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my next guest was a founding member of
Greenpeace but he left the organization
when an abandoned science and logic for
scare tactics and sensationalism I want
you to welcome the author of an
absolutely incredible book and I mean
this sincerely if you have any interest
in the whole issue of climate change and
science
I recommend this it’s called confessions
of a Greenpeace dropout this gentlemen
is also a champion of sensible
environmentalism dr. Patrick Moore dr.
Moore your book is riveting and in part
because it’s a very balanced and fair
approach to looking at what’s happening
to our planet what’s what’s our fault
and what’s not our fault and what we
need to do about it I first of all let
me mention this you have a PhD in
ecology so it’s not like you’re just a
political activist you’re a scientist by
training with a PhD and looking at this
we hear today that the science is
settled when it comes to the climate is
it is it that settled well it’s really
not right even to say the science and
they talk about now climate science and
climate scientists and these are trick
words being used because what they
really mean when they say climate
science is someone who agrees with what
I think and when they say climate
scientists they mean someone who agrees
with all of the narrative about co2
causing global warming and it’s
catastrophic and all of that whole
narrative and anyone who doesn’t agree
with them is not a climate scientist but
rather a climate denier yeah and that is
to conjure up the Holocaust and to make
us look like we’re evil so it’s a very
serious division in terms of using words
and propaganda to make it seem as though
you know they say there’s overwhelming
consensus of climate scientists who
agree with this narrative of
catastrophic global warming consensus
has no place in science consensus is a
political word it’s a legitimate word
that like in a democracy you’re looking
for a majority and that is a consensus
but that’s about policy that’s not about
facts
facts and science are not about a
majority if you good look back to
Galileo or Darwin or Mendel or Einstein
they all had to fight sometimes for
decades even till they died against a
false consensus in order to get the
truth out about what was really
happening in this world of ours in all
these different subjects that they
studied and and and told us what was
true dr. Moore one of the things that I
most appreciated
it’s not that you have abandoned your
love of the planet your appreciation for
the need to take better care of it but
you want to do it rationally sensibly in
a way that does not destroy the very
earth in which we live in the businesses
and all the other at what point did you
feel like Greenpeace as an organization
had kind and you use the term in your
book you didn’t leave Greenpeace it left
you yes it’s true and that I grew up in
nature on us on a floating village in a
isolated I Inlet up up on the north
coast of Vancouver Island with no road
to it so I grew up in eight Lee loving
nature being in it my whole childhood
then I went into life science in school
and ended up in a PhD in ecology before
that word was known to the general
public in the late 1960s so I followed
that through my whole life and when I
joined Greenpeace it was to help save
the world from all-out nuclear war and
then to save the whales from extinction
and to stop toxic waste going into the
rivers and into the air these were what
I thought were the most important things
I could be doing at that time for the
environment and then it gradually
changed the peace kind of dropped off
Greenpeace the peace being about people
the green being about the environment
and suddenly my fellow Greenpeace and
the rest of the movement began to
describe humans as the enemies of nature
as if there were too many of us and
actually we were were kind of a bad
species to begin with as if we were the
only evil species and all the other
species were good and I just could not
accept that because I know we come from
life just like all the other species do
are all part of nature and the first
lesson of ecology is in fact we’re all
one
system here on this earth all
interconnected with each other the other
thing that that I really had to leave
because of was that my fellow directors
in the end none of whom had any formal
science education like I did decided
that the common denominator was chlorine
as a toxic and we should ban it
worldwide I tried to remind them not
only is it one of the elements in the
periodic table which is kind of hard to
be banning yeah that like banning air
fluorine was and exactly and even though
elemental chlorine is quite toxic when
you combine it with other elements it
becomes one of the most important
substances for Public Health and
medicine and adding chlorine to drinking
water was the biggest example in the
history of public health and to our spas
and pools to prevent communicable
diseases and about 85% of our synthetic
pharmaceuticals our medicines are made
with chlorine chemistry precisely
because it is toxic to bacteria that are
trying to kill us so I could not get
anywhere with my fellows because they
just didn’t understand the chemistry and
whereas you don’t have to be a PhD
physicist to want to ban nuclear weapons
or even a PhD marine scientist to want
to save the whales that those are pretty
obvious but when it comes to chemicals
and toxic sand molecules and the whole
subject of toxicology and in fact you do
have to have some training in chemistry
and biology to understand it and they
and they didn’t I want to go through
several things that we hear about all
the time the things that you mentioned
in your book and some are so new that
the book needs to come back out again
and let everybody see it
you mentioned chlorine let’s use the
term new green deal good deal bad deal
no deal at all well it’s just a slogan I
guess at the very best the new green
deal basically says that we have to
completely eliminate fossil fuels from
our whole society and whereas there are
lots of things that we could do to
change our pattern of energy consumption
I mean fossil fuels are about
five percent of global energy and the
same for the United States the the other
two most important ones are nuclear
energy and hydroelectric energy the wind
and solar even though they’ve spent
trillions on it with massive subsidies
is still less than 1% of global energy
and there is no possible way that it is
ever going to become a mainstream source
of power first because it’s intermittent
second because it’s expensive so we do
have to look at at the mix we have we’ve
got natural gas petroleum and coal and
we have hydroelectric energy which is
only available in certain places like
here in Tennessee for example and we’ve
got nuclear which is can be used at
everywhere in the world and that’s the
one that’s been wrongly neglected to
date and one day will be seen as one of
the most important sources of energy
because the fossil fuels will eventually
become scarce or it may it may now be
three four hundred years because of all
the new technologies we have for
extracting them and finding them but in
the end for example all commercial
shipping should be nuclear because
you’ve got the Russian icebreaker fleet
is all nuclear and four countries have
nuclear Navy’s aircraft carriers and
submarines it’s easy to power large
ships with nuclear propulsion so that
would save a lot of oil and the same
thing is true of electrifying the
railroads this can be done with nuclear
energy and so there’s lots of ways that
we can use nuclear to replace fossil
fuels but the so-called green movement
is adamantly opposed to nuclear energy
and in fact to hydroelectric energy
which are the two main technologies that
could actually replace fossil fuels for
certain uses you know when I hear people
say we only have 12 years left and then
we’re all done anyway and if we don’t
get rid of all fossil fuels in 12 years
we’re gonna be extinct and I’m thinking
how do you replace all the airplanes in
the cars I’m empty I fly a lot because I
travel all the time and solar panels in
an airplane may be a great idea but I
would never want to fly at night ever
again I mean
what it doesn’t look good I did I can’t
imagine that being very healthy but the
other thing we hear so much about dr.
Moore is the idea that the carbon
footprint that we’re making is
unsustainable and it’s gonna raise the
global temperature and we’re gonna burn
up polar caps will melt 40 years ago
when I was in college what I remember
being told was in ten years we were all
gonna freeze to death and global cooling
was going to turn us into human
popsicles so which is it are we getting
too cold getting too hot
artists the earth have the capacity to
adjust anyway
Moore: Well it’s it’s difficult
for people to understand because there’s
cycles upon cycles and some of them are
short and some of them are long and they
don’t all mesh together perfectly
so it’s very chaotic the climate of the
earth and has been for all the billions
of years it’s been here. But the main
point to know is because this is all
blamed on carbon dioxide and they love
to call it carbon. Even though carbon
dioxide is not soot it is an invisible
gas that is necessary for life. As a
matter of fact it is the building block
of all life. all the carbon in
carbon-based life which is you and I and
every other living thing on the planet,
comes from carbon dioxide either in the
air or in the sea its absolved in the
sea from the air it all came originally
from volcanic action when the earth was
much hotter than it is today but it’s
not being replenished at the same rate
that it was then so has in fact been
declining steadily for the last hundred
and fifty million years. And the truth is
if we hadn’t come along and put some of
it back in the atmosphere from where it
came you see all the carbon dioxide
that’s being emitted by our burning
fossil fuels they are made with plants
and plankton in the sea they are 100
percent solar created from sunshine in
the first place and they were the result
of carbon dioxide and water being
combined into sugars which powers the
whole of life on Earth. So carbon dioxide
is in fact the building block the very
essence of life that’s where all
carbon is from. And putting some of it
back into the atmosphere where it came
from is not a sin it is in fact a very
useful thing to be doing as it is
resulting in the greening of this entire
planet because carbon dioxide had become
so low and this is it’s almost like
humorous that they have made it seem
that there’s too much carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere when it’s been declining
for actually 500 million years. The last
hundred and fifty million down to levels
that very recently were almost low
enough to kill the plants.
Q: why don’t we
hear more scientists say what you just
said I mean it seems like that there’s a
chorus and they all say the same thing
that we’re we’re going to die because of
co2.
Moore: Many other scientists believe what
I’m saying and it right the first time I
gave this lecture on the decline of co2
and the fact that we are life salvation
by putting some of it back into the
the atmosphere and greening the earth was in
October of 2015 in London with the
global warming policy Foundation as the
key speaker
no one has refuted my presentation it’s
in video it’s in print it’s in
peer-reviewed scientific papers and has
not been refuted by a single person and
I’ve asked people to please tell me
what’s wrong with this theory
Q: you should
be me you don’t have to ask people to
tell you what’s wrong with what you say
don’t ever go into politics dr. Bohr
it’s a very dangerous zone
Moore: well they doesn’t haven’t been able to
come up with anything and I know
actually that I am right on this point
Q: and I just wish more people would listen
to what I would call genuine scientists
like yourself you have a phrase that you
you speak up in the book that I thought
was very powerful because I it’s the
most balanced approach sustainable
environmentalism so describe what that
means sustainable environment well
Moore: the
problem is is this whole term
sustainable has been used by both
extremes now too and it discredits the
word it’s very difficult when words get
misused to get people to understand the
meaning that they were supposed to have
when they were invented the term
sustainable development was invented in
Nairobi in 1982 at a conference of
environmentalists as a compromise
between the environmentalists in the
industrial world and the
environmentalists in the developing
world you can’t be against development
in the developing world
and so
sustainable development was this
compromise which the the people from the
developed world said ok we’ll we’ll use
this word sustainable to describe
development that is good that doesn’t
harm the environment and it like nothing
is sustainable forever the Sun is going
to burn out apparently in
four-and-a-half billion years but for
our sake today and for the next few
decades sustainable simply means will
continue to last for a long time at the
present rate of use now if these are
it’s really interesting because
renewable you think all will renewable
everything renewable is sustainable not
if you over fish it it isn’t not if you
over cut it it isn’t and some things
that are non-renewable are very
sustainable like iron ore for example
there’s enough iron ore in the Earth’s
crust to last for a trillion years so
people have to learn these words and
they’re all in my book described more
clearly than they are in the in the
media which distorts words left and
right so
Q: it’s one of the reasons that I
found your book absolutely fascinating
you you made a statement and I’m going
to close with this it says simple
science made me a green piece dropout I
think for people who say we’ve got to
get back to the science more than any
book I’ve seen this book is one that if
people are really interested in getting
back to the scientist they ought to read
one written by a scientist not a
politician it is called confessions of a
Greenpeace dropout dr. Patman or thank
you so much for bringing some very
genuine
to the often overheated subject of
climate change and to read dr. Morris
latest articles are to invite him as a
speaker get his book Confessions of a
Greenpeace drop out his website is echo
since dot M II that’s echo since dot M
II
you
