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User:Pmoore2222/Sandbox

Patrick Moore
Born1947 (1947)
Winter Harbour, British Columbia
NationalityCanadian
Occupationpublic relations consultant
Employer(s)Greenspirit Strategies Ltd., Vancouver, Canada
Known forearly member of Greenpeace, independent and sometimes contrary opinions on environmental policy.
TitleChair and Chief Scientist
Parent(s)W.D. (Bill) Moore and Beverly Moore (nee North)
Websitehttp://www.greenspirit.com

Patrick Moore (born in 1947) is a former environmental activist, known as one of the early members of Greenpeace, in which he was an activist from 1971 to 1986. Today he is the co-founder, chair, and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies in Vancouver, a consulting firm that provides paid public relations efforts, lectures, lobbying, opinions and committee participation to government and industry on a wide range of environmental and sustainability issues. He is a frequent public speaker at meetings of industry associations, universities, and policy groups.

He has sharply and publicly differed with many policies of major environmental groups, such as Greenpeace, on other issues including forestry, biotechnology, aquaculture, and the use of chemicals for flame retardants.[1] He is an outspoken proponent of nuclear energy[2] and sceptical of human responsibility for climate change.[3]

Early life

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Moore was born in 1947, in Port Alice, British Columbia and raised in Winter Harbour, on Vancouver Island. He is the third generation of a British Columbian family with a long history in logging and fishing. His father, W. D. Moore, was the president of the B.C. Truck Loggers Association and past president of the Pacific Logging Congress.[4] Moore obtained a Ph.D. in ecology from the Institute of Animal Resource Ecology, University of British Columbia under the direction of Dr. C.S. Holling.

Career

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Greenpeace

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According to Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World by Rex Wyler, the Don't Make a Wave Committee was formed in January 1970 by Dorothy and Irving Stowe, Ben Metcalfe, Marie and Jim Bohlen, Paul Cote, and Bob Hunter and incorporated in October 1970.[5] The Committee had formed to plan opposition to the testing of a one megaton hydrogen bomb in 1969 by the United States Atomic Energy Commission on Amchitka Island in the Aleutians. Moore joined the committee in 1971 and, as Greenpeace co-founder Bob Hunter wrote, “Moore was quickly accepted into the inner circle on the basis of his scientific background, his reputation [as an environmental activist], and his ability to inject practical, no-nonsense insights into the discussions.”[6] From September 2005 until its alteration in December 2006, the Greenpeace International web site included Patrick Moore in a list of "founders and first members".[7][8]

Moore traveled to Alaska on advanced research with Jim Bohlen, attending Wave Committee meetings. In 1971, Moore was a member of the crew of the Phyllis Cormack, a chartered fishing boat which the Committee sent across the North Pacific in order to draw attention to the US testing of a 5 megaton bomb planned for September of that year. Greenpeace was the name given to the boat for the voyage and it would be the first of the many Greenpeace protests.[9] Following the first voyage, key crew members decided to formally change the name of the Don't Make a Wave Committee to the Greenpeace Foundation. These decision makers included founders Bob Hunter, Rod Marining and Ben Metcalfe as well as Patrick Moore.[10][11]

Following U.S. President Richard Nixon's cancellation of the remaining hydrogen bomb tests planned for Amchitka Island in early 1972, Greenpeace turned its attention to French atmospheric nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific. In May 1972, Moore traveled to New York with Jim Bohlen and Marie Bohlen to lobby the key United Nations delegations from the Pacific Rim countries involved. Moore then went to Europe together with Ben Metcalfe, Dorothy Metcalfe, Lyle Thurston and Rod Marining where they received an audience with Pope Paul VI and protested at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. In June, they attended the first UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm where they convinced New Zealand to propose a vote condemning French nuclear testing, which passed with a strong majority.[12]

Moore again crewed the Phyllis Cormack in 1975 during the first campaign to save whales, as Greenpeace met the Soviet whaling fleet off the coast of California. During the confrontation, film footage was caught 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.[13] The film footage made the evening news the next day on all three US national networks, initiating Greenpeace's debut on the world media stage, and prompting a swift rise in public support of the charity.[14] Patrick Moore and Bob Hunter appeared on Dr. Bill Wattenburg's talk radio show on KGO and appealed for a lawyer to help them incorporate a branch office in San Francisco and to manage donations. David Tussman, a young lawyer, volunteered to help Moore, Hunter, and Paul Spong set up an office at Fort Mason. The Greenpeace Foundation of America (since changed to Greenpeace USA), then became the major fundraising center for the expansion of Greenpeace worldwide.[8][15]

Presidency of Greenpeace Foundation in Canada

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In early 1977, Bob Hunter stepped down as president of the Greenpeace Foundation and Patrick Moore was elected president. He inherited an organization that was deeply in debt.[16] Greenpeace organizations began to form throughout North America, including cities such as Toronto, Montreal, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco. Not all of these offices accepted the authority of the founding organization in Canada. Moore's presidency and governance style proved controversial. Moore and his chosen board in Vancouver called for two meetings to formalize his governance proposals. During this time David Tussman, together with the rest of the founders, early activists of Greenpeace, and the 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 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 collection of individual offices. 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. He served for nine years as President of Greenpeace Canada, as well as six years as a Director of Greenpeace International.

In 1985, Moore was on board the Rainbow Warrior when it was bombed and sunk by the French government. He and other directors of Greenpeace International were greeting the ship off the coast of New Zealand on its way to protest French nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll. Expedition photographer, Fernando Pereira, was killed. Greenpeace's media presence peaked again.[17]

After Greenpeace

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In 1986, after leaving Greenpeace not necessarily by his own choosing,[18] Moore established a family salmon farming business, Quatsino Seafarms, at his home in Winter Harbour. In this year he was also elected president of the British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association. From 1990-4 he was appointed to the British Columbia Round Table on the Environment and the Economy[19][20] and founded and chaired the B.C. Carbon Project. In 1991, he joined the board of the Forest Alliance of BC, an initiative of the CEOs of the major forest companies in British Columbia. As chair of the Sustainable Forestry Committee of the Forest Alliance he spent ten years developing the Principles of Sustainable Forestry, which were later adopted by much of the industry.[21][22] In 1991, Moore also founded Greenspirit to "promote sustainable development from a scientific environmental platform".[23] In 2002, Tom Tevlin and Trevor Figueiredo joined Moore in the formation of the environmental consultancy company Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. Patrick Moore is Chair and Chief Scientist of the organization.

Moore served for four years as Vice President of Environment for Waterfurnace International manufacturing geothermal heat pumps.[24] In 2000, 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. He 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 promotes increased use of nuclear energy.[25][26] In 2010, Moore was recruited to represent the Indonesian logging firm Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), a multi-national accused of widespread and illegal rainforest clearance practices. [27] Activist and journalist George Monbiot commented on the APP consultancy:

[Moore's report] says it is an "inspection" of APP's operations. But Moore's company is not a monitoring firm, and the two people he took with him are experts not in tropical ecology or Indonesian law, but public relations. In his 43-page report, there is not a single source or reference cited (Greenpeace's latest investigation of APP, by contrast, is 40 pages long and contains 304 references) ... Moore has claimed that "people don't pay me to say things they've written down or made up. They pay me to tell them what I think." He insists that "APP has not shaped our conclusions or imposed its opinions". But sections of his report have been copied from a PR brochure produced by APP earlier this year. In some places APP's text is reproduced verbatim; elsewhere it appears to have been paraphrased.[28][27]

Monbiot noted that hiring Moore is now "what [you] do if your brand is turning toxic". [27]

Views

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In 2005, Moore criticized what he saw as scare tactics and disinformation employed by some within the environmental movement, saying that the environmental movement "abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism."[29] Moore contends that for the environmental movement "most of the really serious problems have been dealt with", seeking now to "invent doom and gloom scenarios".[30] He suggests they romanticise peasant life as part of an anti-industrial campaign to prevent development in less-developed countries, which he describes as "anti-human".[31][32] Moore was interviewed in the 2007 film documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, in which he expressed similar views. In 2007 The Guardian reported on his writings for the Royal Society arguing against the theory that mankind was causing global warming, noting his advocacy for the felling of tropical rainforests and the planting of genetically engineered crops.[33] He has expressed his positive views of logging on the Greenspirit website.[34] In 2010, Moore was commissioned by forestry giant Asia Pulp and Paper to report on its logging activity in Indonesia's rainforests, resulting in a glowing review.[35]

Alternative energy

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Although he spoke out against nuclear power in 1976,[36] today he supports it, along with renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass, and wind.[25][37][38] In Australian newspaper The Age, he writes "Greenpeace is wrong — we must consider nuclear power".[39] He argues that any realistic plan to reduce reliance on fossil fuels or greenhouse gas emissions need increased use of nuclear energy.[25] He has publicly acknowledged that this is in stark contrast to his views on this subject some decades earlier[25] (as has another pioneer environmentalist, Stewart Brand). Moore is supported by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a national organization of pro-nuclear industries and in 2009 he chaired their Clean and Safe Energy Coalition.[40] As chair, he suggested that the mainstream media and the environmentalist movement is not as opposed to nuclear energy as in decades past.[41]

Global warming

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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".[32] In 2006, he wrote to the Royal Society arguing there was "no scientific proof" that mankind was causing global warming.[42]

Genetically modified foods

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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", and need genetically engineered crops to this end. 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.[43]

Criticism

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Moore's views and change of stance (see above) have evoked controversy in environmentalist arenas. He is accused of having "abruptly turned his back on the environmental movement" and "being a mouthpiece for some of the very interests Greenpeace was founded to counter".[22][44] His critics point out Moore's business relations with "polluters and clear-cutters" through his consultancy.[22] Moore has earned his living since the early 1990s primarily by consulting for, and publicly speaking for a wide variety of corporations and lobby groups such as the Nuclear Energy Institute.[40] Monte Hummel, MScF, President, World Wildlife Fund Canada has claimed that Moore's book, Pacific Spirit, is a collection of "pseudoscience and dubious assumptions." Dr Leonie Jacobs of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands has accused Moore of being paid by the timber industry in order to deliberately mislead the public about logging[citation needed].

Bibliography

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  • Wyler, Rex (2004) Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World. Rodale Press. ISBN 1-59486-106-4
  • Moore, Patrick (1995) Pacific spirit : the forest reborn. Terra Bella Publishers Canada. ISBN 1-896171-07-9
  • Moore, Patrick (2000) Green Spirit: Trees are the Answer. Greenspirit Enterprises. ISBN 0-9686404-0-0
  • Moore, Patrick (2010) "Trees are the Answer, 10th Anniversary Edition." Beatty Street Publishing Inc. ISBN 978-0-9864808-0-5
  • Moore, Patrick (2011) "Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist." Beatty Street Publishing Inc. ISBN 978-0-9864808-2-9

References

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  1. ^ Guardian article, 21 May 2000 'Judas' of the eco-warriors spreads his gospel of doubt
  2. ^ "Patrick Moore endorses nuclear energy before US Congress"
  3. ^ EU Watch interview with Moore at Greenspirit Strategies
  4. ^ Moore Resume
  5. ^ "Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World" by Rex Weyler, ISBN 1-59486-106-4 Published by Rodale Press in 2003, pages 59ff
  6. ^ Hunter, Robert. (1979) Warriors of the Rainbow: A Chronicle of the Greenpeace Movement. Henry Holt & Company. ISBN 0-03-043741-5 p9
  7. ^ Greenpeace web archive. Greenpeace founders
  8. ^ a b "The history of Greenpeace"; Greenpeace.org; September 14, 2009
  9. ^ Utne article on founding of Greenpeace
  10. ^ Greenpeace founders
  11. ^ Rainbow warriors
  12. ^ Warriors of the Rainbow, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1979, Page 116, ISBN 0-03-043736-9
  13. ^ DeLuca, Kevin Michael (2005) Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism Routledge ISBN 0-8058-5848-2 p99
  14. ^ Moruroa: Journey into the bomb; Greenpeace.org; April 27, 2005
  15. ^ Greenpeace USA
  16. ^ Greenpeace, Rex Weyler, Raincoast Books, 2004, ISBN 1-55192-529-X
  17. ^ CBC archive
  18. ^ Lobbywatch
  19. ^ Moore, Patrick. "Resume of Patrick Moore, Ph.D." Greenspirit. Archived from the original on 2005-09-10. Retrieved 2007-03-13.
  20. ^ International Institute for Sustainable Development
  21. ^ Utah State University article
  22. ^ a b c Bennett, Drake (March 2004). "Eco-Traitor". Wired magazine.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  23. ^ Greenspirit
  24. ^ Waterfurnace International
  25. ^ a b c d Moore, Patrick (2006-04-16). "Going Nuclear". Washington Post.
  26. ^ Clean and Safe Energy Coalition
  27. ^ a b c Guardian article on Moore "Why is a former Greenpeace activist siding with Indonesia's logging industry?" by George Monbiot. 2 December 2010.
  28. ^ APP "Letter to Stakeholders"
  29. ^ Moore, Patrick (2005-01-28). "Environmental Movement Has Lost Its Way". Miami Herald.
  30. ^ Guardian article, June 10, 2001 recovering the Earth
  31. ^ UK Channel 4 Documentary: The Great Global Warming Swindle
  32. ^ a b Penn Jillette Radio Show, 2006-06-08, Free FM: Interview (Recording)
  33. ^ Guardian article, Diary by John Henley
  34. ^ "Biodiversity in a clearcut
  35. ^ The Great Ventriloquist, by George Monbiot
  36. ^ Patrick Moore, Assault on Future Generations, Greenpeace report, p47-49, 1976 - pdf [1]
  37. ^ Washington Post Article, Sunday, April 16, 2006 - Going Nuclear [2]
  38. ^ The Independent, Nuclear energy? Yes please! [3]
  39. ^ The Age Greenpeace is wrong — we must consider nuclear power, article by Patrick Moore,December 10, 2007 [4]
  40. ^ a b Nuclear Energy Institute article
  41. ^ NEI article
  42. ^ Guardian article, Diary 16 February 2007
  43. ^ Hao, Sean (2006-01-13). "Greenpeace co-founder praises global warming". Honolulu Advertiser. Archived from the original on 2006-02-07.
  44. ^ Guardian article, 21 May 2000 'Judas' of the eco-warriors spreads his gospel of doubt [5]
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