The clincher was when his colleagues decided that Greenpeace’s policy would be to ban chlorine. ‘How can you ban a naturally occurring element?’ Moore wanted to know. An element, he added, which, when added to water systems in tiny quantities, was responsible for the biggest advance in the history of public health, virtually eradicating cholera.
What Moore witnessed was the beginning of a process which would accelerate in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall: the supplanting in the green movement of the old guard of ageing hippies with a new breed of zealots less interested in saving Planet Earth than in destroying the capitalist system. These are the ‘Watermelons’ of this book’s title – green on the outside, red on the inside. You can detect their handiwork in campaign leaflets like the one sitting on my desk from Friends of the Earth.
On the front it says: ‘Profit before planet. Who is making deals with your government?’ Inside, it says:
Oil companies. Supermarkets. Petro-chemical firms. Airlines.
Globally they spend millions of pounds undermining environmental policy.
Big businesses spend serious money on advertising and PR telling us that they are doing their bit for the environment. But away from the public eye they’re spending many millions holding back environmental progress.
Airlines are spending millions to persuade governments to expand airports. Petro-chemical companies are blocking environmentally friendly measures because of the cost to them. Oil companies are funding ‘independent think tanks’, designed to undermine serious climate change research. And they are all doing it for one thing. Profit.
The reason I keep this leaflet on my desk is because it does my work for me. If I’d tried writing some spoof advertising copy myself to show just how brazenly, unapologetically left-wing the green movement now is, I’m sure I couldn’t have produced anything better. I love the way it brandishes words like ‘oil companies’ and ‘airlines’ in the way a hellfire preacher might invoke ‘Beelzebub’ and ‘Anti-Christ’. I love the danger quotes around ‘independent think tanks’, like some massive nudge in the ribs designed to indicate ‘But we the enlightened ones know they’re anything but independent, don’t we, readers?’ I love its insistence, against all evidence, that in the eco-propaganda wars green organisations like Friends of the Earth are plucky little Davids, doing their best against the Goliaths of Big Business. I love the way that final word ‘Profit’ is deployed at the end, as if it were the ne plus ultra of unmitigated evil.
What I love above all, though, is the way the leaflet doesn’t even try to pretend that it’s about anything so fluffy and vague and nice as ‘Saving the planet’. The enemy, it makes palpably clear, is capitalism. And it assumes that its target audience thinks in exactly the same way. Why else would it say such things on a leaflet designed to enlist donations, if it wasn’t what their ‘people’ wanted to hear?
Now, the temptation here is to say: ‘Yeah? And?’ ‘Environmental group turns out to be unrepentantly left-wing’ is an intuition right up there with ‘Pope found worshipping regularly at St Peter’s Basilica’. I understand this temptation. These groups, by their very nature, will tend to appeal especially to the young, sensitive and idealistic. These individuals are likely to be at a stage of their lives where, before they’ve had to deal with children, mortgages or significant tax bills, they still imagine that capitalism is the problem, not the solution.
And perhaps this wouldn’t matter so much if these green groups were still the humble, small-scale, grassroots organisations they were in their early days. The problem is that in the intervening years, these cute, well-meaning, panda-cuddling, three-men-and-a-dog outfits have mutated into global corporate behemoths, with budgets the size of multinational companies. They now wield the kind of power and influence you’d normally associate with medium-to-large nation states.
Probably the most ambitious is the WWF which, in early 2010, was exposed by Christopher Booker and Richard North as being part of an extraordinary scam whereby it planned to snaffle the lion’s share of $60 billion worth of carbon credits. Already, with an annual income (in 2010) of £457 million, the WWF is one of the world’s richest green groups. This scheme – and it still may yet come off – would earn more money for the WWF than the annual GDP of half of the world’s countries. Booker explains:
In 2002, after lengthy negotiations with WWF and other NGOs, the Brazilian government set up its Amazon Region Protected Areas (ARPA) project, supported by nearly $80m of funding. Of this, $18m was given to the WWF by the US’s Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, $18m to its Brazilian NGO partner by the Brazilian government, plus $30m from the World Bank…
The aim was that the NGOs, led by the WWF, should administer chunks of the Brazilian rainforest to ensure either that they were left alone or managed ‘sustainably’. Added to them, as the largest area of all, was 31,000 square miles on Brazil’s all but inaccessible northern frontier; half designated as the Tumucumaque National Park, the world’s largest nature reserve, the other half to be left largely untouched but allowing for sustainable development. This is remote from any part of the Amazonian forest likely to be damaged by loggers, mining or agriculture…
In 2008, funded by $7m from the Moore Foundation and working in partnership with the WWF on the Tumucumaque project, Woods Hole [Research Center] came up with the formula required: a way of valuing all that carbon stored in Brazil’s protected rainforests, so that it could be traded under the [UN’s Clean Development Mechanism]. The CO2 to be ‘saved’ by the ARPA programme, it calculated, amounted to 5.1 billion tonnes. Based on the [UN Framework Convention on Climate Change] valuation of CO2 at $12.50 per tonne, this valued the trees in Brazil’s protected areas at over $60bn…
Unfortunately (for the WWF), the scheme foundered. Partly this was a result of the chaos at the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit. Partly it was as a result of President Obama’s failure – thank goodness – to force through the ‘Cap and Trade’ scheme, which would have helped to establish a global market in CO2. The fact that the WWF even attempted this scheme gives you some idea of the scale on which ostensibly innocuous NGOs are now capable of operating.
Of course, if you sympathise with the political objectives of these NGOs, you might consider this kind of clandestine attempted power grab no bad thing. But if you don’t, then you’ll surely agree that this is a worrying case of power without responsibility and, indirectly, taxation without representation. You didn’t vote for Greenpeace, or the WWF, or Friends of the Earth, or the Sierra Club or the Australian Conservation Club. They never consulted you about how the world should be run or how your money should be spent or how much freedom you should be allowed to have. Yet here they are making these decisions for you all the same.
You see this cropping up in the Climategate files, in a July 1999 e-mail from the WWF’s Adam Markham to the University of East Anglia climate scientist Mike Hulme, regarding a paper that Hulme had written about climate change in Australasia:
Hi Mike,
I’m sure you will get some comments direct from Mike Rae in WWF Australia, but I wanted to pass on the gist of what they’ve said to me so far. They are worried that this may present a slightly more conservative approach to the risks than they are hearing from [Hulme’s counterparts in Australia]. In particular, they would like to see the section on variability and extreme events beefed up if possible…?
This gives you an idea of how presumptuous a modern environmental campaigner can be. Here is a political activist from the WWF behaving as if he is entirely comfortable with the notion of telling a research scientist at a government-funded climate research laboratory how to do his job, as if scientific data were the stuff of advertising.
More egregious still is the influence green NGOs have been allowed over the supposedly authoritative, ‘neutral’ IPCC. Canadian blogger Donna Laframboise – of No Frakking Consensus – subjected the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (FAR) to a crowd-sourcing audit. She found that of the 18,531 sources cited
, at least 5,587 (30 per cent) were not peer-reviewed. Of these non-peer-reviewed references, dozens came not from scientists but from ‘grey literature’ – eco-propaganda, essentially – produced by the activists at Greenpeace, WWF, et al. For example, the sole source for the IPCC’s claim that climate change is linked to coral reef degradation turned out to be a Greenpeace report entitled ‘Pacific in Peril’.
Nor were the 2,500 ‘expert reviewers’ boasted by the IPCC quite as neutral as they might have been. Among those who had an input to just one portion – Working Group III of the Fourth Assessment Report – were ‘three Greenpeace employees, two Friends of the Earth representatives, two Climate Action Network reps, and a person each from activist organisations WWF International, Environmental Defense and the David Suzuki Foundation’.
Can anyone spot the imbalance here? We live in a world where the mainstream media takes its environmental stories directly from the press releases of green organisations. Where the UN and the EU conduct their environment programmes in close association with those green organisations. Where the IPCC, supposedly the gold standard of scientific knowledge on climate change, has been infiltrated and corrupted by those green activists. Where governments and businesses alike live in terror of offending environmental groups and tailor their policies accordingly.
Probably the scariest recent example of this was inadvertently disclosed by the environmental campaigner Bryony Worthington. As Labour peer Baroness Worthington, she is now the face of green activism in the House of Lords. In a September 2011 speech to a seminar called CDKN Action Lab, she revealed the extraordinary extent to which British governmental and political party policy had been dictated by green pressure groups:
But, then something changed, we then had a newly elected leader of the opposition. So David Cameron came in and wanted to reinvent the Conservative Party. And he decided to take an environmental theme. He changed the logo to a tree and he’d obviously listened to the focus groups. He’d realised that the environment was actually an issue for the electorate. So he was lobbied by the Friends of the Earth and he said, ‘Yeah, I’ll deliver you a Climate Change Act. If you vote me in I’ll give you the bill you want that will bring in this legal framework.’ And that was hugely important, that Friends of the Earth campaign that enabled that got the opposition to take up this policy was really important.
At the same time David Miliband had just been made secretary of state for the Department of Food and the Environment and Rural Affairs I think it was then, the bit of government that did climate change. And he was also a young very powerful, dynamic character and he wanted to make his mark and I think initially he was quite sceptical about needing legislation, but there was David Cameron saying he would deliver a bill. So very quickly it became government policy that they would also deliver a bill.
So already you can see that this process for change was dependent on things that you could not have predicted. That you needed certain characters in certain positions to really take this agenda forward. And, the degree of luck really involved was really quite astounding. And, it did really come down to these personalities, these big people who wanted to make a difference.
Yep: that Friends of the Earth she mentioned will be the same Friends of the Earth whose violently anti-capitalist propaganda leaflet we saw earlier. Well, fine: some people do believe that sort of thing and there’s nothing wrong with that. Where you might be inclined to worry, though, is when these people find themselves in the position of being able to dictate not only the environmental policy of the two main political parties (one of them supposedly Conservative), but also one of the most expensive and damaging pieces of legislation in British history – the 2008 Climate Change Act, which, by the government’s own official estimates, will cost the taxpayer £18.3bn a year every year till 2050 on a vainglorious attempt to ‘decarbonise’ the UK economy.
Do you recall voting for Friends of the Earth to decide on your political and economic future? I certainly don’t. But I think there’s at least one area where we can find ourselves in full agreement with Bryony: that the fact such a thing came to pass is indeed ‘really quite astounding’.
What’s even more astounding is that we are daily asked to swallow the line that these massively powerful eco-thugs represent some kind of lovable, tragically malnourished underdog, whose sweet and good intentions are continuously thwarted by the wicked, Big Oil-funded bullies of the heartless establishment.
This is exactly the kind of large-scale popular delusion that the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon analysed so brilliantly in his landmark book The Crowd. It was published as early as 1895, though you’d never guess it, for its insights feel so modern and relevant. That’s probably because it has gone on to influence everyone from Freud to Hitler and Mussolini, using methods still employed by politicians and spin-doctors to this day. One is to keep your message simple: crowds, argues Le Bon, are only as clever as the thickest person within them. Another – for much the same reason – is to repeat that message over and over again. By these means do demagogues create the ‘contagion’ which occurs when an unstoppable idea holds a culture in its grip and when it takes a brave man indeed to try fighting against the current. Le Bon wrote:
When an affirmation has been sufficiently repeated and there is unanimity in this repetition … what is called a current of opinion is formed and the powerful mechanism of contagion intervenes. Ideas, sentiments, emotions, and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious power as intense of that of microbes.
Every idea has its day. In the 1930s, it was the fascistic impulse that swept the world from Hitler’s brownshirts, Mussolini’s and Oswald Mosley’s black shirts and – as Jonah Goldberg has convincingly argued – travelled even as far as FDR’s United States. In the 1780s it was the Revolutionary fervour of the Sans Culottes. In pre-Millennial Europe it was the imminent advent of the End Times. In the 1950s and 1960s it was nuclear annihilation. In the 1970s, it was the coming Ice Age. Today, it’s the widespread notion that Anthropogenic Global Warming is the greatest threat mankind has ever faced and that unless we act NOW we’re all going to fry.
If you wanted to, you could allow yourself to get very, very depressed by these outbreaks of mass stupidity and about the foolishness, credulousness and suggestibility apparently hardwired into a worryingly high percentage of our species. Personally, I don’t. This isn’t because I’m a terribly ‘up’ guy – in fact, I am as prone to melancholia and despair as the next miserable, depressive sod – but since entering the lists in the cause of climate realism, I’ve been struck by something rather uplifting and deeply encouraging: the truth always wins in the end.
Let me cite, by way of illustration, the work of a man from Phoenix, Arizona, named Russell Cook, who describes himself as ‘a complete nobody’. One day Cook set himself the task of tracing the ‘funded by Big Oil’ story to its source – and he discovered some interesting facts. One was that Ross Gelbspan, ‘Pulitzer prize-winning reporter’ (as he was described by Al Gore and several others) has never won a Pulitzer Prize. Another was that the blanket smear about the alleged corruption of science under the direction of the fossil fuel industry can be traced to just one line of one memo, produced as part of a public relations campaign by the coal industry in the early 1990s with the aim of showing – not unreasonably, you might think – that the debate on AGW was anything but settled.
On this wafer-thin foundation, the environmental movement has managed to construct almost its entire propaganda edifice.
What does this tale prove? On its own, very little. Cook – a graphic artist, not a scientist or a reporter – is just another ordinary citizen who has harnessed the powers of the internet to find information which, a decade or two ago, might well have remained buried. The ‘funded by Big Oil’ meme would have spread through endless repetition. And no one would have been in a position to question it.
But now they can. Anyone can. Out there right now are hundreds if not thousands of Russell Cooks tapping aw
ay on their keyboards, following hunches, satisfying their idle curiosity, not taking ‘no’ for an answer and generally living up to the motto of the (now sadly discredited: see next chapter) Royal Society Nullius in Verba. Take no one’s word for it.
And by taking no one’s word for it, they are making some extraordinary breakthroughs. With the internet, the cause of openness and liberty has made its greatest technological leap since Gutenberg invented the printing press. For similar reasons, too. Before printing made books cheaper and more widespread, information could be controlled and guarded by a self-serving, self-perpetuating power elite. Before the internet made it possible for any quantity of data to be disseminated across the world at almost zero expense, it would have been all too easy for the compromised scientists at the UEA and Penn State to keep their skulduggery concealed behind the walls of academia. Without the internet, Climategate could never have happened.
Thanks to the World Wide Web, the citadels of arbitrary and unearned authority are crumbling. No longer is a PhD or a history that goes back 350 years or a Nobel Prize sufficient proof, on its own, against the questing probes of the world’s seekers of truth. If James Hansen or the Royal Society or the IPCC or, for that matter, the BBC or CNBC want their claims to be believed, it isn’t enough for them to hide behind the tired old bluster of ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ From now on, they must convince with hard evidence and show their workings.
This is how ultimately, I believe, the climate wars will be won. Not suddenly and dramatically – Climategates 1.0 and 2.0 were rare exceptions – but slowly through the relentless drip, drip, drip of honest, diligent, liberty-loving citizens doing their bit for the greater cause of openness and truth.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 9