Being attacked by Greenpeace should be considered a badge of honor. In May, the Heartland Institute was the subject of a Greenpeace news release that described the Chicago-based think tank as “a free-market, anti-regulation right wing think tank” funded by leading American corporations and reputable foundations.
That same month, Heartland Institute sponsored a ground-breaking conference on climate change in New York. More than 500 of the world’s leading climatologists, meteorologists, economists, policy analysts, and others attended. Its keynote speaker was Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic.
Having lived under communist rule, President Klaus understood the true nature of Greenpeace and other environmental organizations. He is an outspoken critic of the global warming hoax. He, along with many others, has identified the real reason for the climate alarmism endemic to the environmental movement.
Its agenda has always been to drastically reduce the human population, to attack consumption as evil, and its rabid hatred of capitalism. “The climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotence, in knowing better than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong,” says Klaus.
In the early 1990s, an encyclopedic book, “Trashing the Economy”, by Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb, closely examined the many environmental organizations, among which was Greenpeace. It was and is quite revealing, noting that Greenpeace was founded in 1971 by a group of draft dodgers living in Vancouver, Canada. “Confrontation, civil disobedience, inflammatory lies and physical harassment are Greenpeace’s methods…”
Greenpeace gained fame protesting the whaling industry and went on to attack the timber industry. It gained further momentum attacking genetically modified seed stocks responsible for increasing the yield of crops that has since been recognized as preventing famines. The book called Greenpeace “the archetypal ‘Eco-Thug’ organization that behaves as if it were above the law of all nations.”
The May Greenpeace news release attacked Heartland’s citation of a petition signed by “more than 500 qualified researchers whose research in professional journals provides historic and/or physical proxy evidence” that debunks the global warming hoax.
Among signers of the petition attacked by Greenpeace are Dr. Fred S. Singer and Dennis Avery, two scientists with impeccable credentials, but who Greenpeace said were not climate scientists. Dr. Singer, is the former director of the National Weather Satellite Center and a renowned atmospheric scientist from George Mason University. Avery is a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute, a prolific policy analyst, and an author of a book debunking global warming.
Among the founders of Greenpeace was Peter Bahouth who is on record saying, “I don’t believe in the market approach…When companies have a bottom line of profit you won’t have them thinking about the environment.” Capitalism is about profit and from that comes jobs, dividends for investors, research and development of new technologies, and the opportunity to improve both the individual’s wealth and that of entire nations.
Another founding member, Dr. Patrick Moore, and ecologist, has long since disowned Greenpeace and the environmental movement. In an interview, Dr. Moore was asked why the movement “got it wrong?” He responded saying that, “The environmental movement abandoned science and logic somewhere in the mid-1980s, just as mainstream society was adopting all the more reasonable items on the environmental agenda.” He went on to note that, “Environmentalism was always anti-establishment,” citing Greenpeace’s opposition to the forestry industry, genetically modified crops, and other example of commerce and modern technology.
The big difference between Greenpeace and the Heartland Institute is that the former has never been interested in the truth, scientifically or otherwise, while the Institute has been dedicated to both the best that science has to offer and to our nation’s leadership in defending capitalism against authoritarian regimes and the failed communist/socialist economic systems.
Greenpeace, a multi-million dollar operation with branches around the world, has demonstrated the capacity to manipulate public opinion, but it does so in the fashion that the entire environmental movement has adopted, the unrelenting attack on the motives and credibility of those who step up to present the truth with the belief that it is the best defense against the endless flow of lies with which the environmental movement has become identified.
