When the nation’s capital city was still waking, seven Greenpeace protesters quietly scaled a 270-foot construction crane. Dangling above downtown during rush hour, they unfurled a massive banner with one word written on it, “Resist.”
An impressive feat of urban mountaineering, the flag has captivated the capital. Visible from the White House, it’s already galvanizing opposition to President Trump.
But while Greenpeace pulled off a damn sexy protest this morning, they’ve got a damning scientific record that spans decades. While marveling at their daring, the D.C., bubble ought to revisit the group’s record of putting radical politics ahead of real people.
Most recently the organization has led the fight to sabotage the Keystone XL pipelines. Never mind that millions of miles of pipe safely crisscross the country already, the group wants to kill the project. Blinded by their green romanticism, the peaceniks refuse to see the very real economic benefit the pipeline promises, like the estimated 20,000 jobs it’d create.
Of course, the suffering of middle America doesn’t concern these adventurers. Away in nature, they haven’t witnessed the malaise of everyday families struggling to stay afloat.
The oblivious hippie troupe has been too busy jet setting around the globe. And while crop-dusting their Greenpeace ideology, they’ve hurt those that need help most.
More than a hundred Nobel laureates have begged Greenpeace to end their opposition to genetically modified crops. The scientific community pleaded with the group to end their opposition to “Golden Rice,” an engineered crop with the potential to save half-a-million children from malnutrition each year.
But Greenpeace seems uninterested in ending hunger. And they wouldn’t let science stand in the way of their ideology. In 2013, they famously razed fields of the crop to the ground in the Philippines. A similar thing has happened in Africa with more fatal results.
Joining the crusade against miracle pesticides like DDT, Greenpeace protests their production and distribution. But when Malaria and Ebola ravaged Africa, carried on the wings of those disease spreading insets, Greenpeace was conspicuously absent. The environmentalists fought the man, the mosquitoes won and innocent Africans died.
In fact, nothing is safe from Greenpeace. They even waged war against the periodic table, attacking the use of chlorine. For more than a decade, Greenpeace has tried to limit the chemical’s use, labeling it a “dangerous addition to everyday life.” The environmentalists would have the world forget that the chemical makes sewage safe and inert.
Those examples make the scientific community shake its head as Washingtonians look up admiringly at Greenpeace’s banner today. Just last June, Richard Roberts, chief scientific officer of New England Biolabs, couldn’t contain his anger and astonishment.
“We’re scientists. We understand the logic of science. It’s easy to see what Greenpeace is doing is damaging and is anti-science,” Roberts told the Washington Post. “Greenpeace initially, and then some of their allies, deliberately went out of their way to scare people. It was a way for them to raise money for their cause.”
And the doctor is right. Greenpeace’s coffers are flush with dollars raised from alarmism. Their 2015 budget totals nearly $60 million. While that cash underwrites protests, the majority of it bankrolls the group’s global bureaucracy. It was this fascination with cash and publicity that led co-founder Patrick Moore to leave.
After seventeen years with the organization, Moore penned a now-famous Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Ultimately,” he explained, “a trend toward abandoning scientific objectivity in favor of political agendas forced me to leave Greenpeace in 1986.”
Just like Moore looked at the evidence, the nation needs to do the same. No one can doubt the daring of the seven climbers who unfurled that banner in Washington, D.C. today. In good conscience, though, no one can forget the destruction their anti-science agenda has wrought.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
