Co-Founder of Greenpeace: Greenpeace Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity

Just hit the search box on this blog for Patrick Moore's name and you'll see I've long been a fan of his.  Here he goes again, impressing me with his logic:

“If you plan to destroy test fields to prevent responsible testing and development of Golden Rice for humanitarian purposes, you will be accused of contributing to a crime against humanity. Your actions will be carefully registered and you will, hopefully, have the opportunity to defend your illegal and immoral actions in front of an international court.” -- Dr. Ingo Potrykus to Greenpeace, February 2001

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines “crimes against humanity” as acts that are “committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack - intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.”

According to the World Health Organization between 250,000 to 500,000 children become blind every year due to vitamin A deficiency, half of whom die within a year of becoming blind. Millions of other people suffer from various debilitating conditions due to the lack of this essential nutrient.

Golden Rice is a genetically modified form of rice that, unlike conventional rice, contains beta-Carotene in the rice kernel. Beta-Carotene is converted to vitamin A in humans and is important for eyesight, the immune system, and general good health. Swiss scientist and humanitarian Dr. Ingo Potrykus and his colleagues developed Golden Rice in 1998. It has been demonstrated in numerous studies that golden rice can eliminate vitamin A deficiency.

Greenpeace and its allies have successfully blocked the introduction of golden rice for over a decade, claiming it may have “environmental and health risks” without ever elaborating on what those risks might be. After years of effort the Golden Rice Humanitarian Project, led by Dr. Potrykus, The Rockefeller Foundation and others were unable to break through the political opposition to golden rice that was generated directly by Greenpeace and its followers...

It is clear by the facts that Greenpeace is guilty of crimes against humanity as defined by the International Criminal Court.

Why do they hate their fellow man so much?

Let The Kids Go Blind

Vandals (probably activists) destroyed a trial of Golden Rice in the Philippines.  Golden Rice is rice that has been genetically modified to have more Vitamin A.  Since rice is prevalent in the diets of so many of the world's poor and malnourished, the distribution of Golden Rice, with its Vitamin A, could prevent blindness in hundreds of thousands of innocent children in the world each year.  To some people, though, its provenance is all the excuse they need consign those children to darkness.  Facts don't matter to crazies:

Since their introduction into commercial production over 17 years ago, GM crops have become the most rapidly adopted agricultural technology in the history of mankind, precisely because they provide large benefits to consumers, farmers and the environment. These crops have an exemplary safety record, making them the safest agricultural technology ever deployed. They have already helped to ameliorate many of the kinds of damage caused by traditional agriculture and reduce contamination of corn with fungal toxins. Not a single one of the many claims of negative health or environmental effects uniquely made against GM crops has withstood scientific scrutiny.

Regulatory systems around the world mandate the thorough testing of new GM crops to ensure that there are no unintended, harmful effects either from their cultivation or their consumption. These are the kinds of controlled tests that IRRI and the Philippine Department of Agriculture are conducting with Golden Rice. A few days ago, a field test was maliciously destroyed.

New technologies often evoke fears that they are dangerous. Destroying a new technology based on such fears without testing its safety and efficacy can deprive humanity of a very valuable and much-needed advance. In this case, many more millions will needlessly suffer blindness and death because Golden Rice was not available to them. No group, regardless of its intentions, has the right to condemn a technology without evidence. It is an unconscionable criminal act to destroy a field trial conducted in accordance to international safety norms.

The best thing you can call those who destroyed this trial is "luddite". I myself wouldn't use that best term.

Environmentalism and the Skeptical Mind, Part 4

Two organizations, whose websites can be found here and here, both claim that Greenpeace uses unlawful and dishonest tactics to promote a far-fetched message. They rail against genetically engineered foods, ignoring the fact that foods and animals have been cross-bred for millenia. They put fake "warning labels" on foods in stores. They participate in anti-corporate activism, to include having members arrested in the 1999 Seattle WTO riots. Additionally, they've become a shakedown organization.

My favorite example of their extremism combined with lack of science is "golden rice". Golden rice is a genetically engineered product that takes a daffodil gene and implants it into rice. So what, right? Well, this golden rice has vitamin A. Lots and lots of vitamin A. About a half million children in the world go blind each year due to vitamin A deficiency, most in Africa and Asia. What food could these children be eating? Golden rice. The creator of this food has offered to give it away and let people plant it. Greenpeace and its belief in "Frankenfoods" fought the idea and convinced governments not to allow it, and golden rice still isn't grown. Children still go blind. All for a political cause.

But enough about those yahoos. Let's talk about the Kyoto Protocol.

I'll bet if you asked 10 people on the street what the Kyoto Protocol is, none would know. If you asked 100, only a few would know. Yet, this is the biggest thing going in environmental circles--and fortunately the US has nothing to do with it.

The protocol, agreed to in Kyoto, Japan, aims to curb the air pollution blamed for global warming. Over 140 countries, accounting for 55% of greenhouse gas emissions, have ratified the treaty--but developing countries like China, Brazil, and India, not known as bastions of environmental care, are exempted. For those that have signed on, the protocol demands a 5.2% reduction in greenhouse emissions (from 1990 levels) by 2012. Each country set its own specific reduction amounts, and the US, though not a signatory, has agreed to reduce emissions by 7% between 2008-2012.

Interestingly enough, there's no clear plan how to do this. Canada and Japan have both said they are unsure if they will be able to meet their targets. In fact, Canada's emissions are currently 20% higher than they were in 1990, making their hurdle that much higher. Kyoto dictates goals, which may or may not be met. There's no roadmap given to achieve the goals, and no reward for meeting them or sanction for failing to meet them. Kyoto is just words on paper.

An attempt to extend Kyoto past 2012 was made last December--and this was before the protocol even went into effect!--met with failure. India and China refuse to negotiate, and the US still will not sign. Italy, an EU member, also refused to consider limits past the 2012 date. Kyoto is dead in the water, and it's just begun.

Bjorn Lomborg, discussed in Part 3 of this "series" I'm writing, also addresses Kyoto. He thinks the costs of implementing Kyoto will far outweigh the benefits. For the $150 billion to $350 billion annually that Kyoto would cost--in dubious "renewable energy" projects and doubtful technologies--Lomborg says we could provide everyone in the world with basic health, education, water, and sanitation. Where would the money be better spent?

Two "events" marking the implementation of the protocols are worthy of mention due to their humorous content. On February 16th, 35 Greenpeace protesers stormed the International Petroleum Exchange in hopes of paralyzing oil trading at the London exchange. But they themselves were attacked by the traders, many of whom were under age 25! The Times Online had this quote from one of the protesters:

"We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs," one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. "I've never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view."

Well maybe, jack***, if you were talking instead of blowing whistles and foghorns and releasing rape alarms tied to helium-filled balloons so they couldn't be easily silenced, maybe if you weren't trespassing and trying to disrupt what to these people was very important business, maybe you might have found someone more amenable to listening to your point of view.

Oh, the trading continued and 27 of the protesters were arrested. :-)

The 2nd funny event comes to us from Belgium. Dang, have the Belgiques ever done anything worthwhile? Well, Belgian schools were asked to support "thick sweaters" day to celebrate the implementation of the protocol. Live From Brussels reports, via Joanne Jacobs:

"The idea was to turn off the heating in the school buildings for the day, to save energy, and to have everybody wear extra clothing instead, including thick sweaters." (Darren says: Jimmy Carter, anyone?)

"So far, so good. My wife follows the lesson plan, explains it all to the kids and turns off the heating in her building. But then, for some classes, her pupils need to go to the other, larger school. There, they also have 'thick sweater day'. But they didn't manage to turn off the thermostat.

"Result: super hot classrooms. Talk about global warming.... And to make things even worse, because everybody was wearing extra clothes and things were getting really unbearable, apparently some teachers even opened the windows of their classrooms, with the heating still on full-blast...."

You gotta love this symbolic crap.

The earth's climate has been changing naturally since the place was created. We know that during dinosaur times, areas that are non-tropical today were pretty tropical. We know there was an ice age several millenia ago. We also know that Europe experienced a mini-ice-age as recently as a few centuries ago. We don't know for sure if any temperature changes are the result of man-made action, Mt. Pinatubo, or natural cyclical variations of climate.

Heck, we don't even know if it's going to rain next Sunday. And these people want to tell us what the climate will be like a century from now?


Update: Here is some environmentalism I can get on board with.

Update #2, 3/6/05 9:52 am: An article from the Detroit News about the end of government-imposed environmentalism and the success of wealth-created environmentalism.

Update #3, 3/18/05 5:18pm: Here's more on the worthlessness of the Kyoto Protocol.

Greenpeace and Golden Rice

USA Today has an op-ed about Greenpeace and its opposition to golden rice--at the cost of hundreds of thousands of blind children a year across the planet.

Good on USA Today for publishing that piece; I just want to point out that I've been writing about golden rice since 2005.

If You're Against This, You Must Be For Childhood Blindness

The anti-science zealots on the left harangue against so-called Frankenfoods with no evidence of harm whatsoever.  Their campaign against Golden Rice has meant that children all over the developing world continue to go blind because of Vitamin A deficiency.  Let me restate that:  the unfounded complaints of weirdos cause children to continue to go blind.

In this post I linked to a story about a worrisome banana plant virus.

What do those two paragraphs above have in common?  This:

Vitamin A deficiency kills hundreds of thousands of children worldwide; hundreds of thousands more go blind, says a researcher. That's why his team has developed a "super banana" it aims to grow in Uganda by 2020. Cooking bananas are an East African staple, so Prof. James Dale and his team in Australia genetically engineered a version of the food that's packed with alpha and beta carotene. The body converts the two into vitamin A, AFP reports. The super bananas are now being sent to the US for their first human trials, which will take six weeks and are backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Time notes; details of the bananas' impact on vitamin A levels are expected to be released by year-end.

"We know our science will work," Dale says. If the bananas get the green light in Uganda, the micronutrient-enriched crops could next be grown in Rwanda, Kenya, and Tanzania. One big difference between regular bananas and the super variety: The edible part of the latter is more orange than what we're used to.

Will unscientific complaints stop these bananas, too?  Will these bananas be able to resist the virus?  So many important questions.

Environmentalism and the Skeptical Mind, Part 2

"My bologna has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R..."
"America is turning 7UP!"
"Weebles wobble but they don't fall down!"
"Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us. All we ask is that you let us serve it your way!"

After all these years I still remember those jingles from commercials. The tunes are still in my head! And who doesn't remember the "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" commercial?

There are two other commercials I remember from my childhood. One showed a (fake?) Native American, paddling his canoe and walking around places strewn with litter. At the end of the commercial a single tear fell from one eye. Another commercial had a young boy saying that if we didn't conserve, there'd be no gas left when kids his age were able to drive--and I was about his age. Those two commercials had an obvious environmental intent, the first for the greater social conscience and the second to scare people.

Which brings me to Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace. Moore grew up in Winter Harbour, a village on the northwestern edge of Vancouver Island. His father and grandfather were loggers and his mother's family were fishermen. He grew up in an area where industrialization and nature coexisted peacefully. He earned a PhD in Ecology.

He protested American nuclear tests in the Pacific. He was famously photographed sitting on a seal pup, preventing it from being clubbed to death. He set out in dinghies to oppose Japanese whalers. He co-founded Greenpeace.

In 1986, he left the organization he co-founded back in the 70's. Some call him an eco-Judas, turning his back on everything he believed in. He'd rather think of himself as the apostle Paul, who converted to Christianity after railing against it for most of his life. But he has a valid explanation for why he left. Like Ronald Reagan, who said that the Democrat Party left him and not vice versa, so it is with Patrick Moore and Greenpeace.

In the mid-80's, Greenpeace was looking for other issues to legitimize its existence. They'd succeeded in getting their founding principles adopted by mainstream citizens. Greenpeace "lost its science and logic and became driven by something else: an anti-corporate, anti-globalist agenda." The endgame came with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 when "an influx of peace activists and Marxist ideologues into the green movement destroyed the remnants of a science-based agenda," said Moore. "Most environmentalists have [now] adopted zero-tolerance positions in order to remain adversarial. The only way to stay adversarial is to adopt even more extreme positions." He accuses Greenpeace of using agenda-based "science" to misinform and distort the truth--junk science. He also claims that they are more concerned with maintaining problems so they can push so-called solutions that further a leftist political agenda.

So what does Moore advocate? Sustainable development, which he defines as providing for human needs in ways that reduce negative impact on the environment while also being socially acceptable and technically and economically feasible. He now supports nuclear energy and is an avid proponent of genetically engineered foods, especially golden rice. He's still against unsustainable practices in whaling, fishing, waste dumping, nuclear testing, etc, but believes there are sustainable practices or alternatives available. He's capable of listing them :-)

So we have an avowed environmentalist, a PhD in Ecology, co-founder of Greenpeace, who says that today's activists are philosophically unmoored and blindly technophobic. He claims that "their idea is that all human activity is negative, while trees are by nature good. That's a religious interpretation, not a scientific or logical interpretation." Now that he accomplished all of his early goals, he wants to stand for something instead of always against something. He's still proud of what he accomplished in Greenpeace--he doesn't sound much like a turncoat to me.

He sounds like someone we should listen to. Check out his web site here.