really good for our environment,” while Fox anchor John Roberts noted some benefits of the project, including billions in revenue and hundreds of jobs created.

While Roberts did ask a question about climate advocates not wanting to lock the U.S. into more fossil fuel extraction, this segment did not mention the massive environmental costs associated with the project. Environmental advocate and journalist Bill McKibben noted in a recent article on the project that Alaska is “already warming faster than almost any place on the planet.Warming so fast that taxpayers are already having to pony up huge sums of money to relocate coastal villages inland. Emissions from the Willow project’s oil would cause $19.8 billion in climate damages; it would generate $3.4 billion in federal tax revenue, which is…a lot less.”

McKibben also cited a Center for American Progress analysis of the project which found that “allowing the Willow project to proceed would result in double the carbon pollution that all renewable progress on public lands and waters would save by 2030.”

Contrast Fox’s fawning coverage of an oil drilling project with its dismissive, conspiracy theory-laden, and climate denial-infused coverage of offshore wind, and you get a perfect sense of why Fox cannot be trusted on climate and environmental issues. While it’s true that there are valid concerns with offshore wind’s impacts on the environment and local marine life — something that has been taken into consideration by government authorities in reviewing previous offshore wind projects —the reality is that fossil fuel projects are significantly more detrimental to the environment and climate than renewable projects.

You will rarely if ever hear these facts reported on Fox, as the network has time and again proved to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry, and its offshore wind coverage cannot be taken seriously.

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ISD

TONY HELLER A retired computer engineer turned video producer, Heller posted nearly 300 tweets to his nowsuspended account and garnered almost 30,000 interactions during COP26. Heller is commonly known by the pseudonym ‘Steven Goddard’ and formerly contributed to climate denial blog WattsUpWithThat - he has previously described global warming as “the biggest scientific fraud in history”. In addition to content on COVID-19 conspiracy theories, which led to his suspension from Twitter in mid-December 2021, Heller also pushed the debunked conspiracy that temperature records are being manipulated to justify climate action. He has been repeatedly fact-checked for such claims, including by ClimateFeedback and Politifact, but remained a key influencer online during the Glasgow summit. While Heller’s content has earned him temporary suspensions from YouTube and Twitter, previous bans were lifted and do not seem to have affected his general rhetoric - the most recent suspension from Twitter appears to be permanent, but came after he had amassed hundreds of thousands of interactions on topics including COVID-19 and climate change.

PATRICK MOORE Canadian activist Patrick Moore is another individual whose online reach has not been curbed by repeated fact-checks. He presents himself as a Greenpeace “Co-Founder”, although the organisation has strongly distanced itself from any former affiliation and Moore’s more recent stances on climate. He now oversees the CO2 Coalition. Moore self-describes as a ‘sensible environmentalist’, and achieves continually high engagement on Twitter in particular. A week before COP26 began he achieved nearly 45k likes and 16k retweets for one post, sharing a Sky News Australia segment in which the host condemned youth climate activists as “selfish, badly educated virtue-signalling little turds”. His most popular content tends to push back against ‘woke media’ who dismiss those sceptical of the climate crisis/emergency as ‘eco-traitors’. 

Similar to Shellenberger and Lomborg, Moore’s success is partially dependent on branding himself a pro-climate ‘liberal’, although his content is frequently debunked or rated false by entities like ClimateFeedback, The Tyee and PolitiFact. Despite such comprehensive fact-checks, Moore’s social media presence remains unfettered and high-traction. For example, over 6000 users liked his erroneous claim that COP26 was running on diesel fuel, with nearly 3000 retweets. 

An official fact-check by the COP Presidency team (commented under Moore’s post) received only 70 likes and less than 20 retweets - a stark reminder of the attention disinformation can gain in the face of verified sources. During COP26 alone, key amplifiers of Lomborg’s content included Jordan B. Peterson (2.4m followers), Rebel News journalist Ezra Levant (353k followers), and conservative Canadian politician Maxime Bernier (186k followers)

...these case studies are by no means exhaustive, but highlight a few key features of the ‘repeat offender’ cohort:

1) The network is mutually reinforcing, with many actors cross-referencing, sharing or making appearances in each other’s content. This creates an impression of consensus and ‘critical mass’ on social media, and confers false legitimacy on individuals in the wider media landscape. 

2) Accounts are repeatedly fact-checked without any meaningful response from platforms. Many of the largest tech companies tout their partnership with ‘independent, third-party’ fact-checkers, certified via bodies like the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN), to identify, review and take action on questionable content. As Facebook highlights on its website, this model is intended to combat viral misinformation, with a focus on false claims that are ‘timely or trending and important to the average person’. The company also states that ‘pages, groups, accounts and websites that repeatedly share misinformation will face some restrictions, including having their distribution reduced’, among other punitive actions. Our analysts found some instances where fact-checking labels had been applied to content, or where users were directed to more reliable content hubs and sources. However, beyond this lowest-tier measure there is little evidence of any enforcement against known disinformers, even during critical moments like a global climate summit or extreme weather event.

3) Repeat offenders have often spread mis- or disinformation on multiple topics. This is most clearly observed in the number of high-traction accounts sharing misleading claims on climate and COVID-19, but encompasses a wider range of issues - from anti-vaxx sentiment and genocide denial to conspiracies such as QAnon, the Great Reset and electoral fraud. This should provide an even greater incentive for platforms to act, since an effective response against such accounts could have a ‘force multiplier’ effect and mitigate harm in multiple areas

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amazon

fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom Paperback – January 20, 2021

by Patrick Moore (Author)

Here is Dr. Patrick Moore's description of his unique thesis as presented in Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom."It dawned on me one day that most of the scare stories in the media today are based on things that are invisible, like CO2 and radiation, or very remote, like polar bears and coral reefs. Thus, the average person cannot observe and verify the truth of these claims for themselves. They must rely on activists, the media, politicians, and scientists - all of whom have a huge financial and/or political interest in the subject - to tell them the truth.

This is my effort, after 50 years as a scientist and environmental activist, to expose the misinformation and outright lies used to scare us and our children about the future of the Earth. Direct observation is the very basis of science. Without verified observation it is not possible to know the truth. That is the sharp focus of this book."The book contains 98 color photographs, illustrations, and charts. A key target audience is parents who do not approve of the "progressive" school curriculum and its alarmism about the future of civilization and the natural world. Dr. Moore hopes these parents will read his book and pass it on to their high-school and older children to give them an alternative to the bleak future predicted by the merchants of doom. 

Many other audiences will also find the book informative and convincing. In 11 chapters the reader is clearly shown that citizens are being misinformed by so many environmental doomsday prophesies, ones they cannot verify for themselves. We are told that nuclear energy is very dangerous when the numbers prove it is one of the safest technologies. We are told polar bears will go extinct soon when their population has been growing steadily for nearly 50 years. We are told that there is something harmful in genetically modified food crops when it is invisible, has no name and no chemical formula. We are told severe forest fires are caused by climate change when they are actually caused by poor management of fuel load (dead wood) in the forest. 

We are told that all the coral reefs will die by 2100 when in fact the most diverse coral reefs are found in the warmest oceans in the world. And of course, we are told that invisible CO2 from using fossil fuels, accounting for more than 80 percent of our energy supply, will make the Earth too hot for life. All of these scare stories, and many more, are simply not true. And this book will convince you, your family, and your colleagues of that. There is no substitute for the truth. Dr. Patrick Moore was one of the co-founders of Greenpeace and sailed on the first Greenpeace campaign against US H-bomb tests in Alaska. Upon receiving his PhD in ecology, he spent 15 years in the top committee of Greenpeace and led many of its environmental campaigns.

 Greenpeace began as a group of volunteers with noble intentions. Over the years it became very successful with campaigns to save the whales, stop the mass slaughter of baby seals, prevent toxic dumping into the air, water and earth, and many more. Greenpeace found itself in the early 1980s with more than $100 million coming in annually and close to 1,000 people on the payroll. It had become a business and fundraising moved to the top of the priority list. New campaigns were more about using sensationalism, misinformation and fear to attract donations. 

Dr. Moore said good-bye in 1986 as Greenpeace was turning into a racket peddling junk science. Since then he has strived to be a sensible environmentalist, basing his beliefs on sound science and logical thinking. This book is the culmination of 50 years of learning during Dr. Moore's multi-faceted quest for the truth about environmental issues (an historical account of Dr. Moore's 15 years with Greenpeace and his analysis of environmental subjects are in his previous book, "Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout - The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist, also on Amazon).

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Climate Science Denier Patrick Moore Under Attack ... - DeSmog  https://www.desmog.com › 2016/04/07 › climate-scienc...

Apr 7, 2016 —British environmentalist and author Mark Lynas, who is also pro-nuclear energy, weighed in too, describing Moore as “just a predictable ...

Climate science denialist Patrick Moore is all about “consensus building.” We know this because it says so on his biography at the think tank Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

And so, fresh from delivering a coal-funded talk in Brussels where he told the audience to “celebrate CO2”, the Canadian has been out doing a bit of that “consensus building” in his own unique way.

In recent days, Moore has accused respected climate scientistKen Caldeira of “fakery”, called him a “jerk” and then told a fellow nuclear power advocate to “GFY”.

The nuclear advocate in question was Australian energy and climate consultant Ben Heard, who had engaged Moore on social media. He’s written a blog about the exchange.

British environmentalist and author Mark Lynas, who is also pro-nuclear energy, weighed in too, describing Moore as “just a predictable right-wing anti-green contrarian”.

When DeSmog UK gave Moore the chance to respond to a story showing he had been paid by coal lobbyists to deliver a talk, his response was “bugger off”.

Who is Patrick Moore?

For those that don’t know, Patrick Moore is often described as a former senior member of Greenpeace, even though he left that organisation 30 years ago.

Since then, he has spent his time being an advocate for nuclear power, GM crops, forestry and, apparently, burning as much coal as you can get your hands on.

In a French television interview last year, Moore told a journalist that the pesticide glyphosate was not a carcinogen and was so safe, “you could drink a whole quart of it and it won’t hurt you”.  

Moore was then immediately offered the chance to drink a glass by the interviewer, which he declined. “I’m not an idiot,” he said.

Moore is a long-time climate science denialist and claims, against all credible scientific institutions, that there is “no proof” that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere (about 40 per cent more than there was before the industrial revolution) is causing any global warming.

Acidification denial 

In April 2015, Moore wrote a column for The Australian newspaper claiming that ocean acidification, caused by adding CO2 to the atmsophere mostly from burning fossil fuels, wouldn’t be a problem for the oceans and the species that live in them.

In typical conspiratorial style, Moore even claimed the science of ocean acidification had been “invented” around the year 2005.

Moore has no academic publishing record at all on ocean acidification (or much else in the last 20 years), so it was no surprise that he got things badly wrong.

Several of the world’s leading scientists on ocean acidification, including one who had apparently begun studying the issue a whole five years before it had even been “invented”, tore Moore’s claims to pieces.

Moore’s column was “ill informed and highly misleading”, “very wrong”, “BS” and “nonsense”, the scientists told me for The Guardian, who explained in painstaking detail why his analysis was flawed.

But this didn’t stop Moore making the same claims in a subsequent research paper ”Ocean ‘Acidification’ Alarmism in Perspective” for the Canada-based Frontier Center for Public Policy (FCPP), where he is chair of the think tank’s “Energy, Ecology and Prosperity Program”.

Oddly, the paper carried a disclaimer that the views expressed “do not reflect the opinions” of the center, “its Board of Directors, staff and/or donors” despite it being written by one of its own.

According to FCPP, its papers are “rigorously researched by the most credible experts in their field”. They also claim to run their own “peer review” system for their reports.

This is just as well, because Moore thinks that actual peer reviewed scientific journals are ruled by a “warmist ideology”.

This appears to be a pattern for Moore. When challenged, respond with a mixture of abuse, name-calling and conspiracy theories.

So when a group of students walked out of a speech he gave at a US college last year, he compared them to the “taliban”.

There’s Moore’s “consensus building” skills on display again.

Image: Patrick Moore gives evidence to the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, February 2014

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The Wilks Brothers and PragerU

Dan and Farris Wilks aretwo of the largest funders of PragerU (AKA “Prager University”). Farris’ Thirteen Foundation gave $1 million to the foundation in 2015, while Wilks has given at least $120,000 through the Heavenly Fathers Foundation, according to publicly available 990 forms reviewed by DeSmog. [13]

PragerU, which is not an accredited academic institution, was created by conservative radio talk show host Dennis Pragerwho has “historically fought against what he describes as ‘liberal’ evils—marriage equality, feminism, and multiculturalism.” According to its 2014 annual report, PragerU was advancing with the specific goal of targeting middle school and high school children. [13]

The group’s “Environmental Science” course is dominated by climate change deniers such as Alex Epstein,Bjorn Lomborg,Patrick Moore, and Richard Lindzen.[14]

Dennis Prager has called campus rape a “gargantuan lie to get votes” and “nonsense” promoted by the “feminist left.”[15]

Stance on Climate Change

July 2013

“If [God] wants the polar caps to remain in place, then he will leave them there,” Wilks said, according to sermons reviewed by *Reuters*. [11]

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/07/30/youtube-video-suggestion-algorithm-climate-science-denial-study

no lnx vid

Back in 2015, if you’d searched YouTube for information about climate change, the videos offered up might have left you with a warped sense of the state of climate science and the degree of scientific certainty that people are heating the world’s climate, a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Communication suggests.

That year was, at the time, the worst year on record for U.S. wildfires, including California’s Butte fire, which burned 900 buildings. It was the year when Pope Francis issued an encyclical urging rich countries to ward off climate change. And, for the first time in over 800,000 years, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere crossed 400 parts per million on average in 2015.

It was also a year when YouTube’s video recommendation algorithm — which has become central to controversies over the rise of white supremacism and far-right extremism online — served up an unusually high number of videos in response to climate-related keywords that fell outside of the scientific consensus on climate, the new study concludes.

“Searching YouTube for climate-science and climate-engineering-related terms finds fewer than half of the videos represent mainstream scientific views,” study author Dr. Joachim Allgaier, senior researcher at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany said in a statement about his findings.

“It’s alarming to find that the majority of videos propagate conspiracy theories about climate science and technology,” he added.

Misinformation researcher John Cook developed the Fact-Myth-Fallacy framework for battling myths about climate science and other topics.

Letting Nonsense Flourish

That pattern developed as YouTube rose to new heights of popularity, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults, and 94 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds, report watching YouTube — and one-fifth of Americans described YouTube as “very important” for “understanding things happening in the world,” according to a November 2018 Pew Research Center study.

YouTube, where videos are generally less than 15 minutes long, relies heavily on keeping viewers watching longer with its “Up Next” sidebar — a feature responsible for over 70 percent of the time people spend on the site. That makes the selection of recommended videos, chosen by a proprietary algorithm, both important and — when it comes to factual information — very politically charged.

“The massive ‘library,’ generated by users with little editorial oversight, is bound to have untrue nonsense,” Bloomberg’s Mark Bergen explained in an April investigation into YouTube’s internal decision-making. “Instead, YouTube’s problem is that it allows the nonsense to flourish. And, in some cases, through its powerful artificial intelligence system, it even provides the fuel that lets it spread.”

YouTube’s recommendations, created by that algorithm, have had profound cultural impacts and have been cited as factors in the rise of the anti-vax movement opposing childhood vaccination, the spreading of white supremacist ideology, andeven a surge in the number of flat Earthers.

When it comes to climate change, YouTube has also amplified views that fall outside of the scientific consensus, the new research shows.

'Straightforward Conspiracy Theories'

The study examined a group of 200 YouTube videos and compared them against the scientific consensus on climate change, using the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) stance as a benchmark.

The 200 videos reflected the results of searching for 10 different keywords related to climate change, using the online anonymization service Tor to prevent prior views from influencing the search results. Most of the searches were conducted in 2015.

“Unexpectedly, the majority of the videos in the sample (107 videos) supports worldviews that are opposing scientific consensus views: 16 videos deny anthropogenic climate change and 91 videos in the sample propagate straightforward conspiracy theories about climate engineering and climate change,” the study concluded.

Those outside-of-the-mainstream videos attracted virtually the same number of views as the videos presenting information that was scientifically grounded, the study adds, noting that out of the roughly 34 million views attributed to those 200 videos, those supporting mainstream climate science positions racked up just 2,294 more views than those opposed.

[Screen shots of climate science denial videos on YouTube.

“The way YouTube search algorithms work is not very transparent,” Allgaier continued. “We should be aware this powerful artificial intelligence is already making decisions for us, for example, if you choose to use ‘auto-play.'”

The search terms used in the study included not only “climate,” “climate change,” and “global warming,” but also “chemtrails” and “climate hacking,” which the study described as “terms that are often used by opponents of mainstream science.”

In some cases, conspiracy theorists advised their followers to adopt scientific language to make it harder for listeners to identify them as representing fringe views, the study said.

“From their point of view this strategy also has the advantage that ‘chemtrailers’ can now jump on the bandwagon when there are actual scientific discussions and events addressing technical options of artificial climate modification or manipulation,” Allgaier wrote.

DeSmog has previously covered the ways that YouTube and its algorithm have benefitted climate science denial.

“Despite the clear errors, the video has gathered more views than any other climate science denial clip on YouTube,” Graham Readfearn reported in February, describing a PragerU video by Canadian lobbyist and fossil fuels advocate Patrick Moore that claims there has been “no significant warming trend” in this century. “A search on YouTube for the most viewed “climate change” videos has Moore’s effort ranked 13th — searching for “global warming” has it ranked 19th. But where the problems really start, are when YouTube’s 'up next' algorithm takes a guess at what you might want to watch next after seeing Moore’s video.”

Noted climate science denier Steven Goddard (a pseudonym for Tony Heller) was not pleased with YouTube's changes to fight misinformation on climate change.

YouTube has defended itself in numerous controversies surrounding its video recommendations by citing the principle of freedom of speech. It also recently said that it will also make some effort to promote more credible videos.

“Over the last year we’ve worked to better surface credible news sources across our site for people searching for news-related topics,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Guardian, “begun reducing recommendations of borderline content and videos that could misinform users in harmful ways, and introduced information panels to help give users more sources where they can fact-check information for themselves.”

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2x?

pix: tucker w/ banner quote, if not for oil, all trees cut down]

What does it take to become a legitimate spokesperson on climate change science and energy policy in the eyes of President Donald Trump and partisan conservative media like Fox News and Breitbart?

If the current worshipping of non-expert and climate science denier Patrick Moore is anything to go by, the only qualification you need is the ability to call first-term Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “pompous little twit” on Twitter.

No other actual expertise is, apparently, necessary. This is fortunate, because Moore has no expertise on climate science.

Since Moore attacked Ocasio-Cortez — known as AOC — and her advocacy for a “Green New Deal” in a Tweet on February 24, the Canadian has been “interviewed” on Fox News by Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.

After introducing Moore,Carlson managed to not ask a single question of the Canadian.

Now, President Trump is elevating Moore’s statements, thanks to yet another appearance on the Fox channel, this time on Fox and Friends. The President tweeted:[twt]

Moore has never published an independent scientific journal article on climate change and his claims are contradicted by every major national science academy in the world and all of the evidence they draw on.

Moore does have a 1972 PhD in ecology, but DeSmog could not find any scientific papers published by Moore going back at least as far as 1994. Moore has written many articles for the publications of think tanks and lobby groups.

In his Fox interview with Carlson, Moore said there would “not be any electric trucks anytime soon.” Electric trucks are being manufactured now. Volvo is about to launch its second.

A review of Moore’s past statements on climate change show he has taken contradictory positions, sometimes within weeks, on climate change.

Moore has claimed that nuclear energy is a solution to rising greenhouse gas emissions. But in other forums, he has claimed there is no evidence for human-caused climate change.

Moore’s attempts in recent days to counter suggestions that he is paid for his views by industry are contradicted by his own CV.

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/03/12/trump-tucker-carlson-fox-breitbart-climate-science-denier-patrick-moore

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the gift that keeps giving

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/05/23/climate-science-deniers-marc-morano-patrick-moore-biodiversity-report

many lnx graf

First, Climate Change, Now the Global Extinction Crisis: Industry-Paid Hacks Deny Science to Congress

Read time: 5 mins

By Justin Mikulka • Thursday, May 23, 2019

Patrick Moore, Marc Morano, Robert Watson]

In this week’s Congressional hearing on the recent (and dire) UN Global Assessment of Biodiversity, conservation scientist Dr. Jacob Malcom did not mince words as he explained the report's startling findings that one million species are at risk of extinction.

“We are, as you have heard, losing species faster than ever in human history, tens to hundreds of times faster than the background rate of extinction,” the Defenders of Wildlife scientist told the Congressional House Water, Oceans, and Wildlife Subcommittee. “We are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction, where the last time this happened it was because an asteroid hit the planet. Today we are that asteroid.”

Such a massive loss of plants, animals, and other species would also, quite naturally, affect human life on earth. But just as they have with hearings on the climate crisis, Congressional Republicans and their witnesses used this opportunity to attack the well-documented scientific evidence of a far-reaching global threat to life. And they even used some of the same climate science deniers and tired arguments to do it.

The comprehensive report they attacked gathers even more evidence that human activities are having a significant effect on global biodiversity, just as the scientific consensus shows humans are driving rapid changes in the climate.

“The evidence is crystal clear: Nature is in trouble. Therefore we are in trouble,” Sandra Díaz, one of the co-chairs of the UN Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, told National Geographic.

Business as Usual With Republican Science Denial

Marc Morano isn’t a scientist but does make his money attacking scientists. From 2006 to 2009, Morano was the communications director for Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who will be remembered for his stunt of throwing a snowball in Congress as he tried to discredit climate science.

Morano moved on from politics to working for organizations funded by oil companies, and he currently runs the website ClimateDepot.com, a project funded by the climate science-denying Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a conservative think tank which has received funding from ExxonMobil, Chevron, and the Koch brothers.

This week, Morano wasted no time in attacking some of the actual scientists on the hearing's panel, specifically Sir Robert T. Watson, who heads the UN agency that produced the biodiversity report. These attacks on fellow witnesses resulted in hearing Chairman Jared Huffman (D-CA) twice reprimanding Morano.

Rep. Huffman had to ask that Morano “show respect for your fellow panelists.”

[vid]

However, oil industry-funded attacks on climate science, and even Robert Watson, are nothing new. In 2001 a memo to the Bush administration from Exxon lobbyist Randy Randol specifically requests that Watson be removed as head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a position he held at the time.

And Morano, a notorious climate science denier, is continuing this long tradition of groups funded by Exxon attacking Watson. Exxon has donated heavily to CFACT and was also involved in the infamous “Victory Will Be Achieved” memo. This memo, assembled by Randol and the American Petroleum Institute, declared in 1998 that “Victory will be achieved when average citizens 'understand' (recognize) uncertainties in climate science.”

The other climate science denier on the witness panel this week was Dr. Patrick Moore, current head of the CO2 Coalition, an organization that grew out of a now-defunct group heavily funded by Exxon.

What did the leader of an organization called “the CO2 Coalition” have to say about carbon dioxide?

“There is no hard evidence that CO2 has anything to do with the change in temperature of the earth’s climate,” Moore told the committee.

In fact, Exxon’s own research accurately predicted the rise in CO2 and temperature which the world has been experiencing.

However, Moore not only made the claim that CO2 doesn’t contribute to atmospheric warming — a concept first demonstrated by Eunice Foote in 1856 — but also said that because humans have been increasing the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, they were actually the “salvation of life on earth.” And while plants do use carbon dioxide, more CO2 is not necessarily good for plants.

Not everyone in the hearing seemed interested in the blatantly false statements coming from these industry-backed science deniers. Chairman Huffman noted that the efforts came from the “shadowy corners of these junior varsity think tanks.”

Solutions Amid the Attacks and Noise

Due to the format of Congressional hearings and the general GOP policy of climate science denial, these hearings typically offer very little in the way of solutions or actual debate. However, two of the panelists did speak about the threats to biodiversity and comment on solutions.

Malcom, the scientist from Defenders of Wildlife, called out the success of the U.S. Endangered Species Act.“We have forty some odd years showing that the Endangered Species Act has worked incredibly well and as we all know the American economy has continued to grow throughout that entire time,” he said.

Notably, the Trump administration currently is attempting to weaken the scope and effectiveness of the Endangered Species Act.

Perhaps the most concrete recommendation of the day came from Watson, who recommended that governments stop subsidizing industries that are causing harm to the climate and global species.

“One should get rid of many of these environmentally harmful subsidies in agriculture, energy, and transportation,” Watson told the committee.

With suggestions like these, Watson was an obvious target for industry-funded science deniers like Morano and Moore.

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https://naturalresources.house.gov/subcommittees/water-oceans-and-wildlife

DEMOCRATS 519

May 22 House committee hearing on the extinction crisis devolved into a spectacle resembling a Fox News segment, thanks to two frequent Fox guests who were invited by Republicans to testify.

The House Subcommittee on Water, Oceans, and Wildlife held a hearing on the recent summary report from the United Nations that warned human activity is leading to the possible extinction of up to 1 million plant and animal species. The Democratic majority invited expert scientists as witnesses, including Robert Watson, who led the U.N. team that wrote the biodiversity report, and two of the other scientists who worked on it. The Republican minority invited two of Fox News’ favorite climate deniers, Marc Morano and Patrick Moore, who only downplayed the report's findings and cast doubt on climate science.

Morano and Moore have appeared on Fox multiple times in 2019

Morano, a notorious, polluter-backed climate denier, is a Fox News favorite, regularly invited on-air to discuss environmental topics despite the fact that he has no scientific credentials. So far in 2019, Morano has appeared on Fox News shows at least 10 times. His most recent appearances were on May 6 when he commented on the U.N. biodiversity report on two of Fox's “news”-side shows, Shepard Smith Reporting and Special Report with Bret Baier. Both shows aired footage of Morano trying to undermine the report:

MARC MORANO: This is politics, not science. The U.N. is trying to expand its base to include climate and species. They are looking for more treaties, more regulation. They have identified a problem, they've juiced it up, and they put themselves in charge of solving the problem. That's called a self-interested lobbying organization.

Morano has also appeared three times this year on President Donald Trump's favorite show, Fox & Friends: on April 30, when he claimed that carbon dioxide is not pollution; on February 12,when he called efforts to reduce climate change "medieval witchcraft"; and on February 8, when he lied about what's in the Green New Deal and called it "a big bowl of crazy."

Morano has also repeatedly appeared on Infowars, the far-right outlet run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. And he recently attacked a young climate activist online, which led to trolls threatening her.

Moore is another Fox News favorite who is frequently invited on the network to downplay environmental issues or to deny that climate change is happening, despite also having no background as a climate scientist and raking in money from polluting industries. So far in 2019, he has appeared on Fox News shows at least five times, all in mid-March. One notable appearance came on the March 12 episode of Fox & Friends, during which he claimed that "the whole climate crisis, as they call it, is not only fake news, it's fake science." This appearance caught the eye of another climate denier, Trump, who approvingly tweeted out a quote from Moore. Moore tries to appear credible by claiming that he was a co-founder of Greenpeace, but this is not true.

Morano and Moore made a mockery of the House hearing, and that’s exactly what Republicans wanted

The May 22 House hearing was supposed to be about the U.N.'s new extinction report, but Morano and Moore made a mockery of this occasion by accusing the scientists who wrote the report of having a political agenda and by downplaying the effects of climate change.

:{In his written testimony, Morano claimed that his political science background is “an ideal background for examining the latest round of UN environmental claims” and argued that the U.N. “twists and hypes and distorts science in order to push a political agenda.” During the hearing, he also wrongly:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):}:attacked the 97% scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. Subcommittee Chair Jared Huffman (D-CA) called Morano out for "trolling" climate scientists, saying he came from the "shadowy corners of these junior varsity think tanks."

In Moore’s written testimony, he called the U.N. report's findings “highly exaggerated” and made reference to the “manufactured ‘climate crisis.’” VID] He also falselystated that without rising CO2 levels, plants would be much worse off. Moore often sings the praises of pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere, despite the fact that it is definitely not good.

Morano and Moore also got more time at the hearing than the four scientists invited by the Democrats, according to Public Citizen.

Fox News has helped to put Morano and Moore in the public eye by giving them a platform to sow doubt about climate change and other serious environmental issues, and now the two men’s latest Fox-worthy rants are part of the congressional record. The vicious cycle continues.

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/03/12/trump-tucker-carlson-fox-breitbart-climate-science-denier-patrick-moore

many lnx twts

What does it take to become a legitimate spokesperson on climate change science and energy policy in the eyes of President Donald Trump and partisan conservative media like Fox News and Breitbart?

If the current worshipping of non-expert and climate science denier Patrick Moore is anything to go by, the only qualification you need is the ability to call first-term Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “pompous little twit” on Twitter.

No other actual expertise is, apparently, necessary. This is fortunate, because Moore has no expertise on climate science.

Since Moore attacked Ocasio-Cortez — known as AOC — and her advocacy for a “Green New Deal” in a Tweet on February 24, the Canadian has been “interviewed” on Fox News by Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.

After introducing Moore, Carlson managed to not ask a single question of the Canadian.

Now, President Trump is elevating Moore’s statements,[fdr of gp, fake news] thanks to yet another appearance on the Fox channel, this time on Fox and Friends. The President tweeted:

Moore has never published an independent scientific journal article on climate change and his claims are contradicted by every major national science academy in the world and all of the evidence they draw on.

Moore does have a 1972 PhD in ecology, but DeSmog could not find any scientific papers published by Moore going back at least as far as 1994. Moore has written many articles for the publications of think tanks and lobby groups.

In his Fox interview with Carlson, Moore said there would “not be any electric trucks anytime soon.” Electric trucks are being manufactured now. Volvo is about to launch its second.

A review of Moore’s past statements on climate change show he has taken contradictory positions, sometimes within weeks, on climate change.

Moore has claimed that nuclear energy is a solution to rising greenhouse gas emissions. But in other forums, he has claimed there is no evidence for human-caused climate change.

Moore’s attempts in recent days to counter suggestions that he is paid for his views by industry are contradicted by his own CV.

Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson speaking at the 2018 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in West Palm Beach, Florida. Credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0

Contradicting Statements

In July 2018, Moore claimed that wind farms were a “wealth-destroying technology” that would “rust in place.”

But the previous year, an article uploaded to his own website (with a URL showing the year 2017) said that wind farms were “works of art compared to some of our urban environments,” were “commercially feasible,” and that “a million times more birds are killed by cats, windows, and cars than by all the windmills in the world.”

Moore claimed campaigners against forestry, hydroelectric dams, and nuclear energy were “sick” to “deprive developing nations of clean electricity, stop renewable wind energy, block a solution to global warming, and contribute to deforestation.”

In an almost identical article published around March 2005, Moore wrote that “a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions seems unlikely given our continued heavy reliance on fossil fuel consumption.”

Moore then quoted scientist James Lovelock saying that “Civilization is in imminent danger” and criticized environmental groups' positions against nuclear energy.

“We can agree renewable energies, such as wind, geothermal, and hydro are part of the solution,” wrote Moore.

Yet in the same month in 2005, Moore wrote in the Toronto Sun that: “The world’s climate has always been changing; it is impossible to tell if our activities are responsible for global warming.”

Career Advocacy

What appears clear is that when Moore is advocating for his favorite industries, global warming has been real. But when he’s not, issues suddenly become uncertain.

On Twitter on March 7, 2019, Moore said: “I have never worked for fossil fuel companies. I have worked with mainly with [sic] agriculture, forestry, and nuclear energy.”

He also wrote: “I have never put $$ ahead of trying to be honest and fair. I am always ready to be corrected on any matter.”  He has also denied being a spokesperson for industry.

Between 2006 and 2013, Moore was the founding co-chair of the nuclear industry-funded front group Clean and Safe Energy Coalition (CASEnergy Coalition).

Fellow nuclear energy advocates have been dismayed by Moore’s anti-science views.

In March 2016, DeSmog revealed that Moore had been paid by a European coal industry-lobbying group, Euracoal, to deliver a speech, where he told attendees they should “celebrate CO2.”

The president of the forum that hosted the talk later described Moore’s contribution as among the “less rational” he had heard on global warming.

An archive of Moore’s CV up to 2001 reveals a host of industry clients.

According to the CV, other clients included the Canadian Mining Association, the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, Westcoast Energy and B.C. Gas, PVC manufacturer IPEX, andBHP Minerals.

Between 1992 and 1996, Moore was “retained by the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association for annual two-week tours of countries in Western Europe to brief decision-makers and opinion leaders on forestry and the environment in Canada.”

Moore is also a director for the CO2 Coalition— a climate science denial group founded by a former Exxon manager and professor emeritus Will Happer, who has been picked by Trump to head an inquiry into the national security risk of climate change.

Greenpeace Founder?

Moore’s well-known work as an advocate for industries including forestry and nuclear power have not been mentioned by his supporters at Fox or Breitbart, and his incorrect statements about climate change have gone unchallenged.

But Moore’s fans never fail to mention that he was a “former Greenpeace founder” even though he left that organization 33 years ago and that Greenpeace itself has stated many times that he was not a co-founder.

Replying to the President’s tweet, Greenpeace USA said: “Patrick Moore was not a co-founder of Greenpeace. He does not represent Greenpeace. He is a paid lobbyist, not an independent source. His statements about @AOC & the #GreenNewDeal have nothing to do with our positions.”

Former Greenpeace colleague and actual co-founder of Greenpeace International, Rex Weyler, has written: “Moore has served as a corporate public relations consultant far longer than he ever worked for Greenpeace, and he has never worked as a scientist.”

At Canadian think tank the Frontier Center for Public Policy, Moore’s biography said his values were all about “consensus building.” Moore has been chair of the think tank’s “Energy, Ecology and Prosperity Program” and has published several articles through the group.

In 2014, Moore compared students who walked out of a speech he was giving to the Taliban.

When one fellow nuclear advocate pointed out a paper Moore had written about ocean acidification had been published by a think tank he worked at and was not a recognized scientific journal, Moore said “GFY.”

Qualified?

So what are Moore’s scientific qualifications?

According to his CV, Moore completed a degree in Forest Biology at the University of British Columbia in 1969. He gained a PhD in 1972 for his thesis focusing on “The Administration of Pollution Control in B.C., A Focus on the Mining Industry.”

Despite speaking on climate change and energy policy, Moore has no qualifications in either field.

British environment journalist Peter Hadfield has looked in detail at some of Moore’s contradictions and cherry-picked science in a YouTube video.[vid]

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https://www.desmog.co.uk/2016/03/14/coal-lobbyists-euracoal-paid-patrick-moore-dinner-climate-science-deniers-eu-officials-and-european-parliament-members

europe's coal lobby association EURACOAL paid for climate science denier Patrick Moore to speak to members of the European Parliament (MEP) and EU officials at an intimate dinner-debate last month, DeSmog UK can reveal.

As a March newsletter sent out by the European Energy Forum (EEF) details, Moore was invited as the main speaker at the dinner hosted by EURACOAL on 2 February in Strasbourg entitled “Climate Demons or Climate Gods: Coal Industry Stakes Its Future”.

An EEF press officer confirmed to DeSmog UK that coal lobbyists EURACOAL invited Moore to speak. The Canadian climate science denier is known for promoting the idea that “We should celebrate CO2 as the giver of life it is”.

EURACOAL describes itself as “the voice of coal in Europe” and acts as an umbrella group for associations and research groups across 20 countries.

When asked whether EURACOAL paid for Moore to present that evening, Brian Ricketts, secretary-general of EURACOAL, told DeSmog UK: “Yes, you are correct.  EURACOAL did cover Dr. Moore’s travel expenses from Canada and the time he devoted to preparing and giving his presentation to a small group in the European Parliament.”

“Unfortunately, I cannot disclose exactly what was paid [to] Dr. Moore as that would not be very professional,” he wrote via email. “However, it reflected c.5 days’ work for preparation time and long-haul travel.”

According to Moore’s agent’s site, it seems to cost between CAD$5,000 and $7,000 (£2,631 – £3,684) to have Moore speak at an event.

Climate Ambition

The EEF, which organises events for industry stakeholders and MEPs, describes the dinner-debate on its website: “With COP21 concluded, the EU must make an important decision: to continue its high-ambition climate change agenda or to moderate its ambition. This decision will have a profound impact on the future of coal in Europe.”

However, Ricketts added that “For your information, EURACOAL gave no advice or instructions on what Dr. Moore presented or on what he said during the Q&A session – he was free to say whatever he wanted.  So, for example, I don’t recall him saying anything in particular about coal and lignite.”

Among those in attendance at the February dinner were Paul Rübig, Austrian MEP and member of the EU’s committee on industry, research and energy, Eero Ailio, deputy head of coal and oil retail markets unit for the European Commission's Director-General for Energy (DG Energy), and Jo Leinen, a German MEP.

MEPs are responsible for representing their city or region to the European Union, and when necessary, lobbying the European Commission on relevant issues.

Ricketts and Roger Helmer, an MEP for the East Midlands and climate science denier, were also at the dinner. They are pictured above standing with Moore.

Ricketts made headlines at the end of last year for his post-Paris statement that the fossil fuel sector “will be hated and vilified, in the same way that slave traders were once hated and vilified”.

In a response to the Guardian article on his comments, Ricketts clarified EURACOAL's and the industry's stance on climate change: “While we do question the future potential of renewables, EURACOAL has no view on climate science. However, it is fair to say that many in the coal industry are climate sceptics.”

‘Open Discussion’

EEF states that its aim is to provide “open discussion” between MEPs, industry, and others active in the energy sector ahead of decisions taken on energy related EU legislation so as to “ensure the decisions are based on accurate information reflecting a variety of points of view.”

Among EEF's members are at least 30 MEPs and oil giants Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, and Chevron along with Centrica, Lukoil, and Statoil. Trade associations and lobby groups, including EURACOAL, are also members.

And as the EEF’s website describes, EURACOAL’s aim “is to discover the truth behind climate science”.

Moore, however, believes that humans are not to blame for global warming and is known for promoting misinformation when it comes to the science of climate change.

Recently Moore, who works at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Canada, appeared at the Paris climate conference with known US climate-denial groups the Heartland Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) to hold a ‘counter-conference’ to discourage action on climate change.

Moore also achieved fantastic notoriety after he claimed on camera in March 2015 that glyphosate – the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide – is safe to drink.

Although a World Health Organization study had recently concluded that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic,” Moore boasted to the filmmaker: “People try to commit suicide with it and fail fairly regularly.” But Moore refused to follow through on his suggestion by drinking a glass of the herbicide, saying “I'm not an idiot”.

When asked to comment on his EURACOAL presentation Moore said: “I consider DeSmog to be a hate site. So bugger off.”

This isn't the first time Moore has used offensive language against those he disagrees with. In October 2014, when Moore was speaking at Amherst College in Massachusetts, he described the students who walked out in protest as having a “Taliban mindset”.

Moore’s Presentation

Moore's EURACOAL dinner speech saw him promoting his “celebrate CO2” catchphrase. He gave the dinner guests “an unconventional interpretation of the whole climate and energy issue,” as the EEF states in its newsletter.

And as a photo from the event shows, it appears the presentation he gave that night was similar to a speech given at the climate sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation’s (GWPF) annual lecture last October in London entitled “Should we celebrate CO2?”

Moore’s February presentation is described as having “fostered an inclusive policy discussion based on a broad scientific basis, questioning the selective use of science which, in Dr Moore’s view, has led in some cases to widely accepted myths.”

EEF’s account of the dinner states that Moore told MEPs that “there is no definitive scientific proof that human emissions are the dominant influence on climate” and that carbon dioxide in fact benefits the planet by increasing plant growth.

The myth that ‘CO2 is good for the planet’ has been trotted out by the GWPF and its members several times. DeSmog UK debunks this claim here and here.

‘Options for Thinking’

Moore’s speech was followed by a presentation from Mark van Stiphout, deputy head of unit for new energy technologies, innovation and clean coal at DG Energy.

Van Stiphout argued that “coal is still an important provider of electricity in Europe,” according to the March newsletter.

He also noted that “research and investment are being encouraged to adapt coal to the increasing need for flexibility in power generation and to develop CCS [carbon capture and storage] solutions.”

According to dinner attendee and Austrian MEP Rübig, the night’s discussion provided participants with “options for thinking”.

EU Climate Targets

The EURACOAL dinner-debate was held in advance of a meeting in Brussels on 4 March where environment ministers discussed the EU’s next steps after the COP21 climate summit.

In anticipation of this meeting, and another planned for 17-18 March, EURACOAL has urged the European Commission to implement a less ambitious climate target.

In a 15 February statement, EURACOAL President Wolfgang Ceislik said: “EURACOAL calls on President Tusk and all 28 EU leaders to reject the 40% target and to adopt a less ambitious, more realistic target that can deliver more for Europe.”

While the European Commission initially did not put forward a more ambitious climate target in line with the Paris Agreement’s aim of reducing warming to “well below” 2C, last week Europe’s chief climate negotiator, Artur Runge-Metzger, confirmed that he is open to increasing the EU’s carbon target for 2030.

This followed calls from ministers from 10 countries including the UK, Germany, France, and Luxembourg for the Commission to increase its climate ambition. However, it is unknown whether climate change will be on the agenda for this week's summit.

Photo from left to right: Ricketts, Helmer, and Moore via EEF.

no lnx

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tppf 11/15 morano bs

Ecologist and Greenpeace founding member Dr. Patrick Moore discussed the benefits of rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Let’s celebrate CO2!” Moore declared.

Embedded image permalink

“We know for absolute certain that carbon dioxide is the stuff of life, the foundation for life on earth,” Moore said.

“We are dealing with pure political propaganda that has nothing to do with science,” he continued.

“The deserts are greening from rising CO2,” he added.

“Co2 has provided the basis of life for at least 3.5 billion years,” Moore said.

Read more: http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/11/19/scientists-declare-un-climate-summit-goals-irrational-based-on-nonsense-leading-us-down-a-false-path/#ixzz3suxUDQTu

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Roundup is a highly effective weed-killer that can be used during home garden maintenance, or on a massive soybean field to boost productivity. It's also been called a probable carcinogen. But according to Dr. Patrick Moore, that may not be true because "you can drink a whole quart" of the herbicide "and it won't hurt you."

Moore, an independent scientist not associated with Monsanto, recently joined French cable channel Canal+ as part of an upcoming news documentary. He advocated for the safety of glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, after a recent report said the widely used chemical "probably" causes cancer.

The label, bestowed by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, is the second highest risk level for possible cancer-causing agents. The "probable" category can be a bit contentious and asserts that some scientists disagree with the notion a substance causes cancer -- other agents on theWHO's list include sunshine, alcohol and wood dust.

Monsanto has fiercely tried to discredit the assessment. The company has demanded WHO retract the report, saying a growing body of scientific evidence has found glyphosate is safe when used as labeled.

Moore apparently agrees. He went so far to say that humans could even drink the chemical and be absolutely fine, and that people actually try to commit suicide with Roundup, but routinely fail due to its harmlessness.

In the middle of the interview above, a Canal+ journalist offers to go backstage to get his guest a glass of glyphosate to drink on-air, but Moore refuses and then storms off stage.

Patrick Moore: You can drink a whole quart of it and it won't hurt you.

Canal+: You want to drink some, we have some here.

PM: I'd be happy to actually. Not really, but, I know it wouldn't hurt me.

Canal+: If you say so, I have some.

PM: No, no. I'm not stupid. People try to commit suicide with it and fail regularly.

Canal+: No, no. Let's tell the truth.

PM: It's not dangerous to humans. No, it's not.

Canal+: So are you ready to drink a glass of glyphosate?

PM: No, I'm not an idiot.

Despite some reports that say Moore is a lobbyist, Monsanto told The Huffington Post in an emailed statement that he is not and has never been a paid lobbyist or employee of the company.

"Knowledgeable scientists, consumers and our farmer customers may be familiar with and confident in the safety of glyphosate, but their statements don’t make them lobbyists for our company," a spokesperson said. "Dr. Patrick Moore is one of those individuals. He agrees with the science that supports the safety of glyphosate, and is an advocate for technology and innovation. But Dr. Patrick Moore is not and never has been a paid lobbyist for Monsanto."

Moore did not immediately respond to HuffPost's request for comment.

MORE:

RoundupDr Patrick MoorePatrick MooreMonsanto RoundupMonsantoDrink RoundupGlyphosateDrink GlyphosatePatrick Moore GlyphosatePatrick Moore Roundup

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/27/monsanto-roundup-patrick-moore_n_6956034.html

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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_Moore

Patrick Moore was a leading figure with Greenpeace Canada and subsequently with Greenpeace International between 1981 and 1986. In 1991 he established a consultancy business, Greenspirit Enterprises,"focusing on environmental policy and communications in natural resources, biodiversity, energy and climate change."Moore began working for the Nuclear Energy Institute front group, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, in 200He has worked for the mining industry, the logging industry, PVC manufacturers, the nuclear industry and in defence of biotechnology. In October 2008, Greenpeace issued a statement distancing itself from Moore, saying he "exploits long gone ties with Greenpeace to sell himself as a speaker and pro-corporate spokesperson, usually taking positions that Greenpeace opposes." ^[2]

Moore describes himself as "chairman and chief scientist" of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd., a PR company that "work with many leading organizations in forestry, biotechnology, aquaculture and plastics, developing solutions in the areas of natural resources, biodiversity, energy and climate change." He is also a Board Member of NextEnergy, a Canadian energy services company.[3]

"In 1990, Dr. Moore founded and chaired the BC Carbon Project, a group that worked to develop a common understanding of climate change.

"Dr. Moore served for four years as Vice President, Environment for Waterfurnace International, a manufacturer of geothermal heat pumps for residential heating and cooling with renewable earth energy. He is now a Director of NextEnergy Solutions, the largest distributor of geothermal systems in Canada.

"As Chair of the Sustainable Forestry Committee of the Forest Alliance of BC from 1991 -2002, he led the process of developing the "Principles of Sustainable Forestry" which were adopted by a majority of the industry...

He obtained a Ph.D. in Ecology, Institute of Resource Ecology, at the University of British Columbia in 1974, and was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship (1969-1972). ^[4]

Contents

History

Patrick Moore, grew up on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada where his family was involved in the fishing and logging industry. His father, Bill Moore, was past president of the B.C. Truck Loggers Association and past president of the Pacific Logging Congress.

After completing a Bachelor of Science in forest biology at the University of British Columbia and a PhD in ecology on the administration of environmental law relating to the mining industry, Moore became involved first in the Western Canada branch of the Sierra Club and later Greenpeace. His involvement in Greenpeace between 1971 and 1986 spanned roles as a campaigner in Greenpeace Canada against whaling, uranium mining, sealing, toxic waste and nuclear warships.

He was President of Greenpeace Canada between 1977 and 1986 and as Director of Greenpeace International.

From 1984 he became involved in a family business, Quatsino Seafarms Ltd, farming salmon on Vancouver Island. Until 1991 he was President of the company and between 1986 and 1989 was President of British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association.

Following claims by the United Fishermans and Allied Workers Union about pollution by the industry generally, the Vancouver Sun reported "Moore called the union's concerns 'phoney', saying that we are not causing pollution and there is no such thing as genetic pollution."(1)

In 1990, PR consultant James Hoggan (who had worked for Western Forest Products) told a meeting of forest executives that the industry was wasting millions on ineffective PR. He said he and Patrick Moore had designed a "green audit" program to sell to industry.(2)

Subsequently, Moore and two others formed Greenspirit to help business and government "incorporate the environmental agenda."(3)

In 1991, the year Moore created Greenspirit, he became a member of the Board of Directors of the timber industry created Forest Alliance of B.C. [1]

In 1991 Moore was appointed as Director of the British Columbia Forest Alliance which was described by O'Dwyer's PR Services Report, as "a Burson-Marsteller created group, bankrolled by large timber companies," which "is waging a PR war with environmentalists upset with the logging of rainforests in western Canada." (4)

Burson-Marsteller employee Gary Ley was the Executive Director of the BC Forest Alliance in 1991. Ley subsequently headed up the Vancouver office of National PR, which B-M had a stake in. National PR had the BC Forest Alliance account. Tom Tevlin, who was part of the initial Forest Alliance team and later succeeded Ley as Executive Director and then President at the Alliance, is now President and CEO of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd.

Burson-Marsteller had worked for the Argentinian junta to "improve [its] international image" and boost investment. [Joyce Nelson, interview with Harold Burson (founder of Burson Marsteller) fall 1981, New York]. B-M's work for the Argentinian government occurred at the time that 35,000 people were disappeared by death squads.

In July 1991 Moore was asked by a Canadian journalist about B-M's work for the Argentinian junta. "Forest Alliance Director, Patrick Moore, argues that Burson-Marsteller's contract was with Argentina's economic ministry and its non-political role was to encourage foreign investment," Stephen Hume wrote. "It [B-M] has a record of truth in public relations as its bottom line," Moore said, citing the company's role in the Tylenol recall. Moore went on to object to the juxtaposing the reality of state murder of political opponents with Burson-Marsteller's strategy for marketing the perception of Argentina's stability. Besides, Moore argued, "people get killed everywhere."(5)

In August 1993 Moore was part of the delegation that lobbied a US foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust, against a decision to fund British Columbian environmental groups. Following the meeting, the Chair of the BC Forest Alliance, Jack Munro, told the Vancouver Sun "we are not opposed to them giving money to environmental groups. We are opposed to money filtering into protectionists like the people protesting the Clayquot," he said.(6)

In January 1994, Moore claimed in an interview that while Greenpeace had acted within the law in all matters relating to the International Whaling Commission that they may have funded travel expenses for some delegates to the Commission. "This statement was in error," Moore wrote in a retraction several days later. (7) Download apology as a PDF document

Two months later, Moore was criticized for claims that he made that Greenpeace "blackmail" had forced the rejection of The Times of London of an ad from the BC Forest Alliance. The Times rejected Moore's claim: "The Times had not even received the art work for the ad from the alliance. ... We do not even know what this ad is supposed to look like so we can hardly be accused of censorship or bias." (8) See also these articles on Moore, from Greenpeace co-founder Paul Watson of the Sea Shepard Society.

In 2000 Moore went to the Brazilian Amazon rainforests for the filming of a documentary by Marc Morano for American Investigator. According to an interview in the New York Post, Moore dismissed concerns about the impacts of logging, mining and clearning for agriculture on the Amazonian rainforests. "All these save-the-forests arguments are based on bad science. ... They are quite simply wrong. We found that the Amazon rainforest is more than 90 percent intact. We flew over it and met all the environmental authorities. We studied satellite pictures of the entire area," he said. "They are just about the healthiest forests in the world. This stuff about them vanishing at an alarming rate is a con based on bad science ... Anyone who has been in the jungle knows that if you want to live there, you'd better take a few machetes. Otherwise, it'll take it all back," said Moore. [2]

In October 2002, Moore was a keynote lunch speaker at the "Best Practices in Communications: Wood Products and Forests," organized by the Wood Promotion Network conference in Vancouver. Moore's speech was titled "Declaration in Support of Protecting the Environment by Growing More Trees and Using More Wood." (PDF)

In October 2003 Moore endorsed the launch by the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues(CGFI) of the "Earth Friendly/Farm Friendly" Seal of Approval for the food and dairy industry. Monsanto,DuPont, Kraft/Phillip Morris, and the nuclear industry have funded the Hudson Institute think tank.

In late January 2004 Moore was the key speaker at a "teach-in" organized by Paul Driessen and hosted under the name of the Congress of Racial Equality on "eco-imperialism" at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers. "The environmental movement I helped found has lost its objectivity, morality and humanity ... The pain and suffering it inflicts on families in developing countries can no longer be tolerated," stated Moore.

On nuclear power

See the related SourceWatch articles Patrick Moore on Nuclear Power and Patrick Moore: Media coverage that doesn't disclose Moore's nuclear consultancy work.

On pharmaceuticals in water

In a January 20, 2009, op/ed in the Seattle Times, Moore wrote that it is "inevitable that a small amount of ingested pharmaceuticals will eventually show up at trace levels in wastewater," Greenpeace activist turned industry PR consultant Patrick Moore writes in an op/ed. "The Pharmaceutical Assessment and Transport Evaluation (PhATE) model has been developed by industry as a tool to estimate concentrates of pharmaceutical residues in surface waters. ... But some activist organizations still push for costly and unnecessary controls. In Washington, Oregon and Illinois, for example, interest groups who believe that any trace amount of any compound in wastewater must be stopped at all cost are proposing an elaborate take-back plan." At the end of the op/ed, Moore is simply identified as "an adviser to government and industry." ^[5]

Moore's colleague at Greenspirit Strategies, Tom Tevlin, told the Center for Media and Democracy that the PR firm does count pharmaceutical companies among its clients. However, Tevlin would not name them. ^[6] The PhATE model that Moore praised in his op/ed was developed by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the major U.S. drug industry group. ^[7]

Moore is also sponsored by Bayer Advanced, a company that makes pesticides, as a keynote speaker at the Independent Garden Center Show in Chicago in August 2009. ^[8]

On genetic engineering

On February 22, 2004, the German conservative magazine "WELT am Sonntag" ("World on Sunday") - which is owned by the Axel-Springer media-group - published an article by Patrick Moore. [3] (As an example of the conservative pedigree of and its connections to conservative US circles The World on Sunday also publishes columns by Henry Kissinger).

In an opinion column, Moore approvingly referred to an essay by Peter Schwartz - The Anti-Industrial Revolution - published in Return of the Primitive edited by Ayn Rand. "In it, he warned that the new movement's agenda was anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-human," Moore wrote.

"Environmentalists were often able to produce arguments that sounded reasonable, while doing good deeds like saving whales and making the air and water cleaner. But now the chickens have come home to roost. The environmentalists' campaign against biotechnology in general, and genetic engineering in particular, has exposed their intellectual and moral bankruptcy. By adopting a zero-tolerance policy towards a technology with so many potential benefits for humankind and the environment, they have lived up to Schwartz's predictions. They have alienated themselves from scientists, intellectuals and internationalists," Moore claimed. [4]

In a response Greenpeace's Steve Sawyer dismissed Moore's claims as inaccurate. "If Moore applied the logic he claims is missing from the arguments of opponents of GE crops, he would realise that such crops are no more 'science' than refrigerators, nuclear weapons or washing machines. GE crops are commercial products that result from the application of one specific technology from within a much broader field of scientific inquiry. GE crops are commercial products, not science - and there are sound scientific reasons for opposing them," he wrote in an opinion column in The Age.

"Patrick Moore's attempt to characterise his proselytising on behalf of industry as 'consensus politics' stretches credulity. The reality is that the issues of environment and development are complex. Minimising human impacts on our biosphere, while promoting a basic level of equity and social justice on a global basis, is a challenge beyond anything human society has ever faced," he wrote.[5]

Moore claimed that the European Commission has given genetically engineered products a clean bill of health. "In 2001, the European Commission released the results of 81 scientific studies on genetically modified organisms conducted by more than 400 research teams at a cost of $US65 million. The studies, which covered all areas of concern, have 'not shown any new risks to human health or the environment, beyond the usual uncertainties of conventional plant breeding. Indeed, the use of more precise technology and the greater regulatory scrutiny probably make them even safer than conventional plants and foods,'" he wrote.

Steve Sawyer, from Greenpeace International disagrees. "What the EC actually did in 2001 was to identify 81 EC-funded research projects on GE organisms that were in progress. Most of these studies have not yet been published in peer-reviewed scientific literature. A more accurate assessment of the status of peer-reviewed studies on the human health risks of GE foods can be found in Pryme & Lembcke (2003)," he wrote.

"They concluded that there had been only 10 peer-reviewed 'in vivo' studies examining the possible health consequences of GE foods and feed. Only five of these were independently funded. The authors found that more scientific effort and investigation was necessary before GE foods could be considered unlikely to cause long-term human health problems," he wrote.

In particular, Moore points to the potential of "golden rice," genetically engineered to boost vitamin A levels and therefore the potential to prevent blindness. "Surely, if reasonable people saw the choice between the risk of a daffodil gene in a rice plant and the certainty of millions of blind children, they would descend on Greenpeace offices around the world and demand to have their money back," he wrote.

Sawyer argues that Moore's enthusiasm for genetically engineered rice is overly optimistic and ignores broader inequities that cause and maintain poverty. "Blindness is not caused by a lack of vitamin A in rice, just as starvation is generally not caused by a lack of food production. Malnutrition and starvation are the result of a lack of access to a balanced diet - a problem of poverty, which in turn is caused by problems of economics and politics," he wrote.

"The proponents of GE crops and foods are only too quick to promote the alleged benefits of whatever panacea happens to be the flavour of the month, often with little real understanding of the problem they are purporting to solve," he wrote.

"When those who raise questions about GE foods are lambasted for being ideological, "anti-science", or "anti-human", one has to ask why; and also why the proponents of GE foods manage to avoid being tarred with the same brush despite repeatedly overstating the benefits and systematically understating the risks, he wrote. "The reality is that golden rice is a research project. It has not undergone safety tests and its claims to solving health problems are extremely optimistic, bordering on fantastic."

On mining

At the May 2007 "New York Hard Assets Investment Conference," Moore was a keynote speaker. He told attendees, "Since my entry into the global environmental movement in 1971, mining has contributed significantly to a more sustainable world economy, and key beneficiaries of this progress are mining workers, families and communities," according to Resource Investor. [6]

Moore said that mining companies in third world countries must deal with "corruption among environmental groups and local governments compounded by yellow journalism. Greenspirit Strategies partnered with Newmont as a leader in mining sustainability to dispel such false reports," reported Resource Investor. Moore also accused "environmental extremists" of being "anti-human," "anti-science and technology," "anti-globalization," and "anti-civilization." [7]

On PVC

In December 2007, Moore slammed "anti-PVC activists" for "pushing retailers toward untested, less affordable and potentially riskier materials" with a "fear-mongering campaign." His comments came two days after "Sears Holdings Corporation, parent of the Sears and Kmart retail chain stores, said it will work to phase out use of PVC in its packaging and merchandise," reported ICIS. ^[9]

Moore's resume states that in 2001, he was "retained by IPEX, Canada’a largest manufacturer of PVC, to intervene in the environmental policy of the Toronto 2008 Olympic Bid." ^[10]

In a December 2007 press release from his Greenspirit firm, Moore was quoted as saying, "It's completely unacceptable for these activists to call PVC 'toxic' when PVC's effects on health and the environment have been investigated at every stage from manufacture through use and on to final disposal -- in all cases vinyl has been shown to be safe and environmentally sound." The release did not disclose Moore's or the firm's financial relationship with the PVC industry. ^[11]

Moore used similar language in a July 2006 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle: "Vinyl is one of the most sustainable, flexible and cost-effective materials available. Alternatives are more expensive, less versatile and often pose unknown health or environmental risks." ^[12]

Clients

Moore's clients [8] - though the list has not been updated since 2000 - have included:

Also see the related SourceWatch article Patrick Moore appearances.

Contact information

Greenspirit

4068 W. 32nd Ave

Vancouver BC

V6S 1Z6 Canada

tel: 604.221.1990begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              604.221.1990      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

fax: 604.222.9353

E-mail: patrickmoore@greenspirit.com

Web: http://www.greenspirit.com/index.cfm

Greenspirit Strategies Ltd.

305 - 873 Beatty Street

Vancouver BC

V6B 2M6 Canada

tel: 604.681.4122begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              604.681.4122      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

fax: 604.681.4123

E-mail: tom AT greenspiritstrategies.com

Web: http://www.greenspiritstrategies.com

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

References

  1. ↑ Greenspirit, "About Greenspirit: Who is Patrick Moore?", Greenspirit website, accessed October 2008.
  2. ↑ Press release, "Greenpeace Statement On Patrick Moore," Greenpeace, October 10, 2008.
  3. ↑ "About NextEnergy: Biographies", NextEnergy website, accessed October 2008.
  4. ↑ Biographies, Shark Water, accessed October 20, 2009.
  5. ↑ Patrick Moore, "Don't flush pharmaceuticals down the drain," The Seattle Times (Washington), January 20, 2009.
  6. ↑ Phone conversation with Tom Tevlin of Greenspirit, Diane Farsetta, Center for Media and Democracy, January 21, 2009.
  7. ↑ "Issues: Pharmaceuticals in the environment," GlaxoSmithKline website, undated, accessed January 2009.
  8. ↑ Charles Reynolds, "Bayer Buyers Better Beware," The Ledger (Lakeland, Florida), June 18, 2009.
  9. ↑ Greg Holt, "Greenpeace co-founder defends PVC," ICIS, Decmeber 14, 2007.
  10. ↑ "About Greenspirit," Resume of Patrick Moore PhD, accessed December 2007.
  11. ↑ Press release, "Scientifically baseless attack on PVC could hurt consumers, resulting in use of riskier and less affordable materials," Greenspirit Strategies via CNW, December 13, 2007.
  12. ↑ "PVC letter, SF Chronicle," via Greenspirit website, accessed December 2007.

External resources

External articles

By Patrick Moore
Other articles

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_Moore"

Categories: Nuclear PR | Front groups portal | Water | Energy | Environment | Public relations professionals

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old but omg

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A Million Tiny Strands

By Hunter

01/16/2006

The Murtha-Bashing Cybercast News Service Swarms with Pro-Exxon, Pro-Monsanto Reports, Quotes, and Commentary. Who's Paid to do What?

[Crossposted from Daily Kos]

"Facts don't really matter. In politics, perception is reality."

-- Ron Arnold, Vice President of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise

"We're out to kill the f**kers. We're simply trying to eliminate them. Our goal is to eliminate environmentalism once and for all."

-- Arnold in a 1992 interview. Arnold's "Wise Use" movement has been linked to right-wing militia groups.

The website Daily Kos highlighted this story from BusinessWeek's Earnon Javers on Saturday:

Asked about the payments, Fumento says, "I'm just extremely pro-biotech." He says he solicited several agribusiness companies to finance his book, which was published by Encounter Books. "I went after everybody, I've got to be honest," Fumento says of his fund-raising effort. "I told them that if I tell the truth in this book, the biotech industry is going to look really good, and you should contribute." [...]

Fumento insists that disclosure of financial transactions between op-ed columnists and the companies they cover wouldn't be practical.

So here's a stunner. A senior fellow at the Hudson Institute -- one of those right-wing think tanks founded in order to provide haven for truthiness-based, business-friendly "science" that no actual scientific or knowledgeable policy institution would touch with a sterile, non-conductive ten foot science pole -- solicited money from a biotech company in the process of writing a book that would make them "look really good". And sure enough, Monsanto "contributed" $60,000 to get the book written.

Wait... There's more! (13 comments, 4199 words in sto

but wait:

A Million Tiny Strands

By Hunter

01/16/2006

The Murtha-Bashing Cybercast News Service Swarms with Pro-Exxon, Pro-Monsanto Reports, Quotes, and Commentary. Who's Paid to do What?

[Crossposted from Daily Kos]

"Facts don't really matter. In politics, perception is reality."

-- Ron Arnold, Vice President of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise

"We're out to kill the f**kers. We're simply trying to eliminate them. Our goal is to eliminate environmentalism once and for all."

-- Arnold in a 1992 interview. Arnold's "Wise Use" movement has been linked to right-wing militia groups.

The website Daily Kos highlighted this story from BusinessWeek's Earnon Javers on Saturday:

Asked about the payments, Fumento says, "I'm just extremely pro-biotech." He says he solicited several agribusiness companies to finance his book, which was published by Encounter Books. "I went after everybody, I've got to be honest," Fumento says of his fund-raising effort. "I told them that if I tell the truth in this book, the biotech industry is going to look really good, and you should contribute." [...]

Fumento insists that disclosure of financial transactions between op-ed columnists and the companies they cover wouldn't be practical.

So here's a stunner. A senior fellow at the Hudson Institute -- one of those right-wing think tanks founded in order to provide haven for truthiness-based, business-friendly "science" that no actual scientific or knowledgeable policy institution would touch with a sterile, non-conductive ten foot science pole -- solicited money from a biotech company in the process of writing a book that would make them "look really good". And sure enough, Monsanto "contributed" $60,000 to get the book written.

Now couple that for the moment with another big story of the day -- the CNSNews "story" by senior staff writer Marc Morano smearing Congressman and Vietnam war veteran Jack Murtha -- according to methods nearly identical to the "Swift Boat" claims against Kerry.

Why is Morano's "breaking" coverage of the story especially interesting? Because, as daria g and The Gadflyer point out, CNSNews was the first source of the Swift Boat Vet claims in the 2004 election. And who was the writer of those multiple stories, each sourced heavily from such figures as John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi?

Marc Morano.  Exact same guy.

Imagine that. Anyone think maybe there's a connection between the background sources, in those two stories? Gee, I sure wonder what a perusal of Marc Morano's cell phone records would turn up, over the course of the last month or two.

Aside from a particular interest in the Swift Boat Vet claims, Morano has a long and inventive list of story ideas, including an entire article dedicated to the breathless report that right-wing uber-crackpot Lucianne Goldberg found Bill Clinton's memoirs "boring".

But among the stories Morano and others have returned to time and time again, for CNSNews, have been pro-biotech, pro-GMO, anti-environmental stories. And that's where, in light of yesterday's news on the Monsanto-paid Fumento and our particular interests in sniffing out links between stories, things get a bit interesting.

Because I mean a lot of pro-biotech and anti-environmental stories. Including, as it turns out, one hell of a lot of stories featuring quotes from Niger Innis, spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, and other figures which, one by one, can each be traced to either ExxonMobil and/or Monsanto-backed "nonprofits" and "think tanks".

Earlier this year, Chris Mooney in Mother Jones provided a description of what the previously significant and longstanding CORE has become. And it isn't pretty:

So why, then, does the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of the nation's most storied civil rights groups, organizer of the Freedom Rides and the 1963 March on Washington, attack those who want to curb global warming? ExxonMobil, which in 2003 gave CORE $40,000 ($15,000 was earmarked for "global climate outreach"), would obviously like to avoid any appearance that its products and policies are a slow-moving assault on poor people of color. How better than to turn the accusation around? In that bit of public relations jujitsu, CORE has been most useful. To those familiar with CORE's recent history, its allegiance to ExxonMobil comes as no surprise. In 1968, Roy Innis seized control of CORE and moved the group to the far right. Innis has been accused by founder James Farmer and other black leaders of renting out CORE's historic reputation to corporations like Monsanto and ExxonMobil. (CORE even mounted a counterprotest to environmentalists picketing an ExxonMobil shareholders' meeting.) [...]

Helping CORE form these talking points is its senior policy adviser, Paul Driessen, the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, who also works with several other ExxonMobil-funded groups. At a 2004 ExxonMobil shareholders' meeting, Driessen referred to CORE as "one of America's oldest and most respected civil rights organizations" and called for greater funding for the group.

So out of curiosity, who covered that shareholders "counterprotest" for CNSNews? Hmm -- yep, Marc Morano, in a story approvingly quoting both Innis and Ron Arnold of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, another "nonprofit" group receiving funding from ExxonMobil, of which Paul Driessen is also a senior advisor. Needless to say, neither group was identified by Morano as having an ExxonMobil connection to the "counterprotests".

As far as CORE itself, Jonathan Matthews detailed the new Monsanto and ExxonMobil connections to the group in an excellent article from last March that went down the list of recent CORE-based propaganda efforts:

Of course, such attempts to position biotech's soap box behind a black man's face neither began nor ended in Johannesburg. In late 1999, for instance, a street protest against genetic engineering in Washington DC was disrupted by a group of African-Americans bearing placards such as "Biotech saves children's lives." A Baptist Church from a poor neighborhood had, the New York Times revealed, been paid by Monsanto's PR firm to bus in the counter-demonstrators. But Johannesburg does seem to have been a kind of watershed. Since then, Monsanto's fake parade has really begun to hit its stride. And from US administration platforms to UN headquarters, from Capitol Hill to the European Parliament, we've been treated to a veritable minstrelsy of lobbying.

Let's pick up the trail amidst the Martin Luther King Day observances in New York City this January. That was when the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) invited some 700 diplomats, scientists, journalists, and Gotham high-school students to come and consider the "implications and reality" of biotechnology at UN headquarters.

OK -- so who covered that pro-biotechnology "World Conference" for CNSNews? Well, in this case, none other than CORE national spokesman Niger Innis himself, along with CORE senior policy advisor Paul Driessen, in a "commentary" for the news service. Neo-conservative lobbyist and CORE senior advisor Driessen, in fact, has written at least six such pro-biotech, anti-environmental "commentaries" for CNSNews between November of this year:

Country-Club Anxieties vs Malaria Victims By Paul Driessen, November 01, 2004

Prophets, False Prophets and Profiteers By Paul Driessen, December 15, 2004

When Visions Collide By Niger Innis and Paul Driessen, January 03, 2005

Facts v. Fears on Biotechnology by Paul Driessen and Cyril Boynes, Jr., March 08, 2005

Sustainable Development = Sustained Poverty By Paul Driessen, March 21, 2005

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality

Earth Day 2005 by Paul Driessen, April 22, 2005

As an aside, Driessen apparently started writing commentaries for CNSNews in 2004, not long after he and Innis were interviewed by CNSNews' Marc Morano in an article heavily leaning on the 'Eco-Imperialism' theme of Driessen's anti-environmental book.

Continuing on with Matthew's article:

In a talk on biotechnology at the Natural History Museum in London in May 2003, the world-renowned American botanist, Dr Peter Raven, noted CORE's strong concern about the obstruction of technological advancement. "Last month, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of America's most venerable and respected civil rights groups, confronted Greenpeace at a public event and accused it of "eco-manslaughter" through its support of international policies limiting development and the expansion of technology to the developing world's poor."

Who covered that 2003 counter-protest for CNSNews?  Marc Morano, in a glowing article made up almost entirely of quotes from Innis and a CORE press release on the event.

Let's keep going:

In September 2003, CORE's national spokesman presided over a mock awards ceremony at the World Trade Organization meeting in the Mexican resort of Cancun. The ceremony included participants carrying "Save the Children" placards while the awards went to those Innis termed advocates of "lethal eco-imperialism."

Who wrote about the pro-biotech CORE event for CNSNews? Marc Morano.

Four months later CORE organised a "Teach-In" in New York entitled, "Eco-Imperialism: The global green movement's war on the developing world's poor".

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wired

Eco-Traitor

Three decades ago, Patrick Moore helped found Greenpeace. Today he promotes nuclear energy and genetically modified foods - and swears he's still fighting to save the planet.

By Drake Bennett

Patrick Moore has been called a sellout, traitor, parasite, and prostitute - and that's by critics exercising self-restraint. It's not hard to see why they're angry. Moore helped found Greenpeace and devoted 15 years to waging the organization's flamboyant brand of environmental warfare. He campaigned against nuclear testing, whaling, seal hunting, pesticides, supertankers, uranium mining, and toxic waste dumping. As the nonprofit's scientific spokesperson, he was widely quoted and frequently photographed, often while being taken into custody.

Then, in 1986, the PhD ecologist abruptly turned his back on the environmental movement. He didn't just retire; he joined the other side. Today, he's a mouthpiece for some of the very interests Greenpeace was founded to counter, notably the timber and plastics industries. He argues that the Amazon rain forest is doing fine, that the Three Gorges Dam is the smartest thing China could do for its energy supply, and that opposition to genetically modified foods is tantamount to mass murder.

Moore's turnabout was the biggest change of heart since Harold "Kim" Philby left Her Majesty's secret service for the Soviet Union - or was it? Moore insists that he hasn't changed a bit. His professional life, he says, has been a single-minded quest for true ecological sustainability. To his opponents, however, it adds up to little more than an ideologically bankrupt series of betrayals.

Consider the public hearing held at Boston City Hall on October 23 last year. The matter at hand was a proposal to ban the purchase of polyvinyl chloride products using city funds. An impressive array of expert witnesses testified in favor of the resolution - an Environmental Protection Agency toxicologist, a Tufts University economist, a Boston Public Health Commission official, the head of purchasing for a cancer research center. The production and incineration of PVC products, they argued, releases chemicals known as dioxins, exposure to which can lead to endocrine disorders, cancer, diabetes, infant mortality, and cognitive and developmental problems in children.

Then Patrick Moore took the floor. "It's a good thing most of the people who got up here before me weren't under oath," he began. "There is not a public benefit to be derived from a ban on PVC." The whole issue is "based on bad science and misinformation."

First of all, Moore argued, totaldioxin emissions have dropped 90 percent since 1970, to levels safely below those that cause health problems. Furthermore, dioxins are not some newfangled product of the industrial age. They've been around as long as fire. If the council wanted to make a real difference, he said, it could ban backyard burning, which spews nearly 60 times more dioxins than PVC manufacturing, or residential fireplaces, which emit 10 times more.

Throughout his presentation, Moore made barbed references to the devious forces behind the legislation, the same pack of Luddites who "hijacked a considerable portion of the environmental movement back in the mid-'80s and who have become very clever at using green language to cloak campaigns that have more to do with anti-industrialism, antiglobalization, anticorporate, all of those things which are basically political campaigns."

It was a bravura performance. When Moore returned to his seat, he was greeted with handshakes and backslaps from the folks who had paid his way: the Vinyl Institute.

For Moore, the PVC showdown was part of a larger crusade to reform environmentalism. He derides today's activists as philosophically unmoored and blindly technophobic, and he offers an alternative philosophy that not only accepts but celebrates humankind's growing ability to alter the planet. With a tip of the hat to best-selling "skeptical environmentalist" Bjørn Lomborg (and perhaps Thomas Paine), he has anointed himself the sensible environmentalist and set out to win converts. There haven't been many. So far, Moore has succeeded mostly in making himself a pariah and a cautionary tale.

Greenpeace was born in 1971 when an aging fishing boat steamed out of Vancouver, British Columbia, to disrupt an American nuclear test at the far end of the Aleutian Islands. Halfway there, the boat was intercepted by the US Coast Guard and the crew arrested. But the mission proved successful: The subsequent global show of support for the band of plucky environauts caused President Nixon to cancel the remaining tests. When the crew returned to shore, it adopted the name of the boat, Greenpeace, and turned its mediagenic activism into a global institution. By the mid-1980s, the organization had offices in 21 countries and an annual income of more than $100 million in donations and grants.

Patrick Moore was on board for that inaugural voyage, and he went on to serve as president of Greenpeace from 1977 to 1979 and as a member of the international board for seven years after that. He was a natural activist, impassioned and articulate, and his PhD from the University of British Columbia gave him a mantle of scientific legitimacy. Greenpeace veteran Rex Weyler recalls that "you could put Moore in front to talk to the media on scientific issues, and you could always rely on him. He'd get his facts straight, and he was tough as nails in any debate."

In his study in the neat, airy Vancouver home he shares with his wife, Moore keeps scrapbooks of his activist days. News clippings show him, with a cloud of tawny hair and a bandit's mustache, poring over nautical charts and shielding baby seals. Today the mustache is gone. The mane has receded to a mat of gray.

Moore won't have anything to do with Greenpeace these days, but he still gets a charge out of talking about the early campaigns. He shows me an aerial photo of a tiny raft floating in the way of a supertanker. The ship fills half the frame, like a snub-nosed sea monster. He and Weyler are on the raft, about to be arrested by the US Coast Guard. "Cool, eh?" he says with a hot-rodder's grin.

Moore was made-to-order for Greenpeace. He was raised in Winter Harbour, a village on the far northwestern tip of Vancouver Island. "It was like growing up in a dreamworld," he says. "My most memorable moments were in my boat with the motor turned off, floating over the shallow tide flats and looking down at all the marine life, or in the forest with the moss and the ferns." It's easy to see how that little wood sprite went on to study ecology and fashioned himself into an environmental shock trooper. Even today, Moore can sound druidic when talking about the natural world. He's a firm believer in James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which posits that Earth is a self-regulating superorganism. He hates the word weed, he says, because "it's a value judgment about plants."

Moore's family made its living off the land. His father and grandfather were loggers, and his mother came from a clan of fishermen. Perhaps this explains why, despite his animist tendencies, his ecological attitudes are grounded in an obsessive rationalism. He's fascinated by nature's cycles, mechanisms, and systems, and he sees no reason to privilege natural systems over man-made ones.

When he was 8, one of his toys was a one-cylinder engine that he would take apart and reassemble. For his dissertation research, he built a transmissometer, a device that measures water quality. He's as likely to wax didactic about the minutiae of paper pulping ("There's more computer power in a paper mill than there is in a 747!") as about the life cycle of the moths in the eaves of his porch. Moore is equal parts tinkerer and mystic, and his environmental thinking may be an attempt to reconcile those two impulses.

Like many people who earn a living making speeches, Moore prefaces much of what he says with phrases like "my line on this is" and "as I like to put it." As he likes to put it, he left Greenpeace in 1986 because "I'd been against at least three or four things every day for 15 years, and I decided I'd like to be in favor of something for a change. Suddenly, presidents and prime ministers were talking about the environment. We had won society over to our way of looking at things. As I like to say, maybe it's time to figure out what the solutions are, rather than just focusing on problems."

pix Moore in 1971, on his way to protesting US atomic bomb tests.]

Moore got a glimpse of how an environmentally responsible society might function four years earlier, at the 1982 Nairobi Conference of the United Nations Environmental Program. In a presentation given by Tom Burke, then leader of Friends of the Earth UK, he first heard a phrase that was an oxymoron by Greenpeace standards: sustainable development. It was several years before the idea gained wide currency, but for Moore, "The light went on."

"When I understood sustainable development," he recalls, "I realized that the challenge was to take these new environmental values that we had forged and incorporate them into the traditional social and economic values that drive public policy. In other words, it was a job of synthesis."

Moore's new interest in sustainable development led him increasingly far afield of the rest of the environmental movement and estranged him from the organization he had helped found. Inspired by Elizabeth Mann Borgese's book Seafarm, he started a salmon farm and became head of the fledgling Salmon Farmer's Association - only to find himself pitted against Greenpeace, which blamed saltwater aquaculture for polluting the ocean.

In 1991, as his farm was going under due to a salmon glut, he joined the board of the Forest Alliance of British Columbia, a group created by the timber industry to address the accusations of environmentalists. There, he saw his role as a mediator. He proudly points to his stubborn - and ultimately successful - insistence that the industry soften its resistance to national parks and government regulation. At the same time, however, he was attacking the eco crowd, proclaiming that "clear-cuts are temporary meadows."

Moore's enemies have a simpler explanation for his conversion: revenge. After all, he left Greenpeace amid complaints about an autocratic leadership style and abrasive personality. When it became obvious that he lacked enough votes to keep his seat on the board of directors, he went off to farm fish. When that didn't work out, he joined the loggers.

And then there's money. Even 18 years after he left Greenpeace, Moore's business relationships with polluters and clear-cutters elicit disgust from his erstwhile comrades. "He'll whore himself to anything to make a buck," says Paul George, founder of the Western Canada Wildlife Committee. In an email, former Greenpeace director Paul Watson charges, "You're a corporate whore, Pat, an eco-Judas, a lowlife bottom-sucking parasite who has grown rich from sacrificing environmentalist principles for plain old money."

Moore admits he's well paid for his speaking and consulting services. He won't say how well, avowing only that his environmental consultancy, Greenspirit Strategies, has been "very successful because we know what we're talking about and give good advice." Nonetheless, he adds, he refuses to tailor his opinions to please a client. "People don't pay me to say things they've written down or made up. They pay me to tell them what I think." Furthermore, he maintains that his positions - with the exception of his take on nuclear energy (which he now favors) - have hardly changed since 1971. The rest of the movement, he says, has shifted around him.

It's possible that fat fees or wounded feelings give Moore's vehemence an edge. And it's not inconceivable that he's an out-and-out mercenary. But although his critique of latter-day environmentalism strains in a few places, it does have a larger coherence. The unifying principle is simple: "There's no getting around the fact that 6 billion people wake up every morning with a real need for food, energy, and material." It is this fact, he charges, that environmentalists fail to grasp. "Their idea is that all human activity is negative, while trees are by nature good," he says. "That's a religious interpretation, not a scientific or logical interpretation."

Moore's accusation may read like a caricature, but its outlines are readily apparent in environmentalist thinking. Bill McKibben, one of the movement's preeminent intellectuals, warned in his 1989 book The End of Nature that human beings, not through any particular action but simply by becoming the dominant force on the planet, were destroying nature, a "separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted." In effect, McKibben's argument blurs the line between man changing the planet and destroying it.

Perhaps the best evidence of Moore's integrity is his enthusiasm for genetically modified foods. He's not on the payroll of any biotech companies, yet he has become an outspoken GM advocate.

"This is where the environmental movement is dangerous," he says. "Environmentalists are against golden rice, which could prevent half a million kids from going blind every year. Taking a daffodil gene and putting it into a rice plant: Is this Armageddon?"

Even if the benefits of golden rice have been oversold - something Moore doubts - the limitations of one particular and still-experimental crop shouldn't discredit the possibilities of the entire technology. For all GM's risks, he argues, there are greater risks in failing to develop it.

For Moore, the stakes are higher, even, than a half-million blind children. "The Dark Ages are always just around the corner," he warns. "There will be future Dark Ages, and with this antiscience agenda we may be entering one right now."

I'm reminded of this flourish later, when he mentions that he tries to use his experience as an activist against the activists themselves. It's obvious he hasn't forgotten the art of rhetorical one-upmanship: No matter what environmental catastrophe keeps you awake at night, Moore can always conjure a bigger bogeyman.

While describing his childhood, Moore says something telling. His hometown was "a pristine environment, but it was an industrial environment. People were catching fish and cutting trees." This is what separates him from most environmentalists (and all linguists): the belief that there's no necessary contradiction between pristine and industrial, that development is not despoliation.

One of Moore's favorite metaphors is "gardening the earth." He's all for setting aside land as wilderness, but the rest we should not be afraid to use.

Moore, piloting a Greenpeace raft, approaches Soviet whaling ships in 1975.

"When you've got over 6 billion people, you can't just say we'll let nature do its thing," he says. "We have no choice but to garden - why don't we do it better? Why don't we do it more efficiently?"

Moore's notion of gardening encompasses plenty of things that environmentalists wouldn't object to. He's full of uplifting stories about rice farmers in California who have turned their fallow fields into shorebird sanctuaries, and cattlemen in Montana who leave dead cows for grizzlies that might otherwise eat live ones. He's a passionate advocate for the geothermal heat pump, an unfortunately obscure device that uses solar energy trapped in the ground for residential heating and cooling. But gardening also means genetically engineered trees that grow faster, resist disease, and pulp better. It means large-scale fish farming to take the pressure off wild stocks. It means the widespread use of nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels. It means a willingness to distort nature's cycles to fit human needs.

Shortly after we spoke, Moore emailed Paul Watson, a longstanding enemy of his with whom I had spoken a few weeks earlier, and reopened an old feud. Moore accused Watson of, among other things, lying to me about the details of a 1977 seal campaign involving Brigitte Bardot and falsely claiming authorship of Greenpeace's Declaration of Interdependence. The back-and-forth that followed was Vesuvian in its viciousness and stunningly petty, from Watson's end in particular. I was CC'd on the whole thing. Afterward Moore seemed a bit embarrassed.

In what may have been an effort at damage control, he forwarded me some recent posts from visitors to Greenspirit.com, his Web site. One was from a German man disillusioned with his country's Green Party. Another was from a registered Republican who was "always interested in greener ideas if they make sense" and wanted Moore's opinion on the prospects of alcohol-burning engines. A third was from a former Sierra Club development officer feeling "a little disheartened, to tell you frankly, with the environmental movement as it is today." They were examples, Moore told me, "of the kind of response I get very regularly from people who go to my Web site cold. This is a big part of what keeps me sane in this very emotionally charged environment."

The note was poignant, but its subtext was clear: Here was the prophet of moderation, cast out by his colleagues, tending a growing flock of ideological misfits. The legacy - and the curse - of Moore's Greenpeace days is that he knows how little it takes to ignite a movement. He lit that match once, more than 30 years ago. Now he's looking for a fresh spark.

Drake Bennett (drakepbennett@yahoo.com) is a writer based in Boston.

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/moore_pr.html

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