Patrick Moore (consultant)

Patrick Moore
File:PatrickMoore.jpg
Born	1947 Winter Harbour, British Columbia
Nationality	Canadian
Education	Ph.D University of British Columbia
Website	http://www.greenspirit.com

Patrick Moore (born 1947) is a Canadian ecologist, lays claim to being an environmentalist while speaking and promoting logging, nuclear, and chemical industry efforts against all established environmental organizations. As a former activist, he is now an industry public relations professional. He works as a consultant and public speaker on environmental issues. He proclaims himself to be a co-founder of Greenpeace, although he now voices harsh criticism towards the organization.

Biography

Moore was born in 1947 in Winter Harbour, British Columbia, Canada. He obtained a Ph.D. in ecology from the Institute of Animal Resource Ecology, University of British Columbia.

In 1971, he joined one of the first campaigns of Greenpeace. He participated in the early meetings and the first Greenpeace campaign against US nuclear testing in Alaska. He was a member of the crew of Phyllis Cormack, a chartered fishing boat that set out on the first Greenpeace voyage in September 1971. He served for nine years as President of Greenpeace Canada, as well as seven years as a Director of Greenpeace International in response to a settlement of a lawsuit he brought against the Greenpeace movement based in San Francisco. He was left alone in his own self-established office while others built Greenpeace into one of the largest environmental organizations in the world.

In 1977, Moore he was elected president of the Greenpeace Foundation, a splinter group of the overall Greenpeace organization, which claimed some roots going back to the "original" Greenpeace effort in Vancouver, Canada. The Greenpeace Foundation was isolated from the rest of the international Greenpeace movement, and Patrick Moore futilely engaged in legal proceedings to attempt to grab control of other parts of the Greenpeace movement.

During the first campaign to save whales in 1975, Greenpeace confronted the Soviet whaling fleet off the coast of California. Moore and Hunter were both crew members on that voyage aboard the Phyllis Cormack, the same fishing boat that was chartered for the first campaign in 1971. During the confrontation, film footage was obtained of the Soviet whaling boat firing a harpoon over the heads of Greenpeace members in a Zodiac inflatable and into the back of a female sperm whale.

The Greenpeace crew arrived in San Francisco the next day. The film footage made the evening news on all three national networks. Together with David McTaggart's heroic suffering at the hands of French commandos as he battled French Atomic testing in the South Pacific, this put Greenpeace on the world stage in away that was not eclipsed until the French bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985, which was several years after Patrick Moore was separated from the primary Greenpeace movement. As a result of the anti-whaling efforts undertaken by many other people, support began to pour in. Moore and Hunter went on a talk radio show and appealed for a lawyer to help them incorporate a branch office in San Francisco in order to organize activities in the US and to manage donations. A young lawyer named David Tussman volunteered and helped Moore, Hunter, and Paul Spong set up an office at Fort Mason.

As a result of the publicity, autonomous Greenpeace offices began to open throughout North America, including cities such as Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco. Not all of these offices accepted the authority of the founding organization in Canada. Many people in Greenpeace, including most of the founders and early activists, felt Patrick Moore's attempted usurption of authority was unfounded, and that he management style and manipulation of facts lacked the integrity that Greenpeace worked so hard to establish. Patrick Moore attempted to assert control over the name "Greenpeace", as well as the right to exclusively raise funds and represent the group. Moore and his chosen board in Vancouver called for two meetings to formalize his assertions of authority. During this time David Tussman, together with the rest of the founders, early activists of Greenpeace, and the vast majority of Greenpeace staff-members announced that the board of the San Francisco group intended to separate Patrick Moore's Greenpeace Foundation from the rest of the Greenpeace movement. After all efforts to settle the matter failed, the Greenpeace Foundation filed a civil lawsuit in San Francisco charging that the San Francisco group was in violation of trademark and copyright by using the Greenpeace name without permission of the Greenpeace Foundation.

The lawsuit was settled at a meeting on 10 October, 1979, in the offices of lawyer David Gibbons in Vancouver. Attending were Moore, Hunter, David McTaggart, Rex Weyler, and about six others. At this meeting it was agreed that Greenpeace International would be created. This meant that Greenpeace would remain a single organization rather than an amorphous and chaotic collection if individual offices that anyone could form. McTaggart who had come to represent all the other Greenpeace groups against the Greenpeace Foundation, was named Chairman. Moore became President of Greenpeace Canada (the new name for Greenpeace Foundation) and a director of Greenpeace International. Other directors were appointed from the USA, France, the UK, and the Netherlands. Moore remained a director of Greenpeace International until his departure in early 1986.

After leaving Greenpeace, Moore founded Greenspirit, a consultancy focusing on environmental policy and communications in natural resources, biodiversity, energy, and climate change.

Moore was a member of the British Columbia government-appointed Round Table on the Environment and Economy from 1990 - 1994. In 1990, he founded and chaired the BC Carbon Project, a group that worked to develop a common understanding of climate change.

Moore served for four years as Vice President of Environment for Waterfurnace International, the largest manufacturer of geothermal heat pumps for residential heating and cooling with renewable earth energy.

As Chair of the Sustainable Forestry Committee of the Forest Alliance of BC, a group created by the forest industry, Moore leads the process of developing the "Principles of Sustainable Forestry" which have been adopted by a majority of the industry.

Moore published Green Spirit - Trees are the Answer, a photo-book on forests and the role they can play in solving some current environmental problems in 2000.

Moore also made two appearances on Penn & Teller: Bullshit! in episodes "Environmental Hysteria" (2003) and "Endangered Species" (2005).

In 2006, Moore became co-chair (with Christine Todd Whitman) of a new industry-funded initiative, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which supports increased use of nuclear energy.

Moore currently works as a senior spokesperson for the Forest Alliance of BC, an industry-funded public relations organization.

Views

Moore criticizes what he sees as scare tactics and disinformation employed by some within the environmental movement:

By the mid-1980s, the environmental movement had abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism. I became aware of the emerging concept of sustainable development: balancing environmental, social and economic priorities. Converted to the idea that win-win solutions could be found by bringing all interests together, I made the move from confrontation to consensus.

Interviewed in the 2007 film documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, Moore commented: "See, I don't even like to call it the environmental movement any more, because really it is a political activist movement, and they have become hugely influential at a global level."

Alternative energy

"Nuclear power plants are, next to nuclear warheads themselves, the most dangerous devices that man has ever created. Their construction and proliferation is the most irresponsible, in fact the most criminal, act ever to have taken place on this planet." - Patrick Moore, Assault on Future Generations, 1976

Moore today supports nuclear power, along with renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass, and wind. He argues that any realistic plan to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and the emission of greenhouse gases should include increased use of nuclear energy. He has publicly acknowledged that this is in stark contrast to his views on this subject some decades earlier (as has another pioneer environmentalist, Stewart Brand). Moore believes that alternatives to fossil fuels must be found and that nuclear energy is one of the most effective technologies to reduce fossil fuel use.

Moore is supported by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a national organization of pro-nuclear industries which hopes to enlist Moore's help in bringing about a nuclear renaissance.

Global warming

Moore calls global warming the "most difficult issue facing the scientific community today in terms of being able to actually predict with any kind of accuracy what's going to happen". While acknowledging that the increase of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere is caused by human consumption of fossil fuels, he claims that as of 2006, it cannot be proven as the exclusive reason the Earth has been warming since 1980. He stresses that it is scientific evidence, not consensus opinion, that would prove or disprove this relation.

I think one of the most pernicious aspects of the modern environmental movement is the romanticization of peasant life. And the idea that industrial societies are the destroyers of the world. The environmental movement has evolved into the strongest force there is for preventing development in the developing countries. I think it's legitimate for me to call them anti-human.

It's become so complicated, there's so much snake oil around the whole subject... the best comment that was ever made was by Michael Crichton in his book State of Fear: 'I am certain there is too much certainty in the world'. And I am certain that he is right.

Genetically modified foods

In 2006, Moore addressed a Biotechnology Industry Organization conference in Waikiki saying, "There's no getting away from the fact that over 6 billion people wake up each day on this planet with real needs for food, energy and materials", in support of genetically engineered crops. He also told the gathering that global warming and the melting of glaciers is not necessarily a negative event because it creates more arable land and the use of forest products drives up demand for wood and spurs the planting of more trees.

Criticism by other environmentalists

Moore has been criticized by environmentalists for many of his views. Some see him as having "abruptly turned his back on the environmental movement" and "being a mouthpiece for some of the very interests Greenpeace was founded to counter".

His critics point out Moore's business relations with what they see as "polluters and clear-cutters" through his consultancy. Moore has earned his living since the early 1990s primarily by consulting for, and publicly speaking to a wide variety of corporations and industry lobby groups.

Robert Hunter bestowed the title of "Eco-Judas" on him. He has become known as the Benedict Arnold of the Green Movement and the "corporate green whore". His credibility has sunk so low that the Forest Action Network set up a website dedicated just to Patrick Moore called Patrick Moore is a Big Fat Liar (http://www.fanweb.org/patrick-moore/).

The Greenpeace International web site used to include Moore in their list of founders, although this has since been removed. Patrick Moore himself is the biggest proponent of him being a co-founder, so there is some controversy over whether Moore was a co-founder, or merely an early member, of Greenpeace. His claim of being a founding member, but not co-founder, is seemingly supported by a single edited statement from an op-ed by Paul Watson, although nowhere else does Paul Watson make any statements supportive of a co-founding status and does state that he does not know Patrick Moore to be a co-founder except in Patrick Moore's own autobiographical statements. The status of co-founder is emphatically disputed by other founders including Dorothy Stowe, Bob Hunter (deceased), Ben Metcalf (deceased), Dorothy Metcalf, and Jim and Marie Bolen, and is at odds with his original Greenpeace membership application.

Paul Watson, another co-founder of Greenpeace, quit the organization after Moore allegedly called a meeting to expel him from the board amid disagreements over Watson's direct action campaigns. He claims Moore "uses his status as a so-called co-founder of Greenpeace to give credibility to his accusations. I am also a co-founder of Greenpeace and I have known Patrick Moore for 35 years.... Moore makes accusations that have no basis in fact".

Moore's history as an early member of Greenpeace includes his attendance at some of the early planning sessions for the first voyage against US nuclear testing in 1971, sailing as a member of the crew on the first voyage, and serving 15 years in leadership positions of some permutations of Greenpeace offices. He was one of five directors of Greenpeace International, but only as part of a settlement of his ill-fated lawsuit against the larger Greenpeace movement.

Monte Hummel, MScF, President, World Wildlife Fund Canada has said, "I have read Patrick's book, Pacific Spirit. It is not the work of a 'forest ecologist' but a disappointing blend of pseudo-science and dubious assumptions being used to defend clearcutting and the forest industry."

Dr Leonie Jacobs of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands has said, "Dr. Patrick Moore may be a good marine biologist and a former founder of Greenpeace but he is presently paid by the timber industry to deliberately mislead the public and politicians about the acceptability of aggressive logging practices."

External links

• Greenspirit, Patrick Moore's website
• Greenspirit Strategies, Patrick Moore's consultancy
• Audio Interview from MassiveChange.com
• Source Watch on Patrick Moore
• Going Nuclear: A Green Makes the Case - Washington Post, April 16, 2006
• Why I Left Greenpeace - The Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2008
• Patrick Moore , Forest Action Network website about Patrick Moore