Environmentlism has Lost the Plot

[hobbyguy]

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/greenpeace-is-a-menace-to-the-world/article35444942/

A couple of key paragraphs:

"The little town of Saint-Félicien, in Quebec’s lovely Saguenay region, is under siege. The softwood lumber wars have broken out again, and that’s bad news. … Then there’s Greenpeace.

“Greenpeace wants our total death!” mayor Gilles Potvin complained back in 2013. “If we listen to them, we can’t cut wood any more.”

Greenpeace has been waging a relentless campaign against Resolute Forest Products, the largest forest company in the region and in Canada. (It is the successor company to Abitibi and Bowater.)"

When resource companies are attacked by environmental NGOs, their tendency is to go on the defensive and speak softly.

Resolute is an exception.

It’s fighting back. In part, it’s personal. Richard Garneau, the company’s CEO, grew up in the Saguenay, and his family has lived there for generations. “For me, confronting this barrage of misinformation has been more than just about business ethics,” he writes on the corporate website. “I harvested trees by hand to pay my way through school.”

In his view, Greenpeace “is marauding not just our company but a way of life, one built on nurturing healthy forests that are the lifeblood of the people who live there.”

Last year Resolute launched a racketeering lawsuit in the United States, alleging that Greenpeace and its allies had engaged in defamatory and fraudulent behaviour in order to enrich themselves from donations. The company accused it of faking photos, and fabricating evidence of Resolute’s misdeeds.

Greenpeace has now admitted that it engaged in “rhetorical hyperbole.” It said in a court motion that its words about forest destruction “can be describing figurative, rather than literal destruction.”

It also admitted that its claims “do not hew to strict literalisms or scientific precision” and are “non-verifiable statements of subjective opinion.”

“Greenpeace, in our view, is a group that goes to the extreme, that doesn’t seek a balance between conservation and forest management,” Jack Picard, a band council member of the Innu Nation of Pessamit in Quebec, says in a video. He adds: “We don’t accept anyone else speaking for us. We are fully capable of speaking for ourselves.”

Greenpeace’s fearmongering gives environmental activism a bad name. Last year more than 100 Nobel laureates signed a letter urging them to drop their campaign against genetically modified foods and golden rice, which increase crop yields and provide crucial nutrients that prevent disease and death. Greenpeace is a menace to the world, and especially to the world’s most vulnerable. It is also enormously powerful.

“I used to respect Greenpeace, but they are not aware of the reality of the forest industry,” Mr. Potvin told me. “Young people believe them. Students believe them. They spread a lot of falsehoods, and they do a lot of damage.”

This is what happens when ideology trumps science and thoughtfulness. Paying attention to the environment is important, but it seems Greenpeace and some others of their ilk have lost the plot. I suspect to line their own pockets, but perhaps because their lack of thoughtfulness locks them into a an unsupportable extreme.

[The Green Barbarian]

Greenpeace sucks.

[Smurf]

Very good article. Kind of falls in line with the lies spread about site C. What was it a million people could be fed off the land being flooded, when truth be known it probably would not even feed close to 100,000. The "“rhetorical hyperbole” these groups and people spread as the truth is ridiculous. I hope Greenpeace gets in serious trouble and I hope they get it again over Kinder Morgan. Protecting the environment is one thing but deliberately spreading false information should be grounds for some heavy duty fines. Freedom of speech should not include asking people and companies to boycott someone based on fabricated lies, pictures etc.


Big time GB. Same barrel of garbage as Suckzuki.

[The Green Barbarian]

. Freedom of speech should not include asking people and companies to boycott someone based on fabricated lies, pictures etc.
.

It should fall under the same laws as "hate speech". But of course, when Leftists lie and spread hate, it's all for the greater good apparently.

[Glacier]

Greenpeace, almost from its very beginning, has been anti-science and anti-progress.

[Jlabute]

It sounds as though the $300M lawsuit will be heard in Northern California. Those Californians are just as nutty.
Greenpeace calls it an attack on free speech, when it really is an attack against false speech and fabricated evidence that caused Resolute to loose business partners. Greenpeace is a bunch of criminals.

[The Green Barbarian]

It sounds as though the $300M lawsuit will be heard in Northern California. Those Californians are just as nutty.
Greenpeace calls it an attack on free speech, when it really is an attack against false speech and fabricated evidence that caused Resolute to loose business partners. Greenpeace is a bunch of criminals.

Greenpeace should have been charged for negligence for sending those poor brain-washed misguided kids to scale that Russian oil platform. Just pure evil.

[The Green Barbarian]

Here's a picture put out by GP in 2015:

GREENPEACE has again been caught using a deceptive image in a Great Barrier Reef scare campaign.

The environmental group this week tweeted a composite image of two photographs taken just months apart showing dramatic coral bleaching.

The accompanying caption read: “Time to listen to nature. The #GreatBarrierReef bleaching is a clear message – No more coal” and linked to media coverage of dying coral in north Queensland.

But the photographs were taken thousands of kilometres across the ­Pacific at Flowerpot Rocks, in American Samoa.

Greenpeace says the incorrect picture was posted accidentally.

But Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt and Minister for Northern Australia Matt Canavan say it is part of a pattern by Greenpeace of misleading the public over the threat to the World Heritage-listed natural wonder.

Last year the group admitted using a photo of a coral reef in the Philippines damaged by a super typhoon to warn of the perils facing the Great Barrier Reef from mining and farming run-off.

And it was accused of false advertising to drive donations with emotive but erroneous adverts on the London Underground, claiming coal companies would be allowed to dredge in the Reef.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/quee ... 65c9768ad4

[The Green Barbarian]

How Greenpeace Manipulated the Media Like a Pro: Analyzing the Shell Oil Hoax

You know media manipulation is rampant when even Greenpeace is doing it. There is no other way to describe the "Arctic Fail" hoax that the environmental group pulled off earlier this week. It was media manipulation in its purest form. It may have been done for noble reasons, but that doesn't change the salient fact that they are manipulating the media by creating a fake scandal and lying about it to get more coverage.

For those of you who might have seen the viral Arctic Fail video and not heard yet, the clip–in which a drink fountain at party shaped like an oil rig malfunctions and spoils the pretty Alaskan-themed decorations to the horror of many onlookers–was staged. Yet because of widespread media reports, it was overwhelmingly believed to be real and the whole internet enjoyed a nice self-righteous laugh at Shell's expense.

From what I deduce the roll out went like this:

The Yes Men, an activist prank group, and Greenpeace paid to produce the video, whose main star was a prominent member of the Occupy Seattle movement. Occupy Seattle then posted this video–which they knew to be fake–on their site and claimed it was real. The video was then quickly picked up and reported on by everyone from TreeHugger to Gizmodo and local Seattle press. It racked up nearly 500,000 of its 700,000 views on its first day. To make it look even more real, the parties involved actually set out fake legal messages on behalf of Shell threatening bloggers who reported on the story.

I myself have run a couple of these pranks. I'll grant you that sometimes it can be difficult for journalists to guard against dishonest people or their elaborate ruses. But I can also tell you from personal experience no one tries very hard. Why would they? Skimming over the news and republishing is the best of both worlds for blogs. It's cheap, fast, and never has the pesky side effect of ruining a speculative story, and most importantly, it racks up pageviews for blogs (that get billed to advertisers).

As the Seattle Post Intelligencer wrote in its second post on the story, "It’s confirmed that [the video] is an elaborate — make that extremely elaborate – hoax. And, yes, we were fooled. Shame, shame on us."

Really? Was it that elaborate? Because to me it seemed fairly obvious and it seemed like journalists should've been a tad less credulous. More importantly, I don't see much shame going on here–no sincere apology, no new commitment to more rigorous standards and no real reflection. Instead of being mortified or humiliated by a careless mistake, the media involved in such stunts resort to classic misdirection: now the story becomes how the hoax happened.

Take Gawker for example. One of its blogs, Gizmodo, fell for the hoax and got 30,000 pageviews for its poorly researched story. Gawker then followed up after the prank was revealed with a story titled "Viral Video of Shell Oil Party Disaster Is Fake, Unfortunately" and got 90,000 pageviews out it.

From their perspective it's hard to see what was so unfortunate about it all. It got them 3 times as many pageviews being fake than real. That's the dirty secret of our iterative, fast paced, publish-first, verify-second model of journalism. When blogs get fooled, it doesn't cost them anything because they have little credibility to lose. In fact, by their revenue model, it is a profitable success because they get TWO big stories out of an event that actually deserved none (first, covering the fake news as exciting news, then covering their "mistake" as a story about how the prank came to be).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholida ... 118d3ff779

[Dizzy1]

Environmentlism has nothing to do with saving the earth or the environment, its all about showing off one's lifestyle choice and their smug sense of self worth.

[seewood]

Greepeace is a business, plain and simple. As they don't manufacture anything to sell to make money, they have to raise the ire of patrons so donations flow in to pay for the directors salaries.
Green Peace is very good at this and when they make a big impression regarding an environmental issue, the donations continue to flow in.
I believe they can have good intentions, however to continually attack the forest industry is getting tiresome. I really don't believe the directors of the forest industry wake up in the morning and think what can we do today to screw up the environment. A McMillan Bloedel director told this to a Save the Carmana activist. Forestry today have directives and standards that in the past would have the forest industry throw up their hands and say our way of life is over. Hasn't happened....yet.
When Green Peace make a stand or press release, I'll take it with a bag of salt.