Diff for "Greenpeace"

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout

The Makings of a Sensible Environmentalist

Patrick Moore Central 333.72092 M8235c 2010

• Patrick Albert Moore born June 15, 1947 in British Columbia, UBC PhD 1974 (mining pollution)

• Wikipedia

• Website

• p005 88% of medicines are synthesized with chlor-alkali chemistry

• p006 sustainable aquaculture, colleagues hostile
• p007 Less wood, more steel and concrete, more environmental damage (how about aluminum?)
• p009 Geothermal heat pumps more important than solar panels or windmills

  • 20 feet distance between vertical loop heat pump wells, 200 to 500 feet deep.

• p016 Rice fields reflooded (overwinter decay) to preserve nutrients, rather than burned.
• p016 wintering habitat for shorebirds
• p024 communism and fascism meet behind your back (where you can't watch them plotting)
• p025 Science can't prove a negative, like zero-risk safety
• p029 "I don't believe in taking foolish chances, but nothing can be accomplished without taking any chances at all" -- Charles A. Lindberg
• p030 Greenpeace against golden rice

• p030 Golkany "The Precautionary Principle" - purchased $5.99 AbeBooks / Wonder Book Frederick MD

• p034 Michael Crichton 2003 "The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda."

• p036 I don't even deny we may be responsible for some of the present warming, but I do not believe we can be certain of this.
  • Sophistry or bullshit: we can measure solar energy arriving and less heat leaving, the Earth looks colder from space
  • Perhaps Moore has learned more since 2010
• p040 Father Bill Moore inherited logging camp 1940s age 21

• p042 Bertrand Russell Our Knowledge of the External World

• p044 mentor C. S. Holling

• p044 Moore interdisicplinary PhD heavy metal contamination in Rupert Inlet by mine tailings
• p044 waste did NOT settle to inlet bottom, instead mixed with surface waters
• p045 mining company pressured dean pressured PM to change thesis
• p045 eventually adjudicator sided with PM and he got his Ph

• p047 fallout from nuclear testing

• p047 Strontium 90 -> leukemia, bone cancer (10400 day 28.5 year half life, last US above ground test 1962)

• p048 Tests moved from Nevada to Amchitka
• p049 Travels to Akutan Alaska 1971

• p052 Bob Hunter "... But there is a very good chance it will become a kind of ecofacism ... faith in the gurus"

• p052 "Indian Prophecy" hippie folklore, actually 1962 Evangelical tract

• p053 voyage to protest French tests at Moruroa atoll 1966 to 1996

• p056 blessing from Pope

• p057 Ehrlich Population BombNorman Borlaug high yielding rice and wheat

• p062 Whales evolved from hippos 60M years ago
• p062 the "right" whales to hunt because they swim slow and float after killing
• p064 petroleum and electricity out-competed whale oil
• p064 Southern ocean whaling killed 30K blue whales for meat, soap, margarine

• p073 Lawyer David Tussman incorporates Greenpeace, later betrays it says Moore

• p075 baby Seal hunting for valuable skins

• p075 hakapik

• p079 P.M.quit smoking years ago, still consumes meat and alcohol

• p093 1977 Kitimat supertanker port cancelled (restarted 2018 ]]

• p093 spruce budworm insecticide spraying

• p114 protested supertankers to Puget Sound, doesn't mention 1977 Magnuson legislation

• p119 mentions Greenpeace Germany, not their preference for Russian gas instead of nuclear
• p120 Australia has 1/3 of world's uranium deposite

• p128 Barbara Ward Spaceship Earth 1966

• p132 Russ George touts Seafarm : the story of aquaculture by Elisabeth Mann Borgese

• p133 Moore ponders salmon farm in Winter Harbor
• p134 other greenpeacers hostile
• p135 R-Dub nickname for Rainbow Warrio
• p140 treating sewage with chlorine dioxide instead of chlorine eliminated dioxins
• p140 great divide between physical and social sciences
• p145 arguments about fish farming waste
• p146 coho salmon and rainbow transplanted around the world
• p147 pigs and chickens get antibiotics half their lives, salmon only 3%. organic salmon none, "organic status"
• p149 media propagates farm salmon lice risks to native salmon (with lice)

• p150 SLICE treatment also shunned

• p151 Omega 3 from soybean oil

• p153 Both wild and farmed salmon are pink with the same carotenoids

... about here, Moore wanders off into the weeds ...

• p154 strange stuff about PDBE polybrominated diphenyl esters

• p155 Global Assessment of Organic Contaminants in Farmed Salmon

• p156 average consumer 8x PCBs from meat and 3x from milk compared to farmed salmon
  • misleading comparison: 2010 US beef consumption 39 kg, milk 228 kg, 2004 farmed salmon 1 kg

• p160 California giant kelp grows up to 3 feet per day

• p164

• p164 1987 Bruntland Report Our Common Future

• p165 Greenpeace doesn't participate, fights media war instead

• p165 Getting to Yes, four principles for negotiating agreements:

  • Separate the people from the problem.
  • Focus on interests rather than positions.
  • Generate a variety of opinions before settling on an agreement
  • Insist that the agreement be based on objective criteria
• p166 politicos push narrow agendas, don't learn other perspectives
• p166 learning to speak "the other side" civilly made all the difference
• p167 consensus process does not mean unanimous agreement about everything
• p168 identify issues, state positions, identify reasons for positions
• p169 describe disagreements in unanimous words
• p170 governments don't always like round tables that clarify subjects

• p170 Moore differentiates fossil fuel CO₂ from biomass CO₂ - but is the biomass replaced?

• p172 War in the Woods 1993 protesting clearcutting

• p175 Forest Alliance of BC

• p177 many references to "renewable", but how often are replacement trees actually planted?

• p178 to 180, a list of principles

• p180 Greenspirit Strategies Vancouver Yalehouse district

• p185 French bomb Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbor

• p189 John Perlin A forest journey : the role of trees in the fate of civilization

• p195 IPCC about forest management

• p196 http://www.gcrio.org/ipcc/techrepl/forest.html ... all gone, not archived

• p198 US Green Building Council does not include wood (not "rapidly renewable")
• p199 Greenpeace miffed that Norway Olympics used wood, 2000 Sydney "green olympics" used steel and wood

• p200 Vancouver Olympics uses lots of wood

• p201 9 story wood frame buildings are more earthquake resistant than similar concrete structures

• p202 Rex Weyler

• p204 Argues with James Lovelock about cars, cattle, chainsaws

And here, Forest Biology major Moore jumps the tracks, making ignorant statements about physical predictability. Can Gaia make 500 terawatts of excess heat energy vanish? No, most of that energy accumulates in the expanding ocean, the rest drives a heck of a lot of atmospheric friskiness.

But Lovelock converts Moore to nuclear power advocacy.

• p205 1.5 billion have no access to electricity ... but most Chinese do.
• p205 86% of commercial energy from fossil fuels
• p206 ground heat storage should be called "geoexchange", geothermal is high temperature volcanic sourced energy

• p208 Stewart Brand 2005 Environmental Heresies

• p215 Chinese can't afford to use their own solar panels (in 2010)

  • bs China was world PV installer in 2013. In May 2025, PV capacity crossed 1 terawatt, in June 1.1 terawatt

  • Their PV panel industry was less than 20 years old in 2013. Moore didn't earn his PhD until he was 27 yo.
• p216 "Solar panels ... 15 percent of the time"
  • but many panels can produce far more than enough power than needed, which is sent back into the grid, allowing more water to remain in hydro reservoirs. Perhaps a problem far from reservoirs, but an electrical grid spans most of North America, ditto for much of China.
• p216 capacity factor in 2009 UK solar power was 7% (it is now 10%). BUT, does that factor INCLUDE latitude and weather and day/night interruptions? Are we double-counting our losses?
  • In 2023, UK total electricity consumption was 309.2 TWh, averaging 3.5 Terawatts. At 10% capacity factor, that is 35 Terawatts when the Sun shines. The UK is 244376 km2, 2.4e11 m². With a 60 degree average latitude tilt, that is 1.2e11 m² facing the 1000w/m2 Sun, or 240 Terawatts. 10% of that is 24 TW. The question is, how much net photosynthesis does that 13% of diverted solar power interrupt?
• p217 raise price of solar to 80 cents per kilowatt hour
  • To be fair, Moore is building his case for fission power, which is a powerful case compared to fossil fuel.
• p218 "many" activists exclude hydro from "renewable"
• p219 2010 Spain solar subsidy, diesel power fraudulently sent through meters
• p220 Ontario $0.135can ($0.097 us) solar price; hydro coal nuclear cheaper
  • what are the externalities for each?
• p220 slack wind means more backup natural gas - but with a national or international grid, slack wind everywhere is rare. Also, where is hydro on a national grid? More POMA.
• p221 Swiss buy French nuclear power at night, pump water to high dams, sell it back during the day

  • Levelized cost of land-based wind $42/MHh, much higher offshore

  • What about wind on islands, and remote areas, off the grid?
• p222 solar energy "investment bubble" - or the thousandth transistor compared to the quintillionth transistor?
• p222 aluminum plants (and users) colocate with hydro.
• p222 Aircraft plants? Boeing was founded in Seattle in 1916 because lumber for airplanes was cheap.
  • Airbus headquarters are near Toulouse France, with a hydrodam averaging less than 4 megawatts.
• p222 Greenpeace failed to stop financing for the 22500 MW Three Gorges dam.
• p223 in 2009, China was 2.5% nuclear, 15% hydro, and 80% coal

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#/media/File:China-electricity-prod-source-stacked.svg

  • 2009 3.5 TWh (3 TWh coal, 0.5 TWh hydro) . . . 2024 10 TWh ( 5.5 TWh coal, 1.5 TWh hydro, 0.9TWh wind, 0.8 TWh solar)
  • in 1879, Albert Einstein produced noise, pee, and poop. In 1905 he wrote four groundbreaking papers.
• p223 lower per-capita CO₂ in hydro/nuclear electricity countries ( but what about motor vehicles?)
  • biased activist reporters ignore this
• p229 1892 Boise Idaho first geothermal district heating system

• p229 recent: Nuclear 6% of global energy, 18% of US energy, 68% of US energy

• p231 Three Mile Island killed nobody, taught safety lessons

• p232 Chernobyl RMBK flammable graphite core reactors copied from weapons production, no safety design, 11 out of 26 still operating (4 near Leningrad, also Kursk and Smolensk )

• p232 4 Chernobyl RMBK reactors decommissioned 1986-2000

• p233 Greenpeace claims 90,000 deaths

• p233 CANDU has small positive void coefficient

• p233 evacuation badly managed

• p235 The Tooth Fairy Project attributes Sr-90 in teeth to nuclear plants, but 99% is from nuclear weapons testing, 1% from Chernobyl

• p236 The Catalog of Worldwide Nuclear Testing - Online

• p237 average public dose is 0.0045 mSV/y, 100ppm of natural background radiation
• p239 "easier to enrich uranium than extract plutonium from used nuclear fuel"

  • misleading, most plutonium is extracted from PUREX production reactors. It is banned by presidential directive in the US, not elsewhere

• p239 U-238 is not fissile but fertile

• p243 Processing of Used Nuclear Fuel

• p248 South Africa first to give up nuclear weapons

• p249 500 tonnes of EXCESS Russian weapons uranium to US commercial reactor fuel ... NOT uranium from deployed weapons, as implied in book

• p249 2010 U.S., Russia reach deal on disposing of plutonium from nuclear weapons

• p249 At present (2010) there are 436 reactors in 31 countries, 15% of world electricity . Number of operating reactors may well double in the next 30 or 40 years
• p252 Declining natural gas production trend reversed with 7% increase in 2008
• p256 1600 ducks died in oil sand settling pond, way more killed by hunters
  • OK, but why not cover settling ponds, or scare the ducks away?

• p256 carbon capture and storage

• p261

• p261 Moore cites World Energy Outlook 2009 "... use of coal will increase by 53% in 2030". Not explicitly stated in this 698 page document, but page 90 shows 4548 Mtce in 2007, projects 6981 in 2030, a factor of 1.5347.

  • actually 8.79 Bt / 8790 Mt in 2024,most growth in China

• p263 Buy a smaller, more-efficient car, take mass transit when convenient, insulate your home, and put in a geothermal heat pump.
• p264 Agriculture 10,000 years ago

• p265 Scientist do not agree which species of wild grass ... Wikipedia says Zea mays (teosinte) ]]

• p265 24 billion chickens 27.6B 2024 74B killed yearly

  • note descended from Gallus gallus

  • note shortest wild bird lifespan ruby-throated hummingbird

• p267 Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with High-Yield Farming and Forestry abandoned after 2009

• p267 Over last 100 years, five times as much food per unit of land
• p268 C H O N P K, Ca Mg, minor nutrient elements Fe Cu Mn B Zn Mo Cl
• p268 CO₂ as fertilizer

• p268 guano still mined for organic fertilizer

• p268 "organic" farming a marketing term
• p269 kvetch about organic food label

• p269 Greenpeace badgers HP for using vinyl (polyvinyl chloride)

• p272 Organic farmers use phosphate fertilizer called "inorganic" by Moore
• p275 Dr. Bruce Ames: residue fears reduce fruit and vegetable consumption, increasing cancer
• p289 By 2009, 400,000 hectares planted with GM corn in the Philippines
• p289 By end of 2008, 25 countries growing 125 million hectares of GM crops

• p290 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation agriculture development strategist Sam Dryden, died 2017

• p295 560 million years of multicellular life
• p295 large mammal extinction in Australia and Americas contemporaneous with human arrival
• p296 native wildlife coadapted with humans over millions of years in sub-Saharan Africa
• p298 habitat loss to farming land biggest threat to biodiversity

• p299 UN FAO Food and Agriculture Organization says agricultural land clearing causes 95% of deforestation, contra Greenpeace

• p300 FAO: reforestation of industrialized world farmland increases forest land 0.2% per year
• p301 World Wildlife Fund: 8753 trees endangered with extinction
  • Dutch World Conservation Monitoring says 6969 of those are vulnerable, lower risk, or data deficient
• p301 WWF: "inevitably some flexibility slips in"
• p302 Greenpeace claims 50% mass extinctions of B.C. plants and animals because of island biogeography theory, because only 12% of BC are protected parks and wilderness.
• p302 less than 5% of the province is settlements and farms, most of the rest is managed native forest
• p302 Grizzly bears only threatened in urban areas and cattle ranches
• p303 142 out of 9663 known stocks are extinct, around Vancouver, Victoria, and the hydrodammed Columbia
• p303-4 E.O. Wilson claims 50 million species, only 1.7 million named and recorded.
  • We do know 90% of larger species, many smaller invertebrates undiscovered

  • I'd guess the smallest and slowest and quickly reproducing species genetically isolate in small patches, hence patch use by people removes "small" species and re-wilding eventually adds new small species

  • Moore doesn't mention domestic dogs and cats, which consume 20% of human food and 30% of meat, which increases land use
• p305 mass extinction? rate of species extinction slower in recent decades; the most vulnerable are already gone, the rest are protected, especially by removing introduced predators like cats and foxes

• p306 ICUN Red List Brian Groombridge 75% of recorded extinctions on islands

• p306 extinctions on islands (including 8.6e6 km² Australia?), not on continents (including 1e7 km² Europe)
• p308 Hunting and land use change drive extinction, not climate change (my note: yet)

• p314 James Lovelock's 1957 invention: electron capture detector with 10 millicuries of ⁶³Ni as a source of 17KeV (average) electrons

• p314 polyvinyl chloride vinyl is fire resistant, self-extinguishing, which is why it is used for wire insulation

• p315 brittle, but softened by plasticisers such as phthalates

• p315 Greenpeace frets about dioxins inside vinyl factories, 0.5% of dioxins produced by human activity. 99.5% of dioxins from incineration, wood combustion, diesel trucks, etc

• p316 with no evidence of toxicity, Europe banned phthalates for "precautionary" reasons

• p317 Walmart replaces PVC with PET Polyethylene terephthalate

• p318 US Green Building Council USGBC LEED

• p321 Bisphenol A (BPA) claimed to mimic estrogen

• p321 no adverse effects on rats fed 4000x human BPA exposure
• p330 Climate change / global warming - sophistry

• p332 Fred Singer contrarian

• p332 Climate Change Reconsidered

• p344 1998 warmest in past 150 years "then leveled off" ... until 2005, which was warmer

  • then 2010's new record, followed by new records in 2014, 2016, 2023, and 2024, 1.3℃ higher than the 20th century average
• p361 Kvetch about pH numbers from 85,000 years ago -- we know because we can measure weathering of rock

• Patrick Moore ... you've often been right, and you describe being wrong before in your book. When you stop changing your mind, you stop learning, reject surprises, and instead calcify prior beliefs.
• I don't accept global warming (the phenomena, not the label) because of terrestrial thermometer readings. I accept data showing the same arriving solar light energy, but increasingly less radiation of thermal infrared from the Earth. Energy is conserved ... and accumulates. Nostly in sea water for now, which expands as it becomes slightly warmer but kilometers deep.
• Increasing CO₂ reduces the infrared transparency of the atmosphere, hence the "top radiating layer" moves upwards into thinner air, with a thicker column of "temperature lapse rate" air below. That's not "insulation", it is gravity - atoms lose velocity when they move upwards in Earth's gravity well, gain velocity moving downwards. THAT is why the atomospher is colder above.
• Yes, the ionosphere is much hotter, but it is high vacuum and practically transparent, detached from the neutral atmosphere below, with no effect on Earth's temperature.