News Media Go Along with Greenpeace’s Attempt to Pretend Patrick Moore Not a Founder
For years Greenpeace has pretended that Patrick Moore was not one of the original co-founders of the radical environmental pressure group. More recently, a number of media outlets, including CNN, BBC, Yahoo News, Newsweek, Esquire, Huffington Post, Eco-watch, and Electrek, have fallen in line with Greenpeace’s duplicity. On March 12th, Moore’s opposition to global warming alarmism was tweeted by President Trump. Greenpeace responded by attempting to distance itself even further from Moore. Its method—rewriting its very own history.
Here are some details of that history. The Don’t Make A Wave Committee, which would become Greenpeace, was founded in 1971 to protest underground nuclear weapons testing in Alaska. They hired a boat to “bear witness” and protest this nuclear test, and Patrick Moore was on that boat. In 1972, Greenpeace was officially founded by a group of individuals, including Moore. Moore eventually became president of Greenpeace Canada for nine years.
In 1986, Moore left Greenpeace because he said they were becoming too radical and anti-nuclear energy. Since then, he has been outspoken over the environmental movement’s “abandonment of science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism.” Even after they parted ways in 1986, Greenpeace publicly stated on its website as recently as 2007 that he was a co-founder (as did the Australian Greenpeace website).
But in 2007, Moore published an op-ed in London’s Independent arguing that wind and solar are intermittent and must be backed up by something when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, and nuclear energy made the most sense. Within days, Greenpeace removed Moore’s name as one of the founders. That page changed over time, but is still on the Greenpeace’s website today without Moore being listed as a founder.
Even the Independent, in which Moore published his anti-nuclear op-ed, seems to have forgotten its own history. It is reminiscent of the photos that were edited under Stalin to airbrush out those who fell out of favor with the tyrant.