The Wardman Wire

Iain Dale has been commenting (over vigorously perhaps!) on a refusal by Greenpeace to engage in a debate about Global Warming - effectively “there are no questions left to be answered, so we are not interested”.

I’m not commenting on the particular letter and debate, but I have been taught by history and the behaviour of the organisation to treat Greenpeace sourced material and views with strong sceticism, if not suspicion.

Greenpeace is a Top Down organisation

Like many non-governmental organisations, Greenpeace not accountable to the wider society in any direct or meaningful way - creating “loose cannon” potential. They are a hierarchical organisation lacking in checks and balances:

In re-shaping Greenpeace as a centrally coordinated, hierarchical organisation, McTaggart went against the anti-authoritarian ethos that prevailed in other environmental organisations that came of age in the 1970s. While this pragmatic structure granted Greenpeace the persistence and narrow focus necessary to match forces with government and industry, it would lead to the recurrent criticism that Greenpeace had adopted the same methods of governance as its chief foes — the multinational corporations. (Wikipedia)

Of course, international corporations are accountable to their shareholders.

Greenpeace has form for Supplying False Evidence

Greenpeace has form for supplying false evidence. Do you remember the arguments over the Brent Spar case? This was a campaign against a proposal to abandon a decommissioned oil rig in deep water as an artificial reefs.

Greenpeace first got their science about the toxic waste present in the wreck wrong, then organised a huge campaign and boycott - causing widespread economic damage - on the basis of that wrong science. From Wikipedia:

Greenpeace organised a worldwide, high-profile media campaign against this plan, including calls for boycotts of Shell service stations. Its activists occupied the Brent Spar for more than three weeks. In the face of public and political opposition in northern Europe (including some physical attacks and an arson attack on a service station in Germany), Shell abandoned its plans to dispose of Brent Spar at sea - whilst continuing to stand by its claim that this was the safest option, both from an environmental and an industrial health and safety perspective. Greenpeace’s own reputation also suffered during the campaign, when it had to acknowledge that sampling errors had led to an over-estimate of more than one hundred-fold of the oil remaining in Brent Spar’s storage tanks.

Eventually, Greenpeace admitted that its figures were simply wrong. An independent audit later showed that the exaggeration multiplied the actual quantity of oil left in the rig by many times.

The Greenpeace campaign triggered both vandalism of Shell facilities, and violence against Shell staff members.

Here, Greenpeace were not only incompetent, they were also reckless as to the consequences of their own mistake - any responsible organisation would have considered the possibility that they could be wrong.

It seems to me, the concept of “we may be wrong, and need to think about the possible consequences” is foreign to Greenpeace.

Wrapping Up

I have not attempted to show that Greenpeace is all bad - they are not.

But it is a very powerful organisation which is also extremely capricious, and every claim made by Greenpeace - expecially in any campaigns - should be examined very, very carefully.