My Manifesto: The Incoherent Ramblings of a Madman

An extract....

Beware the big green political monster
By Michael Duffy

Recently I interviewed Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, on radio and asked why he quit the organisation. He said: "I left in the mid-'80s when the policy started to drift away from science and logic into these kind of zero-tolerance positions that I believe are based more on sensation and fund-raising around scare tactics. Look at the campaign against genetically modified crops and the whole 'Frankenstein food' … these are scare words that are attached to what is actually one of the most important advances to genetic science in history … for example, taking a gene from corn and creating the 'golden rice' which could eliminate blindness in half a million kids every year in Asia and Africa, and could eliminate chronic vitamin A deficiency in over 200 million people in the rice-eating countries."

Moore, who has an honours degree in forest biology and a PhD in ecology, says he left Greenpeace when "I was an international director, one of five. My fellow international directors had no science education. Most of them were political activists or entrepreneur environmentalists, for want of a better word, and they decided we should start a campaign to ban chlorine worldwide. I said, 'Chlorine is one of the elements in the periodic table. I don't think that's in our jurisdiction.' And they said, 'No, this is a good campaign. Chlorine is the devil's element, and it works really well for fund-raising and media and everything.'

"I said, 'Just a minute, 75 per cent of our medicines are based on chlorine chemistry, and adding chlorine to drinking water was the single biggest advance in the history of public health, and the best way to deliver that slightly chlorinated drinking water to the general public is in a PVC pipe. So give me a break. I cannot go along with this. You guys make a list of the chlorine compounds that you don't like and we'll look at them one by one like any regulatory agency would do, but you can't just condemn chlorine. We put it in swimming pools so that people don't get cholera and tetanus.' "

The others weren't persuaded. Moore says: "That was the beginning of my having to leave the organisation that I helped found."

These days the green movement often seems driven by left-wing rather than environmental causes. The biggest example is population growth, which is the greatest single danger to Australia's environment. When is the last time you heard a green activist even mention immigration, a major source of that growth? When the Herald-Sun newspaper in Melbourne claimed before the 2004 election that the Greens political party wanted to reduce the population by 2 million, Senator Bob Brown took it to the Press Council on the ground that this was not the party's policy - and won.

The activists focus on other issues, such as globalisation. They claim free trade moves dirty factories offshore, thereby exporting Western environmental problems to the Third World. But in his new book, The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford of the Financial Times points out that "foreign investment in polluting industries is the fastest growing segment of foreign investment coming into the United States. In contrast, foreign investment in clean industries is the fastest growing segment of American investments abroad." The reason, Harford says, is that "seriously polluting industries like bulk chemical production require high levels of skill, reliable infrastructure and - since a lot of capital investment is involved - political stability. Why jeopardise that by moving the plant to Ethiopia to save a few dollars on environmental costs?" He notes that air pollution in China has dropped substantially as globalisation has boosted its economy, a correlation also seen in the other major developing nations of Brazil and Mexico.

i would never claim Michael Duffy to be the most truthful journalist in the world, nor should he have to be in an opinion column, but when an opinion column is verging on news he should make sure he notes that Mr Moore has an interest in a forest group funded by multi-national companies that promote deforestation.

I agree with Mr Moore for the most part, the environmental lobby is always extreme and often has nothing but emotion to back up their claims. After learning more and more I fell by the environmental wayside myself on more than one occasion. However, someone pointed out the following to me once - and I agree:

"all of the science, all of the studies, all of the companies, all of the governments, all of the truth (whatever you perceive the truth to be) in the world will not change anything unless we give them the power to. It is us who affects change and we are emotive. Whether right or wrong - if you take the emotion out of the movement there is no movement"