#Greenpeacefail...

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If, say, a lobby group for forestry interests did this there would be the most enormous outcry:

The event was a hoax, and so was the follow-up email and the website with its often hilarious-if-it-wasn't-true fake...marketing copy.

Yet environmental campaign group Greenpeace are revelling in their media manipulation, lies and misrepresentation. Indeed as the New Statesman (hardly the most anti-green bunch) have put it:

The real villain here is Greenpeace. This is an NGO that thinks it is acceptable to lie to the public, to lie to bloggers and journalists, and to then intimidate writers with threatening emails warning of legal action. This absolutely is not okay. I don’t care if you’re saving the Arctic, rescuing kittens from YouTube’s vicious pet-celebrity training camps, or training pandas to pull famine-ridden children out of earthquake debris; to behave in this deceitful way demonstrates an astonishing amount of contempt for the public - not least for environmentalist supporters who spread their message in good faith only to find themselves forced into embarrassing retractions.

There is a limit to the bounds of campaigning. For me, Greenpeace crossed it years ago when they forced Shell to adopt a less environmentally sensible disposal of a redundant oil rig for the sake of cheap headlines and the 'kerching' of the organisations cash register. But this really is stepping even further beyond those bounds:

“Even if you think Shell is evil and will lie to achieve their goals, now you know Greenpeace is the exact same way.” 

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Vested interests, lies and dissembling - more from the climate change debate

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I'm not a 'climate change denier' - denying climate change would be akin to believing the earth to be flat. Nor am I a denier of man's contribution to that changing climate - again it seems wholly reasonable that the activities of 6 billion humans will have an impact on the climate. I do, however, deny that the solution lies with more government action and intervention. Or indeed that we need to search for a solution with such urgency.

But enough of me and more on the IPCC, which seems to be on a mission to discredit all the good work on climate being done. If the IPCC want to keep folk like me on side and willing to accept the need for action they need to stop lying, making it up and dissembling. And definitely to stop using reports from Greenpeace activists as the basis for their proposals - especially Greenpeace activists with a direct financial interest in the subject matter (renewable energy) under discussion.

And the IPCC should take especial note when their dissembling is pointed out by prominent climate change activists:

I’d have loved to have had a fully independent study conducted by the IPCC on the prospects for renewable energy over the coming century. I’d have been even happier had that independent IPCC study concluded that 80% renewables by 2050 is a realistic option. But what I don’t want are recycled campaign reports masquerading as ‘proper’ science leading the assessed scenarios – and the media – because their originator has managed to lever himself into a pole position on the team of lead authors. That stinks. And it stinks doubly because the Greenpeace report was originally co-authored by the European Renewable Energy Council – an industry lobby group whose prospects depend on state subsidies which can be expected to be further increased once its views are given the ‘official’ stamp of approval from the IPCC.

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