Patrick Moore talks about why he left Greenpeace and why the the push for net-zero emissions is an unattainable goal
Patrick Moore was only 24 when he co-founded Greenpeace in the early 1970s. He soon became the driving force behind the environmental activist group’s many influential campaigns, such as to stop nuclear testing, protect endangered whales, and prevent toxic dumping.
“It began in 1971 with the first voyage to stop U.S. hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska, which we did,” Moore told The Epoch Times. “And then we went after France’s atmospheric nuclear testing in the South Pacific.”
Greenpeace would go on to launch its “Save the Whales” campaign in 1975, followed in 1976 by a campaign to end the killing of baby seals for their fur, and later that decade a campaign to end toxic dumping in rivers by factories in Europe.
But as Greenpeace gained influence, Moore says he started to see it getting hijacked by what he characterizes as people with political ideology from the left.
“None of us in the original group was there to make money. We were all volunteers,” he said. “But the ultra-leftists took over my organization when they realized there was a lot of money and power to be had there.”
He said it was during the “Save The Whales” campaign that people started donating money to Greenpeace in larger numbers, and that was when the group started getting a bank account and renting an office.
“So as time went on into the late 1970s, Greenpeace turned into a kind of business,” he said. “Pretty soon it actually became a business where fundraising started to become more and more important.”
By the time Moore left in 1986 after being with the organization for 15 years, “fundraising had now become the most important priority, and they would go ahead with a campaign for which there was no scientific basis,” he said.
He left Greenpeace due to “philosophical and political” reasons, he said, after having served as director, president, and international director.
“Greenpeace had started out with a strong humanitarian orientation, as well as a belief in saving the environment,” he said. “‘Green’ is for the environment, ‘peace’ is for the people not to be killed by nuclear war, among other things, or pollution.”
Over time, “peace” was gradually dropped, and Greenpeace, along with the rest of the environmental movement, drifted into a belief that sees the “human species as the enemy of nature, the enemy of the Earth,” Moore said.
The Epoch Times asked Greenpeace for an interview but didn’t hear back.
BY ISAAC TEO
