Poor countries should hold Big Green groups and directors liable for deaths, ravage they cause
Guest opinion by Paul Driessen
Fossil fuel and insurance company executives “could face personal liability for funding climate denialism and opposing policies to fight climate change,” Greenpeace recently warned several corporations. In a letter co-signed by WWF International and the Center for International Environmental Law, the Rainbow Warriors ($155 million in 2013 global income) suggested that legal action might be possible.
Meanwhile, the WWF ($927 million in 2013 global income) filed a formal complaint against Peabody Energy for “misleading readers” in advertisements that say coal-based electricity can improve lives in developing countries. The ads are not “decent, honest and veracious,” as required by Belgian law, the World Wildlife ethicists sniffed. Other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) make similar demands.
These are novel tactics. But the entire exercise might be little more than a clever attempt to distract people from developments that could create problems for thus far unaccountable Big Green organizations.
I don’t mean Greenpeace International’s $5.2 million loss a couple weeks ago, when a rogue employee (since fired) used company cash to conduct unauthorized trades on global currency markets. Other recent events portend far rougher legal and political waters ahead for radical eco-imperialists, especially if countries and companies take a few more pages out of the Big Green playbook.
India’s Intelligence Bureau recently identified Greenpeace as “a threat to national economic security,” noting that these and other groups have been “spawning” and funding internal protest movements and campaigns that have delayed or blocked numerous mines, electricity projects and other infrastructure programs vitally needed to create jobs and lift people out of poverty and disease. The anti-development NGOs are costing India’s economy 2-3% in lost GDP every year, the Bureau estimates.
The Indian government has now banned direct foreign funding of local campaign groups by foreign NGOs like Greenpeace, the WWF and US-based Center for Media and Democracy. India and other nations could do much more. Simply holding these über-wealthy nonprofit environmentalist corporations to the same ethical standards they demand of for-profit corporations could be a fascinating start.
Greenpeace, WWF and other Big Green campaigners constantly demand environmental and climate justice for poor families. They insist that for-profit corporations be socially responsible, honest, transparent, accountable, and liable for damages and injustices that the NGOs allege the companies have committed, by supposedly altering Earth’s climate and weather, for example.
Meanwhile, more than 300 million Indians (equal to the US population) still have no access to electricity, or only sporadic access. 700 million Africans likewise have no or only occasional access. Worldwide, almost 2.5 billion people (nearly a third of our Earth’s population) still lack electricity or must rely on little solar panels on their huts, a single wind turbine in their village or terribly unreliable networks, to charge a cell phone and power a few light bulbs or a tiny refrigerator.
These energy-deprived people do not merely suffer abject poverty. They must burn wood and dung for heating and cooking, which results in debilitating lung diseases that kill a million people every year. They lack refrigeration, safe water and decent hospitals, resulting in virulent intestinal diseases that send almost two million people to their graves annually. The vast majority of these victims are women and children.
The energy deprivation is due in large part to unrelenting, aggressive, deceitful eco-activist campaigns against coal-fired power plants, natural gas-fueled turbines, and nuclear and hydroelectric facilities in India, Ghana, South Africa, Uganda and elsewhere. The Obama Administration joined Big Greeen in refusing to support loans for these critically needed projects, citing climate change and other claims.
As American University adjunct professor Caleb Rossiter asked in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Where is the justice when the U.S. discourages World Bank funding for electricity-generation projects in Africa that involve fossil fuels, and when the European Union places a ‘global warming’ tax on cargo flights importing perishable African goods?”
Where is the justice in Obama advisor John Holdren saying ultra-green elites in rich countries should define and dictate “ecologically feasible development” for poor countries? As the Indian government said in banning foreign NGO funding of anti-development groups, poor nations have “a right to grow.”
Imagine your life without abundant, reliable, affordable electricity and transportation fuels. Imagine living under conditions endured by impoverished, malnourished, diseased Indians and Africans whose life expectancy is 49 to 59 years. And then dare to object to their pleas and aspirations, especially on the basis of “dangerous manmade global warming” speculation and GIGO computer models. Real pollution from modern coal-fired power plants (particulates, sulfates, nitrates and so on) is a tiny fraction of what they emitted 40 years ago – and far less harmful than pollutants from zero-electricity wood fires.
Big Green activists say anything other than solar panels and bird-butchering wind turbines would not be “sustainable.” Like climate change, “sustainability” is infinitely elastic and malleable, making it a perfect weapon for anti-development activists. Whatever they support is sustainable. Whatever they oppose is unsustainable. To them, apparently, the diseases and death tolls are sustainable, just, ethical and moral.
Whatever they advocate also complies with the “precautionary principle.” Whatever they disdain violates it. Worse, their perverse guideline always focuses on the risks of using technologies – but never on the risks of not using them. It spotlights risks that a technology – coal-fired power plants, biotech foods or DDT, for example – might cause, but ignores risks the technology would reduce or prevent.
Genetically engineered Golden Rice incorporates a gene from corn (maize) to make it rich in beta-carotene, which humans can convert to Vitamin A, to prevent blindness and save lives. The rice would be made available at no cost to poor farmers. Just two ounces a day would virtually end the childhood malnutrition, blindness and deaths. But Greenpeace and its “ethical” collaborators have battled Golden Rice for years, while eight million children died from Vitamin A deficiency since the rice was invented.
In Uganda malnourished people depend as heavily on Vitamin A-deficient bananas, as their Asian counterparts do on minimally nutritious rice. A new banana incorporates genes from wild bananas, to boost the fruit’s Vitamin A levels tenfold. But anti-biotechnology activists repeatedly pressure legislators not to approve biotech crops for sale. Other crops are genetically engineered to resist insects, drought and diseases, reducing the need for pesticides and allowing farmers to grow more food on less land with less water. However, Big Green opposes them too, while millions die from malnutrition and starvation.
Sprayed in tiny amounts on walls of homes, DDT repels mosquitoes for six months or more. It kills any that land on the walls and irritates those it does not kill or repel, so they leave the house without biting anyone. No other chemical – at any price – can do all that. Where DDT and other insecticides are used, malaria cases and deaths plummet – by as much as 80 percent. Used this way, the chemical is safe for humans and animals, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes are far less likely to build immunities to DDT than to other pesticides, which are still used heavily in agriculture and do pose risks to humans.
But in another crime against humanity, Greenpeace, WWF and their ilk constantly battle DDT use – while half a billion people get malaria every year, making them unable to work for weeks on end, leaving millions with permanent brain damage, and killing a million people per year, mostly women and children.
India and other countries can fight back, by terminating the NGOs’ tax-exempt status, as Canada did with Greenpeace. They could hold the pressure groups to the same standards they demand of for-profit corporations: honesty, transparency, social responsibility, accountability and personal liability. They could excoriate the Big Green groups for their crimes against humanity – and penalize them for the malnutrition, disease, economic retractions and deaths they perpetrate or perpetuate.
Actions like these would improve billions of lives and bring some accountability to Big Green(backs).
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.
These green groups should be made illegal and stomped out of existence. How disgusting! I am ashamed of my government and this dolt who is playing president in WashinKton.
I couldn’t agree more Paul. Great article.
Do I personally have a standing to sue Greenpeace?
NGO’s that do more than deliver good works to the needy are probably not good for society.
The big green industry hides behind NGO status easily because they actually do no real work. And they certainly do practically nothing at all to improve the “green” qualities they claim to back. Big green is a parasitic industry, even less worthy than a lobbying firm- lobbyists are hired guns to improve their client’s ability to withstand government. Big green is basically about fleecing people into funding big green to make noises about a self-declared never ending crisis.
All of these Marxist infected NGO’s are guilty of crimes against humanity and need to be treated as such. There goal really is the destruction of civilization. The death and poverty is an INTENDED consequence of their activities. Technological society must be destroyed in order to make the world safe for socialism.
The statistics for malaria are especially horrifying. It appears Big Green may have been responsible for more human deaths than the Nazis managed. It is time their Goebbelsian bluff was exposed for what it is: a huge conspiracy and hoax.
Imagine your life without abundant, reliable, affordable electricity and transportation fuels.
We are soon there if they get what they want. But in the end, all what they demand is getting supported by others for free (a.k.a. social wellfare), spiced with some power & control to secure their economical “needs”. Collateral damage is not an issue …
Human hating greens ENJOY the suffering and death of human beings.
Other people. Not them.
One can punch holes galore in Greenpeace’s faulty logic. Take sustainabiity, for example.
In essence, whether an energy source is sustainable or not is not only irrelevant, it is often
undeterminable. For example, if you have two energy sources, X and Y and X is exhaustible in , say, 100 years, while Y is inexhaustible, which would you choose? Naturally, neither of the two physical plants that generate power using X or Y are “sustainable” since they have to be replaced after a certain number of years. So is it even correct to call the inexhaustible power source really “sustainable.”? And the two energy sources have different costs and different side effects.
So exactly why would any logical person, regardless of their goals, ever consider using “sustainability” as relevant deciding factor, even if one could determine which energy source was
more sustainable? Now the Greenies seem to think that solar and wind are “sustainable.”
However, fast nuclear reactors are the future and they require less than 1/80th the uranium fuel
that current reactors use. The oceans are full of dissolved uranium that can be extracted at a
price that makes fast reactors actually cheaper to fuel. That uranium source is large enough (and
always growing) to provide fuel for perhaps a million years, who knows? Perhaps until our sun stops shining, which ends solar and wind energy along with it. So doesn’t that make nuclear power at least as sustainable as solar and wind? Nuclear power plants these days are guaranteed to last 60 years, but likely will still be here 100 years from now, while any solar panels installed today will have been replaced probably 5 times during that 100 years. Ditto for wind turbines. Sounds to me like, no matter how you look at it, nuclear power is more sustainable than either solar or wind. Of course, that means nothing when one analyzes which power sources best meet ALL of our needs : economics, power demand requirements, emissions goals, etc. Greenies have chosen “sustainability” as a decisive criteria, but that characteristic, even if it can be defined, is totally
irrelevant. To avoid using a cheap and clean power source like natural gas simply because it will be exhausted in, let’s say, 300 years, doesn’t make any sense,economic or otherwise, since power plants, regardless of type, will be worn out before the end of the supply, so nothing is
lost even when the power supply is exhaustible. Greenies are simply either very ignorant
of the economics of power generation, or they purposefully ignore same.
Deep down, at a fundamental level ‘Big Green’ is anti-human. To them humanity is the root of all ill and needs to be, at the very least, constrained to a minority status. The fact that several million people die each year from easily preventable causes seems to not bother them at all, since it’s just wiping out an ‘invasive species’.
I have long been amazed at the ability of the Greens to be so ruthlessly cruel towards other humans while seeking absolute restoration of a unsullied nature which hasn’t actually existed since Mesopotamian civilization began. It must be some sort of religious blindness that prevents them from seeing that their ideals keep millions in poverty. Most Greenpeace supporters are middle-class people who own SUV’s (but counter their guilt by owning a Prius as well) and have chemically treated lawns in front of their centrally-air-conditioned suburban homes.They make plans for meetings on Chinese-peasant-labor-made iPhones; meetings in which they will weep for pandas and baby seals, but shed nary a tear for starving African children or Indian students trying to learn to read by firelight and learning math by using a piece of charcoal to practice their sums.
Such close parallels between big green and Eugenics.
Same hatred and hidden racism.
The premise that there are too many people on the planet, so easily morphs into too many of the wrong people.
Time we started playing by the eco-nasties true values, let us give them exactly what they profess to desire.
Living free of modern technologies and all such things contaminated by carbon.
I just got to see their “carbon free” lifestyles.
Which of the ‘Green’ organisations bought up chunks of the Amazon Rainforest with supporters donations – and then lobbied the UN and IPCC for the creation of REDDs – which are set to bring them billions in income ??
These organisations are a clear and present danger to mankind and particularly to the poorest on earth.
India is right to treat them as a threat.
If any other group of people carried out what Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth do they would be classified as terrorists.
These nuts are Lenin’s foot soldiers. Note that they themselves give up absolutely nothing, Sacrifice is for the masses.
I have said it before but let me repeat myself: environmentalism is virulently racist and should be called out as such. I lived in the Sahel and the tropics of Africa for four years, and even then (the late 70’s), the demands of the greens on Africa were either through sheer ignorance or malevolence.
I just don’t see the Leninist/Terrorist/Eugenic and other misanthropic parallels. The closest parallel I see is the Judeo-Christian religions of the middle ages; Selfish people using guilt to control the unwashed masses. Many died to support those people’s ego also.
Thank you Paul for a very good post.
In this part of the world, WWF-South Africa and Greenpeace both have great influence on lazy journalists in the MSM, and their wild claims are seldom countered by climate sceptics here who are rather thin on the ground and who are generally too busy trying to survive rather than deal with the endless lip-strumming of CAGW alarmists and salaried green activists.
In one of my past lives I was a ‘medical entomologist’ and would like to add to Paul’s observations about DDT and malaria control. South Africa was one of the few countries in Africa that went back to house-spraying with DDT to control malaria in the 1970s, when a huge epidemic of the disease followed some years of high rainfall. Our local Anopheles mosquitoes that carry malaria are opportunistic breeders in small puddles of water and can spread very rapidly when weather conditions are favourable.
But medical entomology is rather more complicated than swatting flies, and the mosquitoes are a very diverse bunch of critters. Turns out that there are a whole lot of different species that look identical until you squash them onto a glass slide and count the bands on their chromosomes (I swear people are paid to do this!).
We then find we have a whole lot of quite different mosquitoes that reside within the Anopheles gambiae ‘complex’ and the Anopheles funestus ‘complex’. Some of them transmit malaria, but some do not. So you need to know which of them you are dealing with before you bring on the DDT.
The South African public health authorities succeeded in bringing a massive malaria epidemic under control during the 1970s by the judicious use of DDT in the (then) Natal province. But there was an interesting side-effect that I would like to share with WUWT readers, because we are all interested in the interesting things about life on this amazing planet.
The walls of a traditional Zulu mud and wood home provide not only a resting place for mosquitoes to digest their meal of blood and enable their Plasmodium malaria parasites to develop to the next stage where they can be transmitted to the next person bitten.
These same walls also provide a safe haven for the other blood-sucking parasite that has followed humans ever since we found shelter from the weather in warm caves – the infamous Bed Bug, Cimex lecturalius. Stay in any cheap hotel in Africa or India and you will meet these chaps! Big itchy wheals in the morning are a sure sign that you should have paid more for your accommodation!
In South Africa, the DDT killed the malaria mosquitoes pretty well. But the bedbugs quickly became resistant to DDT. So the bedbugs proliferated in houses sprayed with DDT. The local folk would lock their homes and disappear over the hill when the malaria control squads arrived to spray their houses. In the local vernacular, these malaria control teams were known as the ‘bringers of bugs’.
And the real tragedy of this rather convoluted tale, for which I apologise, is that bedbugs transmit serum hepatitis within households and this hepatitis is a precursor to liver cancer that is a major factor in the of early mortality of many Africans.
Nothing in nature is simple, and there are very few quick fixes to our world that do not have unforeseen outcomes.
Best wishes to all of you and to Anthony for providing a place where we can share our diverse views of this amazing planet.
I once wanted a bit of info on some green stuff, so like an idiot I went on to the Greenpeace site on this subject. Talk about superficial toy town information, it was a classic case of: “Never mind the quality, feel the width.”
Greenpeace has a marketing strategy identical to those dodgy Bible Belt religious sects, the only thing that matters is suckering the gullible for everything they can get.
Has Greenpeace protested against this move by Obama?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/2/california-grants-wind-industry-permit-to-kills-ea/?page=1
I’m not holding my breath waiting for a protest.
The future of Greenshirtpeace was foreshadowed in the fate of their fancy Bat Boat:
http://youtu.be/ycyCfK14axw
Brian says: “I just don’t see the Leninist/Terrorist/Eugenic and other misanthropic parallels. The closest parallel I see is the Judeo-Christian religions of the middle ages; Selfish people using guilt to control the unwashed masses. Many died to support those people’s ego also.”
Why you gotta hate, Brian? The Lenninist/Terrorist/Eugenic parallel to Greenpeace’s actions is abundantly obvious to the rest of us. These are people who ignore the suffering and death of others as a direct result of their policies or actions because they believe the end justifies the means. Millions have died and hundreds of millions suffered as a result of, for example, communism. There is no record of Judaism or Christianity doing anything like this, except in extremely limited numbers by hypocrites who claim allegiance to their faith but don’t behave in accordance with its teachings. Take a moment to enlighten yourself on what the various sects of Christianity and Judaism actually teach before parroting the lies and misinformation propagated by so many who worship these lies in order to bolster their own lack of faith or adherence to any organized religion.
John Ledger says, “These same walls also provide a safe haven for the other blood-sucking parasite that has followed humans ever since we found shelter from the weather in warm caves – the infamous Bed Bug, Cimex lecturalius….In South Africa, the DDT killed the malaria mosquitoes pretty well. But the bedbugs quickly became resistant to DDT. So the bedbugs proliferated in houses sprayed with DDT.”
The research I found is that bed bugs are not vectors for malaria – or any other disease. Whereas mosquitos carry malaria and are responsible for terrible outbreaks of other diseases in the Philipines and Haiti right now, for example. Every church we support is experiencing terrible illnesses from mosquito bites.
ref: http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/313844275/mosquito-borne-breaking-bone-disease-spreads-in-haiti
And, FYI, Brian, the “human rights” so important to the constitutions of numerous countries and trans-national organizations are derivations of fundamental principles of Christianity and Judaism; contemplated and codified centuries before the Age of Enlightenment, the Progressive Era, or the great philosophers of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries ever grasped those ideas. If you live in a free, modern, secular society, you can be sure it was originally founded by statesmen whose ideas of governance came directly from their religious notions of the rights and dignity of all people.
O K, you’ve convinced me. I will cancel my monthly donations immediately .
Acknowledged World Expert, Prof Paul Reiter
speaks on mosquito vector borne diseases
Published by EIKE on January 31, 2013
The internationally well most respectable mosquitoes specialist Paul Reiter of the Institut Pasteur in Paris showed that no climate change malaria, dengue and chikungunya carriers to driving to our shores, but the global trade in used tires, in which rain water stops. tabs: “The biggest malaria epidemic of all time with over 600,000 dead broke not in the tropics, but in the 1920s in the far north of Russia from.” But the UN IPCC replaced riders in the drafting of the chapter on health effects of climate change through a inexperienced, but well patronized young scientist who willingly disseminated the tale of the malaria-spreading as a result of global warming.
The Video is from Germany, but Prof. Reiter speaks in English.
I can watch the “Bat boat” getting cut in half everyday
Please release the Prof Reiter, mosquito video I posted above – thank you
Lauren R;
Didn’t think I was hating. The “guilt as a control” part of my comment should be self obvious, as for the collateral deaths in the middle ages, these days they have names like Schism, Reformation, Inquisition, and Crusade.
Agreed with much of your post but I’m getting tied to see golden rice sale pitch among climat septics.Should be sceptical about that too.
‘In order to meet the full needs of 750 micrograms of vitamin A from rice, an adult would have to
consume 2 kg 272g of rice per day. This implies that one family member would consume the entire family ration of 10 kg. from the PDS in 4 days to meet vitaminA needs through “Golden rice”.
Dr. Vandana Shiva
Lauren R says, “Millions have died and hundreds of millions suffered as a result of, for example, communism.”
There is some very important research done by a man named RL Rummel, which demands attention. He has painstakingly assembled the data in thousands of lines of tables comparing the death rates in democracies, authoritarian systems, and totalitarian regimes. It is very clear that authoritarian and totalitarian governments are far more lethal to their own citizens, and are also much more belligerent towards other countries.
Democracies have the least rate of democide – that is Rummel’s term for death by government – and do not go to armed conflict with other democracies. This is plain from the last century. To illustrate, let’s look at the casualties in WWII as broken down in Rummel’s Death by Government:
So the data from the last century clearly shows that the over-powerful government is the worst perpetrator of murder against civilians in their own countries, and a great threat to life and limb. And incidentally, these totalitarians and authoritarians always make a point of first denigrating and censoring, then controlling, then wiping out the religions and folk beliefs of the people. They all share that in common: eliminate religious freedom and belief, which competes with the state. Open societies protect religious freedom and other basic rights, such as property rights and freedom of expression.
Big green acutally likes and invest in fossil fuels. Hooooray! And goodnight.
May 2013
The Guardian
“The giants of the green world that profit from the planet’s destruction”
The Nation
“Time for Big Green to Go Fossil Free”
The Nation
“Why Aren’t Environmental Groups Divesting from Fossil Fuels?“
” Brian says:
July 6, 2014 at 3:25 pm
Lauren R;
Didn’t think I was hating. ….”
Neither does greenpeace.
In South Africa, the DDT killed the malaria mosquitoes pretty well. But the bedbugs quickly became resistant to DDT. So the bedbugs proliferated in houses sprayed with DDT.
=========
sorry but this makes no sense. the bedbugs don’t feed on DDT, so at best it had no effect on the resistant bedbugs. it certainly can’t cause them to “proliferate” any faster than if no DDT was used, unless the DDT killed something that eats bedbugs.
interestingly World Health listed bedbugs as a transmitter of Slim’s Disease in Africa for years. this was all hushed up after Slim’s Disease was confirmed to be HIV/AIDS. Look in the WHO manuals from the 70’s and 80’s if you have any doubts.
@ Martin – Golden Rice issue.
It was not until 2004 that the first field trial was conducted in Louisiana, which proved Golden Rice produced sufficient beta-carotene under farm conditions. Then in 2005, with the help of the Syngenta Foundation, a new variety of Golden Rice was produced that contained 23 times as much beta-carotene as the original strain. This, along with studies on human uptake of beta-carotene from Golden Rice, now provides proof Golden Rice will be effective in preventing vitamin A deficiency with a cup of rice per day. – click my name for source
Vandana Shiva opposes Golden rice, because she claims the women of Bengal grow and eat 150 greens which can do the same, and furthermore sees golden rice as a threat to other local strains of rice plants, who have a “right to integrity” and she claims that we need to abandon “anthropocentric worldview” in favor of “Earth Democracy”.
Martina McGloughlin, director of the biotechnology program at the University of California at Davis angrily compared this to Marie Antoinette, who said that the peasants should eat cake if they don’t have bread. In fact as Patrick Moore and others have pointed out many 3rd World people have only a single bowl of rice per day, and have not got access to these “150” plants. Many of them have never even seen a carrot for instance.
kenw;
point taken, good one.
@ El Nino Nanny
As with most environmental issues, I still firmly believe that we need to improve the economic of affected population. Vitamins deficiency? Need to improve the income to be able to buy variety of food. The past (or current) technology is more than sufficient to feed all humans.
Greenpeace et al are simply following the UN Agenda21 dictum that wealth and economy are bad and everything must be done to break capitalism.
What better way than to destroy fuel supply infrastructure?
This is quite ironic – first of all “Big Oil” and other fossil fuel investors have every reason to like Greenpeace ideas, (although it would appear that Greenpeace et al refuse to see it that way).
Why would the fossil fuel industry like a forced reduction in fossil fuel use? Well like OPEC and every other trader in the worl, they can see that if volume is restricted, the price shoots way up. In fact it is often touted that price hikes be used to lessen the use of fossil fuels. Either way “Big Oil” knows there is no substitute on the horizon for fossil fuels and the demand will always be there. Just like Adam Smith said!
That being the case, the fossil fuel industry will be quite happy to settle for decreased production and high prices – the higher the better. Even if the economy is destroyed, what a huge margin they will achieve for less work!
Just what OPEC tried to do and basically failed.
Of course the UN is working on otherways to destroy capitalism – one is the education system where bogus “Studies for sustainability” courses and the like are inserted into the school curriculum.
If you think this is far fetched check this expemplar which I found on my countries official government education website! http://thedemiseofchristchurch.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/exemplar-3-2008-exam.pdf
Check my blog, there is more!
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
Bravo for India. Introduction of Golden Rice alone would eliminate millions of cases of blindness from poor nutrition at no cost ecologically. It’s shocking that “environmentalists” have delayed this for so long.
Just look at their actions and add up the results of such.
Misanthropes, every single one of them.
Greenpeace started out as a poor eco-terrorist organization and is now a rich eco-terrorist organization. Every principal of Geenpeace needs to be on the US terrorist no fly list.
Brian says:
July 6, 2014 at 3:25 pm
###
You need to get your knowledge of history from other sources besides Christianity hating lefty historians. E.g. The Church strongly condemned the Inquisitions, which were nothing but tools of the nobility to achieve political goals.
Off topic, but related. Greg L*d*n resurrected the old Patrick Moore is not a Greenpeace co-founder meme recently. Bob Tisdale summed up Greg L*d*n to a tee on Dec 20, 2013:
Greg L*d*n appears to be expressing a belief, not knowledge, which is a common trait among global warming alarmists.
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/06/27/who-founded-greenpeace-not-patrick-moore/
The majority of respondents appear outraged. Good!
The threat of civil litigation by the Green industry underscores two important items. There are more. However, this is a post response. So, who is reading.
First, it is an attempt at greenmail. There is no possible follow-up. The green’s counsel would advise that, the greens would have to provide all exculpatory documents and more. Not good. However, the suit’s premise is: get media headline. Then, hope one of the accused rolls over and provides enough cash to make the suit cash neutral.
Second, [and last] this is the Steyn suit on steroids.
So, if you are truly outraged, buy a book at Mark’s website.
My point is: if this is a step-up from the suit against Mark, win the smaller suit and the boogeymen will stop and think.
As full disclosure, I have been buying Mark’s books on the American musical theatre for the last three years. If you like music, the man is an over the top library of the anecdotal history of our culture.
This is a battle: contribute to the small win. The big win may follow.
Buy stuff. It’s good.
Can the UN IPCC, it’s director and administration employees (including the UN General Secretary present and past), and the “authors” (present and past) of its reports be held by law on the complaints of fraud against citizens of member countries and given trial by jury in the Hague ? or in the countries of the citizens who claim injury ?
I.e. If the United Nations (its General Secretary and employees and employee consultants) commits crimes against humanity, then where can a trial by jury be held ?
Is such not an act of war ? And if an act of war should it be answered by an act of war ?
James Strom says:
July 6, 2014 at 4:24 pm
Bravo for India. Introduction of Golden Rice alone would eliminate millions of cases of blindness from poor nutrition at no cost ecologically. It’s shocking that “environmentalists” have delayed this for so long.
>Actually no, it’s not. See some of the posts above that claim these people hate humanity and want to see us culled. The shocking part is that governments have gone along for the ride with them for so long. I would have had this matter settled within a week, the wailing and gnashing of teeth would go on for a short while and then nobody would hear about it again. Once India takes them down they won’t bother with India anymore. You won’t see Greenpeace messing around in Russia anymore either. It’s long past time for the western world to shove them to the extreme margins where they belong.<
@lawrence Todd, 4:42pm, July 6.
Greenpeace started out as a poor eco-terrorist organization, while I agree with the second part of your comment, I wouldn’t call the early years of Greenpeace ‘eco-terrorists’.
In preparing my rebuttal to Greg L*d*n’s absurd claims in the link above, I borrowed from the library Rex Wyler’s Greenpeace, an Insider’s Account: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists and Visionaries Changed the World; http://www.amazon.com/Greenpeace-Ecologists-Journalists-Visionaries-Changed/dp/1594861064 , those early first half-dozen years or so their main concerns concentrated on the nuclear test program in the pacific, whaling and saving seal pups from clubbing.
It was around about ’78-’79 that GP turned to the more political ‘eco-terrorist organization’ when David McTaggart arrived on the scene.
I honestly can’t understand why any country allows organizations like Greenpeace to operate there, attempting to change their politics with foreign money. I can only presume politicians are benefitting from that foreign money in some way.
By all means hold Greenpeace accountable. They need to face reality. Hit them with hard fact after hard fact, and don’t let them run away into their “visionary” echo chambers.
I was trying to put my finger on the difference between engineers, who have to deal with hard facts or else see their structures come crashing down, and politicians, who can’t make anything work. Into my mind’s eye came the 1960’s singing group who changed its name from “Jefferson Airplane” to “Jefferson Starship.” What is the difference? (Besides way too much LSD, I mean.) The difference is that an airplane is a real thing that can actually fly. A starship doesn’t exist, and therefore cannot fly even to the next town, let alone to the next star. This seems an apt symbol for the mentality we are dealing with.
If you try to tell Greenpeace burn-outs they are not dealing with reality they get all haughty and claim you lack vision. You are not “progressive.” However they are the ones who are blind, blind to the extreme lack of practicality in their goals. Their “vision” is not vision at all.
(Don’t get me wrong. I like the idea of starships, and like dreamers. However please show me a working starship before you ask me to give up my pick-up truck. )
When dealing with a person who is “out there,” you need to go jaw to jaw and hit them with hard fact after hard fact. It is cruel to isolate the “out there” in a padded cell when they need contact, but in the case of Greenpeace they are marginalized by a weird sort of self-marginalization. They are a cult; they are yes-men in an echo-chamber. If rescue is possible, they need to be held accountable.
If you break through their walls and invade their ivory tower you will hear all sorts of strange excuses for the fact their ideas simply don’t work. A crashing economy? Oh, that is “redistribution of wealth.” Suffering in the third world? Oh, Well…I won’t repeat and don’t care what they say; I call it genocide, inhumane, and craziness.
Confront them every chance you get.
sadbutmadlad says:
July 6, 2014 at 2:06 pm
If any other group of people carried out what Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth do they would be classified as terrorists.
———————————————-
They are terrorists.
Here in Australia, they broke into a government research station and destroyed an experimental GM wheat crop, and years of research. They perps got a fine (paid by Greenpeace). And, trying to board a Russian oil platform was undoubtedly a terrorist act. Fortunately, Vlad Putin has dealt with terrorists in the past, and I don’t think they’ll be trying that again in a hurry.
They and other groups like them have thrived on the double standard which stupid Western governments have applied to them. A novel legal defence, called “caring about the Planet”, has been allowed to let off vandals, trespassers and thieves with slaps on the wrist, at worst.
Two things should happen to put a stop to this. Firstly, anyone who commits offences against property (or any other offence) should be treated the same. Claiming that you are saving the planet is irrelevant. Secondly, organisations like Greenpeace should either forfeit their tax deductible status or publish comprehensive accounts, and otherwise be subject to the same laws as corporations. That means details about where the money comes from and where it goes, including salaries and perks (like the guy who flew to and from work in Amsterdam). It also means that if you damage someone, you can be sued, and if you try to hide income or assets, you can be prosecuted.
Great work by India, although given the nature of politics and bureaucracy there, whether it has much effect in practice remains to be seen.
what is criminal is that Greenpeace & the likes are having it both ways, with the complicity of the MSM & vested interests. the CAGW policies have caused fuel poverty all over Europe & even in Australia, but this is now being denied as the cause, while more CAGW action is being called for!
4 July: DailyMail: Rachel Rickard Straus: ‘Government’s energy efficiency policies are in free fall’: Insulation and boiler installation plummets 60% in a year, campaigners warn
25,000 people die of the cold every winter, campaign group warns
The Energy Bill Revolution urged an overhaul of the government’s strategy to make our housing stock warmer, warning that the UK has one of the highest rates of fuel poverty in Western Europe, with an average of 25,000 people dying of the cold each winter.
It said that millions of households still need energy efficiency measures installed, at a time when installation rates could fall to their lowest level for more than a decade…
The alliance of 180 charities, businesses and unions campaigning to end fuel poverty has called for home energy efficiency to be made a UK infrastructure investment priority…
Ed Matthew, director of the Energy Bill Revolution campaign, said: ‘The Government’s energy efficiency policies are in free fall.
‘As a result, fuel poverty is getting worse and people are dying.”
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-2680515/Governments-energy-efficiency-policies-free-fall-Insulation-boiler-installation-plummets-60-cent-year-campaigners-warn.html
EnergyBillRevolution: Who’s behind it
The Energy Bill Revolution is a movement of people committed to ensuring warm homes and lower bills for all.
We are an alliance of children’s and older people’s charities, health and disability groups, environment groups, consumer groups, trade unions, businesses, politicians and public figures.
(INCLUDES)
Greenpeace
Climate Bonds
Decarbonize
Friends of the Earth
Save the Children
Low Carbon Communities Network
Sustainable Energy Associaton
WWF
Sandbag
http://www.energybillrevolution.org/whos-behind-it/
Golden Rice is a patent license trap. They could make it truly free, but they only want to be pushers.
I’m not sure of the truth of the story many years ago where Nestle gave free samples of formula to poor 3rd world breastfeeding mothers, who dried up and then had to buy more or have their infants starve.
If Samsung can’t withstand Apple, and Java is used by Oracle to strangle Google, what chance has impoverished farmers, especially when other neighboring crops get the gene and then are owned by Monsato.
They could prove their altruism, but instead appear to be crony capitalist pushers.
more about Energy Bill Revolution:
.pdf (9 pages) E3G: The Energy Bill Revolution
Campaign briefing
Carbon emissions
The Government has a legal obligation to reduce the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050 in order to help combat climate change. If the Government fails to meet its targets, we increase our risk of facing the serious environmental, social and economic impacts of climate change…
The answer is for the Government to use the money it gets from carbon taxes to help make homes super‐energy efficient – with excellent insulation, renewable energy and modern boilers.
Even though these things save money on energy bills and keep our homes warmer, many people simply can’t afford to pay for them – meaning they stay cold. That’s why the Government must do more to help.
Carbon tax revenue
The Government taxes big companies for the damage their carbon emissions cause to people and the environment. There are two main carbon taxes: the European Emissions Trading Scheme and the Carbon Floor Price. The companies eventually pass these taxes on to consumers. Over the next 15 years the Government will raise an average of £4 billion every year in carbon revenue.
These taxes are used by the Government to help combat climate change and wean the UK off dirty fossil fuels…
This money could be used to help all households or just to support the most vulnerable. There is, for example, enough carbon tax revenue to provide a grant worth on average £6,500 to every fuel poor home to make them super‐energy efficient, treating more than 600,000 homes every year for the next 15 years..
***The Energy Bill Revolution is a public campaign, coordinated by Transform UK (www.transformuk.org), a programme of the sustainable development organisation E3G (www.e3g.org).
http://www.e3g.org/docs/Energy-Bill-Revolution-Campaign-Briefing.pdf
About E3G
Governance and Funding
E3G is established in the UK as a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee. E3G maintains full independence in all its activities, and is funded by a mix of foundations, government bodies and NGOs.
E3G is established in Belgium as a not-for-profit association (ASBL) and in Washington as a private company with 501c3 tax exempt status.
We gratefully acknowledge funding from GREENPEACE, CLIMATE WORKS FOUNDATION, AVAAZ, EUROPEAN COMMISSION, WWF, NRDC, ROCKEFELLER BROTHERS FUND, ETC ETC…
http://www.e3g.org/about
E3G’s buddies, TransformUK, the same people who caused the fuel poverty in the first place and now want more spending on CAGW policies. how conflicted can u get?
TransformUK
Transform UK is the home of the Green Investment Bank Campaign.
Ed Matthew
Ed is the founder and Director of Transform UK, which is hosted by the
sustainable development organisation E3G.
Before that he was at Friends of the Earth where he led the Economics Team
for four years which specialised in climate economics.
***The team successfully campaigned for the introduction of Carbon Budgets within the Climate Change Act and the introduction of Feed in Tariffs and the Renewable Heat Incentive
in the Energy Act 2008.
Ed has 14 years experience as an NGO campaigner working on biodiversity and
climate change issues and has also worked for WWF, The Wilderness Society in
Australia and the Environmental Investigation Agency…
Dr Alex Bowen
Dr Alex Bowen joined the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and
the Environment at the London School of Economics in Autumn 2008 as a
Principal Research Fellow…
He has long been involved in aspects of economic policy, having worked in
the Bank of England for sixteen years, most recently as Senior Policy
Adviser, on both monetary and financial stability issues, including
responsibility for the Bank’s Inflation Report and Financial Stability
Review. He first became involved in climate change issues when seconded as
Senior Economist to the team that produced the Stern Review of the Economics
of Climate Change in 2006…
John Alker
John is Director of Policy & Communications at the UK Green Building Council
and has been there since it was established in 2007.
He is responsible for government and political communications, media
relations, campaigning and policy. John has worked as an MP’s researcher and
speech-writer in the House of Commons and in commercial public affairs for
Political Intelligence.
Prior to joining the UK-GBC John led political communications on the EU
Emissions Trading Scheme and sustainable homes campaign for the
environmental charity WWF-UK…
Jonathan Johns
Jonathan founded Ernst and Young’s UK renewable energy, waste and Cleantech
practice where he originated its influential global country attractiveness
indices.
He has advised on in excess of $3 billion of transactions in three
continents covering all major low carbon technologies…
Philip Wolfe
Philip Wolfe is one of the pioneers of the UK renewable energy industry.
He recently founded Ownergy Plc, to provide renewable electricity and
heating systems to businesses and consumers, supported by the government’s
new Renewable Energy Tariffs. He is also a Director of the Renewable Energy
Association and the Aldersgate Group…
Leonie Greene
Leonie Greene is Head of External Affairs at the Renewable Energy
Association and Manager of the We Support Solar campaign.
She co-led the Parliamentary campaign for Tariffs for renewable heat (RHI)
and local power (FITs) with Ed Matthew of Transform UK and Dave Timms of
Friends of the Earth. Previously she worked as Political Adviser to
Greenpeace UK and as a Sustainability Adviser to the Deputy Major of London.
Her Greenpeace report Decentralising Power; An Energy Revolution for the
21st Century was cited by David Cameron as particularly influential on
Conservative energy policy.
She holds an MSc (Distinction) in Environmental Change and is a qualified
yoga instructor
http://www.transformuk.org/en/aboutus/alliance/
The Greenies successfully lobbied to ban DDT because they claim it makes the falcon’s eggshell thinner. Nevermind DDT was saving millions of lives from malaria. Since its ban in 2004, malaria killed around 10 million people. A crime against humanity. I guess the Greenies also want to reduce world population.
[2004? Was the DDT ban not much earlier? .mod]
Re the “bat Boat”
it wasnt a greenpeace boat, it was a sea shepherd boat and it wasnt acting in any way about climate change.
It was in fact trying to stop the murder of whales.
dont tar sea shepherd with the same brush as Greenpeace, SS dont get on with greenpeace at all (too peaceful and too red centred) SS do what they set out to do and the only people they stop are murderers of whales and Dolphins, they certainly dont try and stop people in 3rd world countries from having access to technology that will save lives.
Stupendus says:
July 6, 2014 at 9:08 pm
“SS dont get on with greenpeace at all (too peaceful and too red centred) ”
Trying to damage the retinas of fishermen with high power laser pointers; a warfare technique that is outruled by the Geneva convention… (but of course perfectly fine with environmentalists, as humans are below animals especially when they’re enemy humans right?)
Stupendus says:
July 6, 2014 at 9:08 pm
“stop the murder of whales.”
That reminds me; yesterday I murdered a hundred baby tomatos. They were still seeds; I ate the tomato they were in.
Or should we reserve the word murder only for animals? Well, that’s discriminating against plants, isn’t it.
Or should we reserve it only to animals with big brains? Hmm, don’t the animals without big brains deserve more empathy? After all, they’re handicapped, brainwise.
Maybe it would be best to expand use of the word murder to things; to avoid the impression that we give life an unfair advantage just because we are life forms as well.
DDT banned in US in 1970s. The Stockholm Convention took effect in 2004 with 151 signatory-countries. BTW the inventor of pesticide DDT, Hermann Muller, won the 1948 Nobel Prize in Medicine. It was before the Greenies took over governments.
It’s all about politic. Thus the best thing to do in order to find tendensy as well as aim/intent is follow the money…….
The next thing to do is asking Greenpeace (and WWF for that matter): Where have all the money gone…..
not money used to “save” Polar Bears – they manage on their own
The latest value seaice extent Arctic: 8,553,014 km2(July 6, 2014)
given the figure 22,000 Polar Bears (max estimation) the seaice each Polar Bear have by him-/herself is above 388 square kilometer (close to 389)….. in other words close to three times Long Beach California’s land area and more than double same town’s total area (sea + land) …… I take it that it must be harder being an Polar Bear walking by myself on such a hugh area trying to find a partner than for humans in Long Beach 🙂
Data of Sea Ice Extent July 5, 2014, IARC-JAXA Information System, IARC, UAF P.O. Box 757340 Fairbanks, Alaska 99775-7340 USA
There are some aspects of Green Peace I relate to. Specifically, I wholeheartedly agree with the GreenPeace attempt to stop all whaling. We, as humans have not right, nor need, to “harvest” another intelligent creature like whales for meat, oil, or any other thing of value.
But GreenPeace’s crusade against clean nuclear energy, and coal as a transition fuel, is without any basis as long as sulfur and particulate (soot) emission restrictions are in place (which in China they are not).
So I wish GreenPeace would go back to stopping whaling, and simply advocate for clean energy whatever the source, even nuclear. That would be an honest and do-able strategy.
Are cows, pigs, goats, sheep, rabbits, monkeys less intelligent than whales? We don’t usually eat rabbits and monkeys but they are often subject of lab experiments where they suffer injuries and eventually die. The definition of animal intelligence is debatable. Some biologists think the ultimate measure of intelligence is the ability of the species to survive. In that case, rats would be very intelligent. Man could not eradicate this pest with all the poisons and better mouse traps. And whale would be less intelligent because it could not protect itself against man.
I’m in favor of protecting whales but I don’t find the intelligence argument convincing. I say don’t hunt animals to the point of extinction regardless of their intelligence. BTW whatever your advocacy is, do it legally. Greenpeace is committing crimes in the name of nature.
Brilliant report. Thanks.
At last some common sense about these dreadful NGO’s.
Thank you Paul Driessen for demonstrating how Greenpeace policies are inherently incompatible with fundamental rights. Keep it coming.
NikFromNYC. Greenpeace and ‘Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’ may share the same ancestry, but seem to have some scores to settle.
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/news-and-blogs/news/paul-watson-sea-shepherd-and/
http://www.seashepherd.org/who-we-are/paul-watson-and-greenpeace.html
@Patrick Guinness says:
July 6, 2014 at 8:05 pm
Thanks for the heads-up
E3G are utter shills for green hokum
scroll down to the bottom of this page to see
a scrolling applet which name all the suspect
organisations which fund their nonsense.
http://www.e3g.org/about
Transform UK is just part of E3G, as is evidenced
by the e-mail address of its director ……@e3g.org
Alexa rates e3g at 2,742,865 worldwide,
compared with WUWT rating at 9,398
According to his own c.v. @ LinkedIn, Ed Matthew is
Head of New Economics at Friends of the Earth
London, United Kingdom
Therefore Transform is naught but a puppet of F.O.E. UK.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive”
– Sir Walter Scott
If Greenpeace disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice? Or, as is the measure in the business world, what have you (Greenpeace) done for me lately?
pat says:
July 6, 2014 at 7:39 pm
what is criminal is that Greenpeace & the likes are having it both ways, with the complicity of the MSM & vested interests. the CAGW policies have caused fuel poverty all over Europe & even in Australia, but this is now being denied as the cause, while more CAGW action is being called for!
////////////////
Too right.
In the UK, the politicians and media are spinning that green levies add less than 10% to the electricity bill total. In practice less than 50% of the bill is made up of the cost of supply. Over half of the bill is made up entirely because of the pursuit of green agenda and the drive for renewables.
Some 25% of the bill is made up of infrasture charges. This is decommissioning perfectly serviceable coal generaors and converting them to biofuels, errecting windfarms, coupling windfarms to the grid (which are sited in remote locations far away from the grid). Some 25% represents subsidies for home insulation and save energy incentives and to assiist those in fuel poverty. If the bill was halved there probably would be few in fuel poverty and most of fuel poverty is caused by having driven up the energy costs.
The costs of supply which represents only about 48% of the bill total is also higher than would be the case if they had stuck to conventional coal and gas power generation since it includes the costs of purchasing green energy at a fixed minimum price well above the market price. Also includes the costs of paying for electricity from back up diesel generators who again are entitled to sell their energy at well above market price.
The present debate in the UK is disengenuous in that it sugggests that green levies have increased the average bill by about £70 when in practice it has increased it by about £250, and with more future increases already built into the bill structure in the form of carbon taxes which are adding to the cost of supply (the UK has the highest carbon tax in europe) and of course because of impending brown outs/blackouts energy companies will soon have to pay energy intensive industries to stop working after 4 pm in the winter, so that peak energy consumer demands between 4pm and 10pm can be met. This compensation will be passed onto the bill payer.
The Greens and Politicians are in denial as to how much extra cost has been loaded ontyo consumers. The costs are substantial and this is why intensive energy manufacturing has uprooted sticks, resulting in loss of tax revenues, greater unemployment and welfare payments etc.
There is a big backlash awaiting the Greens and Politicians, and it cannot be swept under the carpet since so many people find that they cannot properly heat their homes and that number will increase as future locked in expenses begin to bite, and the floodgates will well and truly open should brownout occur, and that why Politicians are taking such despeerate meanures (using polluting diesel generators, asking industry to down tools ect). Madness,.
And if winter temperatures continue their downward trend, that will only add to the fury.
Watch this space, it is likely to become interesting.
Excellent article. I hope more countries affected by these malign organisations will follow the lead of India and ban them.
The relationship between Greenpeace and India reminds me of the Soviet Union and China. In the early part of the 20th century, the Soviets financed, trained, and otherwise encouraged the Chinese communists. Chiang Kai Shek was able to keep them in check but, when the Japanese invaded, that was just too much.
Similarly, Greenpeace et al. are financing, training and otherwise encouraging folks who are acting against the welfare of their countrymen. A rich country can withstand the activity of the environmentalists (it is often good) but, for poor countries, it is an extra pressure that they may not be able to deal with.
“Most of the greatest evil that man has inflicted upon man comes through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false” (Bertrand Russell, “Ideas that Have Harmed Mankind” in Unpopular Essays [1950], p. 149).
To most “environmentalists”, deaths of people is a feature, not a bug.
Very thoughtful. Great article but over here in Oregon it is probably hate speech. Yep another socially backward anti development state. We don’t want oil trains going through Oregon now because they “might” have a mishap. We don’t want to export coal because it contributes to imaginary global warming. And we protest and ban GMO everything blindly.
Martin says:
July 6, 2014 at 3:29 pm
“… I’m getting ti(r)ed to see golden rice sale pitch among climat septics.Should be sceptical about that too.
‘In order to meet the full needs of 750 micrograms of vitamin A from rice, an adult would have to
consume 2 kg 272g of rice per day.”
You are a doctor! Is zero better than half the required vitamin A? And are you assuming the people eating it are all 80kg westerners for your ‘dosage’?
I can’t see for the life of me why we can’t ignore these green zealots. I would say a campaign of speeches across Africa and maybe a widely distributed newspaper to tell these people exactly what is going on and why they never will have development and prosperity if they don’t kick these haters out.
Here’s a simple question
Which has helped humanity more, Exxon or the Sierra Club?
My guess is that if either helps mankind, it is just a coincidence. Large organizations and their executives have a high likelihood of being psychopaths. They are in it for their own good, even if they claim to work for some moral cause.
commieBob says:
July 7, 2014 at 7:30 am
“My guess is that if either helps mankind, it is just a coincidence.”
The only thing wrong with the thinking here is that by design, we do what’s best for us (as do the fishes, birds and beasts). Don’t be shocked by the unattractiveness of this state of affairs. In the corporate world, this innate selfishness is the economic engine of the world. In commie economics, businesses don’t work and that is why the system fails. Whether we think sinistras are all lovely humanists, is immaterial – it doesn’t work as a system but it keeps reforming itself because they have a better slogan. Commie ‘light’ is the halfway condition- the social folk- it only works for as long as it takes to use up the productive sectors’ money. Once disincentivized, all falls apart. Indeed, incentives to do as little as possible are too strong.
Combatting the NGOs – who are of this persuasion – is like saving the Nile crocodile – they don’t appreciate it and put up a fierce offense (the croc can be excused), but having not thought things through to the end game , NGOs don’t realize the symbiosis of the set up. Once they have succeeded in their goal to kill free enterprise and prosperity, they kill themselves, too.
“I don’t mean Greenpeace International’s $5.2 million loss a couple weeks ago, when a rogue employee (since fired) used company cash to conduct unauthorized trades on global currency markets.”
I do not believe the person went rogue.
Who is it and has anyone actually spoken to that ‘person’?
Feeding all the poor people of the earth seems like a futile exercise, feed them and give them medicine and the next thing you know you have fat happy people on our hands…and we all know what fat happy human beings do, They breed, Next thing you know they are overpopulated skinny and sick, Then we give them more food and medicine and so on and so forth
Subdermal birth control is probably the best thing we could offer them
Reality is complicated. Ayn Rand was just as wrong/right as Karl Marx. Anyway, most thinking people will agree that most of us have trouble consistently doing what is ‘best’ for us. 🙂
We need rules (written surely but also in the form of social norms) and we need people to willingly follow the rules, otherwise, the strongest psychopath takes over and everybody else lives a miserable existence (and we get the tyrant’s rules). The USofA became great because of entrepreneurial people working hard and creating wealth, not because our ancestors cheated and stole their way to prosperity.
Like I said, it’s complicated. YMMV
John:
At July 7, 2014 at 11:59 am you write
OK. I understand that to mean you are a member of Greenpeace.
I write to explain reality to you and your fellow Greenpeace members.
The fallacy of overpopulation derives from the disproved Malthusian idea which wrongly assumes that humans are constrained like bacteria in a Petri dish: i.e. population expands until available resources are consumed when population collapses. The assumption is wrong because humans do not suffer such constraint: humans find and/or create new and alternative resources when existing resources become scarce.
The obvious example is food.
In the 1970s the Club of Rome predicted that human population would have collapsed from starvation by now. But human population has continued to rise and there are fewer starving people now than in the 1970s; n.b. there are less starving people in total and not merely fewer in in percentage.
Now, the most common Malthusian assertion is ‘peak oil’. But humans need energy supply and oil is only one source of energy supply. Adoption of natural gas displaces some requirement for oil, fracking increases available oil supply at acceptable cost; etc..
In the real world, for all practical purposes there are no “physical” limits to natural resources so every natural resource can be considered to be infinite; i.e. the human ‘Petri dish’ can be considered as being unbounded. This a matter of basic economics which I explain as follows. bold
Humans do not run out of anything although they can suffer local and/or temporary shortages of anything. The usage of a resource may “peak” then decline, but the usage does not peak because of exhaustion of the resource (e.g. flint, antler bone and bronze each “peaked” long ago but still exist in large amounts).
A resource is cheap (in time, money and effort) to obtain when it is in abundant supply. But “low-hanging fruit are picked first”, so the cost of obtaining the resource increases with time. Nobody bothers to seek an alternative to a resource when it is cheap.
But the cost of obtaining an adequate supply of a resource increases with time and, eventually, it becomes worthwhile to look for
(a) alternative sources of the resource
and
(b) alternatives to the resource.
And alternatives to the resource often prove to have advantages.
For example, both (a) and (b) apply in the case of crude oil.
Many alternative sources have been found. These include opening of new oil fields by use of new technologies (e.g. to obtain oil from beneath sea bed) and synthesising crude oil from other substances (e.g. tar sands, natural gas and coal). Indeed, since 1994 it has been possible to provide synthetic crude oil from coal at competitive cost with natural crude oil and this constrains the maximum true cost of crude.
Alternatives to oil as a transport fuel are possible. Oil was the transport fuel of military submarines for decades but uranium is now their fuel of choice.
There is sufficient coal to provide synthetic crude oil for at least the next 300 years. Hay to feed horses was the major transport fuel 300 years ago and ‘peak hay’ was feared in the nineteenth century, but availability of hay is not significant a significant consideration for transportation today. Nobody can know what – if any – demand for crude oil will exist 300 years in the future.
Indeed, coal also demonstrates an ‘expanding Petri dish’.
Spoil heaps from old coal mines contain much coal that could not be usefully extracted from the spoil when the mines were operational. Now, modern technology enables the extraction from the spoil at a cost which is economic now and would have been economic if it had been available when the spoil was dumped.
These principles not only enable growing human population: they also increase human well-being.
The ingenuity which increases availability of resources also provides additional usefulness to the resources. For example, abundant energy supply and technologies to use it have freed people from the constraints of ‘renewable’ energy and the need for the power of muscles provided by slaves and animals. Malthusians are blind to the obvious truth that human ingenuity has freed humans from the need for slaves to operate treadmills, the oars of galleys, etc..
And these benefits also act to prevent overpopulation because population growth declines with affluence.
There are several reasons for this. Of most importance is that poor people need large families as ‘insurance’ to care for them at times of illness and old age. Affluent people can pay for that ‘insurance’ so do not need the costs of large families.
The result is that the indigenous populations of rich countries decline. But rich countries need to sustain population growth for economic growth so they need to import – and are importing – people from poor countries. Increased affluence in poor countries can be expected to reduce their population growth with resulting lack of people for import by rich countries.
Hence, the real foreseeable problem is population decrease; n.b. not population increase.
All projections and predictions indicate that human population will peak around the middle of this century and decline after that. So, we are confronted by the probability of ‘peak population’ resulting from growth of affluence around the world.
The Malthusian idea is wrong because it ignores basic economics and applies a wrong model; human population is NOT constrained by resources like the population of bacteria in a Petri dish. There is no existing or probable problem of overpopulation of the world by humans.
So, every aspect of your post is wrong.
Richard
“” tz2026 says:
July 6, 2014 at 7:53 pm
Golden Rice is a patent license trap. “”
Any Hollywood film maker or Western musician would tell you how difficult it is to enforce a copyright (patent) in the Non-Occidental world.
If you want a knock-off, look to the East.
If Monsanto gives it free,
They’ll have a tough time collecting money later, One can’t get blood from a storm.
If you feel corporations incapable of altruism, then Monsanto’s monetary incentive to give would be tax write-offs.
Monsanto is not evil. Profit seeking is not evil, Capitalism is not evil.
To Let human beings starve over ideology, now that’s evil.
Storm = stone.
@ richardscourtney
First never assume, I hate Greenpeace as much as anyone that hangs around here ;0)
Second anyone that would say resources are unlimited on a rock floating through space probably doesn’t have both oars in the water, that’s just a silly statement, kind of like global warming will cause global cooling.
Also you might notice I said we should OFFER them birth control not insist they use it, The intelligent members of the group will except that offer and with any luck will find a better path
A little help is good, unlimited help just creates a group of lazy people
John:
In your post at July 7, 2014 at 1:28 pm you reply to my having written
You reply to those truths by saying
Nobody has suggested that “resources are unlimited on a rock floating through space”. Indeed, that “rock” is not “unlimited” because it will be consumed by the expanding Red Giant Sun in some billions of years time. But so what?
The reality is that for all practical purposes all resources can be considered to be “unlimited” because of the economic facts I stated and have again stated in this post.
I explained how and why you are mistaken about population. And it is your failure to understand which results in your desire for people other than you to be forced to continue in poverty. Your suggestion that your eugenic solution should be voluntary is beneath contemptible.
Richard
Richard
“humans find and/or create new and alternative resources when existing resources become scarce.”
If this statement does not say that resources are unlimited I don’t know what does, you are saying that when we run out of one resource we will find another and another and another….unlimited
Birth control is voluntary pretty much in all societies why is it contemptible? eugenics does not apply here, offering choice allows people to exercise free will, since the beginning of time humans that make good choices survive and those that don’t die
John:
I replied to your first post and you misread that reply so (at July 7, 2014 at 1:49 pm) I clarified what I wrote.
You have come back with your post at July 7, 2014 at 2:48 pm that again fails to understand my clear statements.
I wrote
You reply
NO! Please try to understand the meaning of “for all practical purposes”. I explained it in some detail with examples of food and fuels in my first reply to you (at July 7, 2014 at 12:20 pm).
As I said
We are going to run out of the Earth, so should we panic? Think for yourself.
And please try to read what I wrote.
Richard
Richard
What are you saying? either you are saying that population control isn’t necessary because we have unlimited resources, or you agree with me in that there is a limited amount of resources and population control/cap is a good idea, which is it?
space is a resource, and it is not unlimited, the population can only continue to grow until we run out of arable land to grow food, you say the population will level out on its own? interesting I have never met someone that could see the future ;0)
I am happy to read and consider anything you post, For that matter I have been reading and considering everything this site has to offer since 2007, However you won’t change my mind on a few topics, and two of them are conserving resources and population control, I feel much better about 7 billion people living on this planet comfortably, Than 15 billion living in squalor and surviving on dwindling resources, waiting for the next resource to be developed, its simple math for me, We can put money in the bank for a rainy day, or we can burn through everything we have and HOPE that there is just one more resource to sustain us, placing the future of humanity in the hands of someone that claims clairvoyance, In that there will always be one more resource that can be developed is just foolish on so many levels
RobRoy:
“Blood from a storm” ain’t bad.
John says:
July 7, 2014 at 3:53 pm
“… agree with me in that there is a limited amount of resources and population control/cap is a good idea, ..”
________________
I’ll recommend to you the same course of action that I give to all of those who think that too many humans exist and must be reduced. You find a high building and show us the way. Be sure and pin a note on your shirt. What’s that? It’s some other life that you mean to eliminate?
There is no anecdotal evidence which you can offer that proves any sort of overpopulation of humanity, nor end of resources.
@ Alan Robertson
why do so many people that post here believe that population control requires that some people need to die before they have lived out a full life, you should feel silly for jumping to that conclusion
John says:
July 7, 2014 at 6:28 pm
@ Alan Robertson
why do so many people that post here believe that population control requires that some people need to die before they have lived out a full life, you should feel silly for jumping to that conclusion
___________________
Why do you think that current methods of “population control” do not involve the premature deaths of human beings? You should feel ashamed for pretending otherwise.
I think we are talking about birth control here not killing people, try to stay on track please
John says:
July 7, 2014 at 6:51 pm
“I, think we are talking about birth control here not killing people, try to stay on track please”
________________
You stay on track and quit trying to change the subject, but since we’re there…
Do you think abortion isn’t advocated and practiced by the “population control” crowd?
Almost every single tenet of modern green advocacy leads to the deaths of human beings. You have aligned your thinking with those whose implemented policies are causing the deaths of others.
Well, technically, we should be talking only about YOUR permanent mandated birth control: Of yourself first obviously. But also of every one of your brothers and sisters (if any), your extended family, your parents, and your children.
Surely, YOU would not want any of these to contribute to the world’s future problems……
After YOUR entire family is sterilized, I will listen to any of YOUR discussions of future population growth of others.
“” inMAGICn says:
July 7, 2014 at 4:50 pm
RobRoy:
“Blood from a storm” ain’t bad.””
I know, a two letter typo?
I wish it meant something profound, but no.
It was raining outside when I typed it.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
😉
@ Alan Robertson
I haven’t aligned my thinking with anyone, This is simply my idea of what might work to keep this planet in good shape for future generations, limit couples to two children, stabilize the population at 7 billion, require birth control, no unwanted pregnancies and no abortions
How sad you are, That you jump to the worst possible conclusion
@ RACookPE1978
You also are jumping to the worst possible conclusion, stabilizing the population means that all couples will continue to be able to have two children, no one needs to be sterilized unless they want to, my wife decided that two was enough and got her tubes tied,
I think that you may be confused about the difference between population control and population reduction, perhaps you should look it up ;0)
John says:
July 7, 2014 at 7:23 pm
“How sad you are, That you jump to the worst possible conclusion”
___________________________
That’s the third time you’ve tried to lay a trip on me.
I see you’re doing it to RC also. That’s all you’ve got, You certainly haven’t come up with a defensible idea and in typical anonymous troll fashion, you aren’t being honest with your answers, either. You claim that you haven’t aligned your thinking with anyone, yet you are openly advocating well- known statist utopian goals. You are advocating the use of force against individuals to make them comply with your ideas, which aren’t originally your ideas in the first place. You’ve let others do your thinking for you and either you aren’t smart enough to realize it or honest enough with yourself to admit it.
Go ahead and lay some more trips- your anonymity doesn’t give you cover- you betray yourself with your own words.
You aren’t worth talking to.
I stopped donating to Greenpeace and WWT years ago. I do contribute to IFAW though. Not RSPCA who put on chickens ‘Accepted by the RSPCA approval’ Read the small print. Chickens have enough space to flap their wings’ (They are in bigger cages?) Gee a bit far from free range eh? However, during the Copenhagen climate change conference, Tivula residents cried out our island is being inundated by the sea because of climate change. However, they never applied for the UNCCF because the island governors thought it was too complex. Yeah. But good on India.
Now get rid of Pachauri, who said to save the planet we should give up eating meat.
John:
You have had complete freedom to make your case overnight and you have not. Instead you have repeatedly posted ignorant and wicked nonsense which ignores every point made to you by several people.
For example, at July 7, 2014 at 6:51 pm you write to say in total
As I explained in my first post to you, what you claim to “think we are talking about “ would kill most of the world’s poor when they get ill, infirm or old.
At July 7, 2014 at 12:20 pm I wrote to you saying
You have ignored that and said you want population control which would kill the poor by removing their ‘insurance’.
And my paragraph which immediately followed that ‘insurance’ paragraph said
So, you say you want population reduction and I told you the one certain, proven and repeatedly demonstrated method to obtain it: population reduces if you reduce poverty. You have ignored that and have advocated an exceptionally cruel method to cull the poor.
And to compound your evil, you have ignored my explanation of WHY population reduction would be a mistake. The explanation was my paragraph that followed my paragraph stating that rich countries need to import people from poor countries. It said
So, you have ignored that your call for genocide is not needed even if your desire for reduced population were acceptable.
John, you are an especially wicked and obnoxious troll who is advocating totalitarianism and genocide. Please crawl back under your bridge because your presence is befouling WUWT.
Richard
Third world countries want more population, but they do have a high mortality rate too. Not just from famine, but civil unrest, where farmers existing on subsistence farming get removed either by genocide or by being displaced. It sickens me John to hear what you have to say without any understanding of the cultural environments some countries have to endure. Women are baby bearers and work in the fields or sold into prostitution by their parents, AIDs killing parents, leaving a younger generation to thrive only in western organizations help or with increasing poverty on their grandparents. When they offered Indian men free vacsectomies they found the same men came back again to get money. China’s one baby law, favored male babies, not females. As far as asylum seekers or refugees, in Australia they are being turned back as they are mostly economic refugees not true asylum seekers. Rich countries do not generally offer poor people jobs, they want skilled people who are head hunted generally from other developed countries and are educated. Other than of course the ever growing illegal immigrants crossing from Mexico. But these undeveloped countries are undeveloped for a reason, and they want to keep the masses ignorant and uneducated while the elite live well on their labor. We have rules against exploitation of women, children and girls, so don’t blame us for other culture’s religious or even civil rights disputes. We didn’t cause them. Good on you, Richard.
@Alan Robertson
“That’s the third time you’ve tried to lay a trip on me.
I see you’re doing it to RC also. That’s all you’ve got,”
Thats really all I need, Anyone that reads this will see that you choose to see the worst possible outcome. I dont need to convince anyone of that
Also it seems to me that you are the troll here, I put my ideas out there, and instead of discussing them, Each of your posts attacked me on a personal level, perhaps you should take a look in the mirror, then come back and offer some usable information, or at the very least read up on proper edicate for holding a discussion with someone.
@ richardscourtney
You have had complete freedom to make your case overnight and you have not. Instead you have repeatedly posted ignorant and wicked nonsense which ignores every point made to you by several people.
Richard this might come as a complete shock to your system, But I made my last post at 7:30 pm At that point I shut my computer off (yes some people do that) and turned my tv on and spent the rest of the night with my family, then I went to bed slept 7 1/2 hrs, got up went out to my shop and worked 4 hrs and then came in for lunch and turned my computer on…. so the fact that you’re upset that I didn’t respond immediately means that you are on WUWT 24/7?
“I think we are talking about birth control here not killing people, try to stay on track please.”
“As I explained in my first post to you, what you claim to “think we are talking about “ would kill most of the world’s poor when they get ill, infirm or old.”
I really don’t see how slowing population growth is going to kill old people, Again this is just as silly as global warming will cause global cooling, we really need to start somewhere, and as of yet, No one has offered any solutions in this conversation just personal attacks, The three of you have come at me like its a territorial thing, This is an open forum correct or am I wrong?
@ richardscourtney
And richard so you don’t get upset with me again for not responding fast enough, I will be shutting my computer off AGAIN, and spending the rest of the day with my oldest son helping him replace the sink in his bathroom, so he can get his wife off his back ;0)
Have a great day ;0)
John:
I think you must be the most egregious troll to have crawled into WUWT so far this year.
You have spewed the most despicable evil, ignored all information from a variety of people who have corrected your errors, and pretended that my detailed post at July 8, 2014 at 12:29 am which is here was a complaint at your failure to make rapid reply.
In reality you made several replies and it was their content I objected to when I wrote
I can do no better than to repeat what I wrote as the conclusion of my post which you pretend to answer
Unfortunately you did not and have continued to pollute WUWT with your falsehoods and bile.
Richard
richardscourtney says:
July 7, 2014 at 12:20 pm
John:
“At July 7, 2014 at 11:59 am you write…”
Nice summary of the nature of humans vis a vis resources and trashing of the still grasping Malthusians. I would add one more word on resources. The combustible fuels, of course, are consumed (given some hundreds, thousands and millions of years, they are actually renewed but not quick enough for our purposes). However, virtually all the metals that have been mined are variously close at hand for re-use. It is said that nearly all the gold mined since antiquity is presently in bricks and products that are likely to be recycled. When with the Geological Survey of Nigeria in the 60s, I was invited out to see what a lease owner called native tin. I envisioned some natural smelter like a forest fire or lightning strike having reduced cassiterite to metallic tin, but it turned out that the tin miner working the stream began to concentrate amulets made of tin! An archeological survey revealed the bases of clay beehive furnaces used by early artisans and probably a flood picked up some jewellery in the process. Nevertheless, we recycle iron and steel, copper, aluminium, glass, plastic, etc. etc. One day we will manage this process with even more efficiency. The concept of recycling built right into product design has been under development and a Japanese group has designed a future sustainable society that will be continuously recycling resources. Obviously your human ingenuity clause covered this.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2008/aug/05/japan.recycling
@ richardscourtney
Ya see there you go again richard with the name calling and rude behaviour, I’m starting to believe you’re not capable of having a polite conversation with someone that disagrees with your malarky on every level, The thought of someone that believes there is a never ending supply of resources and the population can go unchecked just boggles my mind ;0)
I do get to walk away with something of value however, I read the wiki page on Malthusianism, and I can tell you for a fact that has nothing to do with how I think, I had never even heard of Malthusianism before yesterday, I never once implied that we should force anything on anybody perhaps you should go back and reread what I have posted, Your tendency to jump to conclusions and try to put words in my mouth is distasteful
Also I didn’t ask you to comment on my original post, and looking back if anyone is a troll here its you, you have made several attempts to drag me down to you level of name calling and rude comments, you should just give up and move on, I have very thick skin and I find you mildly amusing at best
You have a great day
John
For a start, how about a $2B class action?
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/wivenhoe-classaction-eyeing-2bn/story-e6frg6n6 1226982216097?nk=14643e9bd2b96aa3e1bf4a89b173cc82
Operators of Wivenhoe dam were just adhering to the party line, of every government bureaucracy at the time. All had then bought into the Australian environmentalists’ scare: “It will never rain again”.
While local governments were squandering billions to construct desalination plants, to save the public from the delusion, operators of a dam full of irreplaceable water were hardly going to flush it.
The desalination plants are still costing the public billions per year – just to sit idle, because there’s now more water than there is place to store it. Yet the public has been locked into picking up the tab, whether or not the plants operate.
Who were the masterminds behind this debacle?
John says:
July 8, 2014 at 4:10 pm
” I never once implied that we should force anything on anybody perhaps you should go back and reread what I have posted, ”
_____________________
Maybe you should take your own advice…
—————–
John says:
July 7, 2014 at 7:23 pm
“This is simply my idea of what might work to keep this planet in good shape for future generations, limit couples to two children, stabilize the population at 7 billion, require birth control,..”
@ Alan Robertson
Yep you got me on that one ;0) and two seconds after I hit the submit button I was kicking myself, if there was an edit option I would have changed “require” to “offer” before anyone had a chance to see it, but I have said offer in several other place during this exchange so we will stand on that
John, It doesn’t matter. Wouldn’t our thinking ultimately take you to the point where force would be necessary? Your ideas have been expressed here by others, many times and the road of that sentiment ultimately ends the same way, with dead people. Consider that the idea of global warming has been promoted by the same people who have long stated their desire to reduce human populations. Consider that the premature deaths of over 30 million people have already been attributed to efforts to mitigate CO2 emissions. Consider that for the past several years, at least 25, 000 people (mostly old, poor) have died annually in Great Britain, one of the most highly developed nations on the planet, because those citizens could no longer afford to heat their homes after their government drove energy costs beyond their reach. Now we see our US government following the same road. Where is the hue and cry? You won’t hear it, because the utopian statists/elitists have the upper hand, right now and they are implementing their policies. Do you honestly believe that those deaths are not by design?
When I told you that you have aligned your thinking with those whose implemented policies are causing the deaths of others, I meant it. It wasn’t a put down, it was a fact of which you continue to plead ignorance. That’s unfortunate. You did not invent the idea that too many humans exist, the idea has been pummeled into you from many sources, whether you are aware of them, or not and now, you are expressing those ideas as if they were your own. You have made yourself useful to them, through your willing acceptance of their ideas.
I’ll state again, that you can not present any sort of evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that too many human beings exist now, or will in future. Here are some thoughts from some of the people whose ideas you have been expressing here. But first, some of the linked quotes are out of contest and do not reflect the speaker’s intent. and should not be included, but I didn’t make, not can I alter the list: http://www.c3headlines.com/global-warming-quotes-climate-change-quotes.html
pimf… Wouldn’t your thinking
John it isn’t the western industrialized countries that have a population problem vs resources, and you don’t seem to understand that contraception is something developing countries don’t understand or wish it on themselves as a solution for population growth. More children means more workers. That’s why they have AIDS. But women who are not educated, how can they use the pill, and men wouldn’t be made sterile, it threatens their man hood. Your suggestions are naive and also a bit simplistic. These impoverished people are not in control of their own destinies unfortunately, and suffer the natural culling process of child deaths and disease. Look at 17th century and 18th century England particularly London. One in five children survived until they were 5, thankfully the powers of be made their futures a little brighter just!
John:
I write to ask a clarification.
At July 8, 2014 at 4:10 pm you write
No, I have polite conversations with people deserving of respect, and I learn most from those who disagree with me.
You are an especially obnoxious troll who refuses to go away. I would insult you if that were possible but it is not.
Please explain what you think to be the proper way to address an egregious, anonymous troll who (a) asserts desire for genocide
(b) which can only be enforced by totalitarianism
(c) and who states reasons for his/her/their/its assertions which are falsehoods
(d) while ignoring all evidence and argument which refutes the falsehoods
(e) and who misrepresents those who point out the lies he/she/they it is telling.
Richard
@ richardscourtney
(f) none of the above ;0)
You see, There you go again trying to put words in my mouth, I would suggest you go back and learn a little more from those that you disagreed with, Only this time try to pick up some pointers on how the get your ideas across without being rude and obnoxious,
You could take a lesson or two from bushbuny and alan robertson, They both just put on a silk glove, gave me a noob slap and called me an uneducated buffoon, and I was ok with that, because they didn’t come across as coarse jack handles with narcissism issues.
Funny I never thought that a simple comment about handing out free birth control would inflate to this level…anyways, I think they are doing just that in many places combined with education, and it seems to be working, another thing that might improve the human condition would be to remove religion from the equation, and teach science instead of the idea that a big hairy arm came down out of the clouds and plopped a bear down on a mountain top ;0)
John says:
July 9, 2014 at 9:10 am
So, in your future world of apparently free choice and low energy costs and no government domination and free birth control.
What happens when 1 billion parents decide they want a third child.
And another 10,000,000 parents with one child find they are going to have twins.
And another 1,000,000 parents find they are going to have triplets.
And 1,000 parents find out they are going to have quads.
@RACookPE1978
Well if we are going to turn this into a “what would john do thread”.. ok ill play
we except what mother nature gives them, it can’t be predicted
And for the 1 billion wanting a third child, I say if you have to do it do it, but I would hope that the free education that is being handed out with the free birth control would have a growing effect and they would make a conscious decision not to have that third child, just like my wife and I decided to stop at 2
I’ve made no reference to energy or government control
John:
You really are incorrigible. Who is paying you to conduct this egregious trolling?
I asked you for clarification on how you think I should address so contemptible a troll as you and your response at July 9, 2014 at 9:10 am denies all of your repeated behaviours in this thread then adds this additional falsehood
I have not put any “words in your mouth” (which I would like to wash out with soap). You cannot quote or cite my having done that because I have not.
But you have repeatedly “put words in the mouths” of me and others. Indeed, my post at July 7, 2014 at 1:49 pm which is here consists solely of my corrections to your words you put in my mouth.
Troll posting as “John”, there is only one thing you can now inform to provide some input to this thread before you leave: say who is paying you.
Richard
richard
I’m mystified that you are unable to see what a bully you are, and now you are adding paranoia to the list by thinking i’m being paid, also I would point out that most of what you have thrown at me are tired old comments that were being thrown around back in 2007 when I started reading here, you seem to copy what people have said before you instead of coming up with something original
so to feed that burning curiosity you seem to have about me, I’m saying that because you have tossed out the very weak anonymity card a couple of times ;0)
I am here, my name is John, and I have my own opinions, I graduated high school in 1981, spent a few years working in residential construction, didn’t like the way things were ran, Quit my job with $7000 in the bank and started my own business, now I’m 52 running my own shop (not related to the building industry) and feel as though I have scratched a decent place for my self in this world
Before 2007 I didn’t know anything about climate and solar cycles and such, my world was much smaller back then, And looking back you could say I was blissfully ignorant, I have received my entire education on these matters from WUWT
Now one would think that because this is my sole source of information on these topics, That I would agree with every word you have said, but I don’t, life has taught me to conserve everything and not to live an extravagant life style even though I can afford too, all those years when I wanted to buy a big gas guzzling 4 wheel drive monster to fit in better with the other builders, I stuck with 6 cylinder mini cargo vans, consolidated all my trips for supplies to lower my fuel costs. At home I kept my thermostat turned down and made sure my home was airtight, made sure trips to the store were also organised to reduce fuel cost (to my wifes constant objections) no SUV’s or hummers in my driveway
So as you can see (hopefully) I am not a troll, I am a regular guy leading a regular life, who picked up an addiction 7 years ago… WUWT. I spend as big a portion of my free time as I can reading articles and then reading all the comments, sometimes skipping the article and going straight to the comments to see what some of my favorite posters are talking about, open threads are like a smorgasbord for me. I just love linkage.
So as you might well imagine that making what seemed like a legitimate post and then running into a tool box such as yourself, was a little discouraging, especially after years of reading so many well thought out replies and rebuttals on every topic, From posters that showed an endless supply of patience with people that have less world knowledge and have opposite views, you went from explanation to ticked off troll in 2 steps, so I played the narcissism card, because you seem to think that anything that flows out of that hole under your nose should be immediately accepted by all, and when it isnt, you go straight to name calling and banging your keyboard with clenched fists, so if you reread everything you have said about me, you should see that your magical clairvoyant powers have failed you, and you couldn’t be more wrong, I’m guessing that will be a tough pill for you to swallow ;0)
Ok enough about me who are you? ;0)
John:
STOP TROLLING! You claim you are not an employed troll, but that seems very improbable in the light of your series of blatant lies in this thread .
I replied to your original post with calm clear argument.
Your response was offensive drivel which distorted what I had said.
I continued trying to reason with you until it became clear that you are merely an egregious troll.
I am NOT “bullying” you. I am saying that I don’t want to have WUWT polluted by your despicable bile. Indeed, I do not know how I could have been more clear about this.
You have told nothing about you, not even your name. And you would have known who I am if your claim to have been a WUWT follower for 7 years were not yet another of your lies.
Richard
John:
At the end of your untrue diatribe at July 9, 2014 at 12:13 pm
you say
Yes! At last! I have been telling you that since yesterday. Act on it.
Richard
@ richard
What makes you think I haven’t read your posts before? This seems to be your usual tack,and I have skimmed over you in favor of reading something interesting on more than one occasion
because you seem unwilling to talk about yourself, I did a google search and I believe this is you http://www.desmogblog.com/richard-s-courtney
And I will say one thing for sure, If that is you, your credentials read like ONE LONG SLOW TRAIN WRECK, I’m actually upset with myself for giving you the time of day, especially after I read that you are an Accredited Methodist Preacher, coal activist, and affiliated with the tobacco industry, I simply will never listen to a “man of the cloth” LOL, religion has no place in the modern world, and certainly no place in any scientific discussion
I really can’t see any reason to continue chatting with you.
Have a great day
John
Bye John and forever hold your piece! So you think John, Greenpeace is faultless in its insistence that we humans are ruining the planet in our greed for money and energy supply. And the poorer and less affluent societies are the drudges in this world behest to ruthlessness of the richer countries? And we should share our money with them as compensation. We do give aid you know to help some countries, and when there is a disaster we actually send help. If you remember, Australian fire fighters were sent to America once to help fight fires. One thing you forget too, where there is a strong economy, countries have to have a good military defense system, to guard against others who wish to have our resources. We even lend our armed forces to countries who need help at the expense of our troops lives. No Utopia on this world unfortunately. If you honestly think we who are supporting those who are against alarmistism who are striving for a one world government, and unilateral income distribution, then give half your gross earnings from your business to those who have less, and offer them free condoms or free sterilization so this funding will go further. You think religion is worthless in this world, maybe for you of course, and that is your choice. You tell that to the Sunni Iraqies
who want to make it legal to follow Sharia laws. (Honor killings etc) and you will see that sometimes religion can be used as a weapon to serve ruthless despots. And that is why democratic countries separate religion from the State and give freedom to worship your dog if you wish. This thread is not for you to criticize people for their opinions and many religious people have scientific knowledge which is not your forte. So be a good lad and stop being rude to Richard. Thanks Anthony for being so patient.
John says:
July 9, 2014 at 4:36 pm
” I simply will never listen to a “man of the cloth” LOL, religion has no place in the modern world, and certainly no place in any scientific discussion”
_____________________
Of course, you won’t listen. That would cause you to have to think about the path you have chosen and direct your gaze at self- reflection, a dangerous path upon which you might stumble and betray your notion of yourself as a little god (little g,) influencing and controlling the fates of others, wielding the power of life and death, deciding who lives, who doesn’t.
You haven’t been able to defend your ideas and have not responded with any justification for your claims, because you can’t think of any proof or justification and it hasn’t occurred to you that you haven’t developed the ability to go that deep into yourself. You’ve never learned to think beyond your feel- good acceptance of the thoughts of others which you’ve come to believe were your own The very idea that there may be principles of universal consciousness which are beyond your shallow existence has never even crossed your mind. There can be no god higher than yourself, in your little mind, secure in its own little mirrored ball, reflective externally, but hollow inside. Step outside that ball and look into the mirror, if you dare.
Newton, Farraday- the list is long- devoutly religious, all.
@ bushbunny
If Anthony is watching and has chosen not to send me a warning or outright ban me its because my email is the one given to me by my ISP not an anonymous gmail account or the likes, something that a troll would use, I would also guess that he may have checked my IP to make sure its not hopping around the globe, I would believe that is enough for him to allow me to continue to defend myself against the crazy unwarranted attack from richard, he has accused me of lying being a paid troll and hiding behind anonymity, so I gave him a boatload of information about myself hoping to ease his paranoia, but he came back again with lyer,troll evil etc. etc.
I’m beside myself that he is unable except the fact that I’m an everyday Joe with little or no agenda, I feel its my right to disagree with him on this single topic, I’m guessing that on other topics CO2, climate change, AGW, we are in complete agreement, most of what I read on WUWT I completely agree with.
Now on to your post, how did we get from birth control to unilateral income redistribution ? the only thing I can say to that is I’m not interested in giving my money away, I worked hard for what I have, I do give out of pocket to charity’s some, but what lets me sleep at night is knowing that some of the tax money I pay goes to aid sent overseas, that’s a respectable number
also I have never said the word sterilization so please can we drop that from the conversation
“Sunni Iraqies
who want to make it legal to follow Sharia laws. (Honor killings etc) and you will see that sometimes religion can be used as a weapon to serve ruthless despots.”
This is why I said religion should be taken out of the equation, every major religion has caused untold suffering and pain on the poor people of the world and the rich through wars, why do you feel the need to bring this up I agree with what you say?
“This thread is not for you to criticize people for their opinions and many religious people have scientific knowledge which is not your forte.”
But this IS a thread for criticizing ME and MY opinions? also I have freely admitted that I don’t posses the same level of knowledge that most here do, but my opinions still count, nothing can take that away from me!
OK so there you have it now have at it ;0)
@ Alan Robertson
Holly cow allen what part of OFFER didnt you get?
“You haven’t been able to defend your ideas and have not responded with any justification for your claims, because you can’t think of any proof or justification”
Well actually allen in between defending my self, I have given my thoughts to you and everyone else, I will say I have little interest in a philosophical discussion with you, but a little bit…It might surprise you at just how long I have been taking a long look at myself, the younger me was rather ruthless and took advantage where I could, the old me is actually rather laid back and harmless
cheers
John
Friends:
I see the egregious troll has linked to a smear site which lies about me. In the unlikely event that anyone wants some true information about me then they can read it on pages 25 & 26 of this
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/courtney_2006_lecture.pdf
It is a little dated because I am now retired so have closed my Consultancy which does not now have any clients.
Please note that I am posting this to correct the untrue smears provided by the troll.
Richard
Anonymous troll posting as John:
You seem to have had complete success in destroying this thread which was about Greenpeace.
Congratulations on your superb trolling.
Was it Greenpeace who employed you to do this or some other anti-human NGO?
Richard
@ richard
I should hope you know that saying the same thing over and over won’t make it true. also I have a post awaiting moderation that might give you some peace, we will have to wait and see if anthony lets it fly
This might apply to you, seeing how you continue to say the same things about me over and over that simply aren’t true
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Also the link I provided was the top google search, And there is one thing I have learned, the agw crowd and the sceptic crowd are exceedingly good at digging up dirt on each other, I have to believe there is a fair amount of truth in that link, The internet is an interesting place you will drag that baggage with you for the rest of your life
I have tried to walk away from this but I really can’t let you continue to call me a liar, we may be stuck in an infinite loop ;0)
John:
At July 10, 2014 at 12:25 am you say
Well, in that case apologise for your lies and I will accept your apology.
Richard
John,
No one agrees with you, not even the co-founder of Greenpeace.
You are the odd man out. Readers here are more intelligent than the average blog reader, and much more scientifically literate. That is why you are losing your futile argument.
@ richard
Well richard last night two of my posts were held up in moderation and I figured anthony was dropping the hammer on me, so I sent him a note asking if he was going to let my posts fly, also in the same note I gave him my full name and address, he replied back a few hrs later and said my comments were stuck in the spam folder and said “There was no active suppression on my part.”
So I’m tossing the apology card back on your side of the fence, and I believe I have proved I’m not a liar or a troll, the rest of the things you said I will let go but the liar and troll thing, you need to make amends for that behavior.
[Tough. Wait for moderation like everybody else. .mod]
John vs. Richard is getting soooo old here.
[Tough. Wait for moderation like everybody else. .mod]
sorry I had 15 posts go through without moderation yesterday, and anthony told me two were in the spam filter I guess I [assumed] [that] going through was the norm and the spam filter was the exception
It wont happen again
[Life happens. Then you die. 8<) WUWT has been under a well=organized spam attack for many days now, with several hundreds of spam posting being inserted in various threads each day. It takes a while – a long while sometimes, to find the real messages inside that malicious backed up pipeline. .mod]
Troll posting as John:
At July 10, 2014 at 8:37 am you say to me
You are a multiple liar (e.g. see here) who has trolled this thread from its subject which actually is “Holding Greenpeace accountable”. Your every behaviour here has been despicable.
If there were something for me to apologise then I would as I (sadly often) have.
Richard
John,
If you use our gracious host’s name (or certain other terms) then your post will await moderation.
Thanks for the info alan ;0)
OK thats it then, you sadly remain and old man who clearly doesn’t know the difference between, telling the truth and telling a lie without proof, looks like some of that info on the link I provided is a little more true than you would care to admit, sad that a man of your age has lost all his integrity, seems like a bad way to wind up your last remaining years
I’m going to apologize for all the rude things I said but not the lies, all of them were said as reactionary comments not from hate or malice
Sorry Richard .S Courtney
The list… these are the ones I feel bad about
Coarse Jack Handle
Coarse Jack Handle with Narcissism issues
And for thinking about calling you a Cantankerous Old front Door Nob ;0)
(edit) But not the lies you say I told
John:
I acknowledge that you refuse to apologise for your several lies and leave the matter there.
Richard
John regarding religion, anyone in their right mind would say the Sunni attacks are not characteristic of Islam. But what about the other main religions, you targeted Richard as a minister in your comments. Greenpeace were active environmentalists and conservationists, and I used to contribute to them once. But they have gone outside their mission now and have become political. I just think you enjoy the attention, and having a go at worthwhile members of WUWT, and personally, I think you are a troll as Richard says, as you seem to be here not to speak up for Greenpeace but to ridicule anyone that comments on this blog, especially Richard. So let’s get back to the thread, eh. I don’t think you are American, I reckon you are either British or Australian.
Anyway, who cares. How is the weather in Cornwall Richard, warmer now I hope.
bushbunny:
Thankyou for your post at July 10, 2014 at 8:57 pm.
Sunny and warm here now. My son has informed me that nearby Trebah Gardens has become the leading visitor attraction in Cornwall: perhaps my mention of it on WUWT added to that (grin) but it means more cars trying to pass on our narrow roads (wince).
Richard
Absolution for assassins? Not without precedence, I suppose. Christ forgave his executioners and the criminals on Golgotha with him.