Holding Greenpeace
accountable
Poor countries should hold
Big Green groups and directors liable for deaths, ravage
they cause
Paul Driessen
Fossil fuel and insurance
company executives “could face personal liability for
funding climate denialism and opposing policies to fight
climate change,” Greenpeace recently warned several
corporations. In a letter co-signed by WWF International and
the Center for International Environmental Law, the Rainbow
Warriors ($155 million in 2013 global income) suggested that
legal action might be possible.
Meanwhile, the WWF ($927
million in 2013 global income) filed a formal complaint
against Peabody Energy for “misleading readers” in
advertisements that say coal-based electricity can improve
lives in developing countries. The ads are not “decent,
honest and veracious,” as required by Belgian law, the World
Wildlife ethicists sniffed. Other non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) make similar demands.
These are novel tactics. But
the entire exercise might be little more than a clever
attempt to distract people from developments that could
create problems for thus far unaccountable Big Green
organizations.
I don’t mean Greenpeace
International’s $5.2 million loss a couple weeks ago, when a
rogue employee (since fired) used company cash to conduct
unauthorized trades on global currency markets. Other recent
events portend far rougher legal and political waters ahead
for radical eco-imperialists, especially if countries and
companies take a few more pages out of the Big Green
playbook.
India’s Intelligence Bureau
recently identified Greenpeace as “a threat to national
economic security,” noting that these and other groups have
been “spawning” and funding internal protest movements and
campaigns that have delayed or blocked numerous mines,
electricity projects and other infrastructure programs
vitally needed to create jobs and lift people out of poverty
and disease. The anti-development NGOs are costing India’s
economy 2-3% in lost GDP every year, the Bureau estimates.
The Indian government has now
banned direct foreign funding of local campaign groups by
foreign NGOs like Greenpeace, the WWF and US-based Center
for Media and Democracy. India and other nations could do
much more. Simply holding these über-wealthy nonprofit
environmentalist corporations to the same ethical standards
they demand of for-profit corporations could be a
fascinating start.
Greenpeace, WWF and other Big
Green campaigners constantly demand environmental and
climate justice for poor families. They insist that
for-profit corporations be socially responsible, honest,
transparent, accountable, and liable for damages and
injustices that the NGOs allege the companies have
committed, by supposedly altering Earth’s climate and
weather, for example.
Meanwhile, more than 300
million Indians (equal to the US population) still have no
access to electricity, or only sporadic access. 700 million
Africans likewise have no or only occasional access.
Worldwide, almost 2.5 billion people (nearly a third of our
Earth’s population) still lack electricity or must rely on
little solar panels on their huts, a single wind turbine in
their village or terribly unreliable networks, to charge a
cell phone and power a few light bulbs or a tiny
refrigerator.
These energy-deprived people
do not merely suffer abject poverty. They must burn wood and
dung for heating and cooking, which results in debilitating
lung diseases that kill a million people every year. They
lack refrigeration, safe water and decent hospitals,
resulting in virulent intestinal diseases that send almost
two million people to their graves annually. The vast
majority of these victims are women and children.
The energy deprivation is due
in large part to unrelenting, aggressive, deceitful
eco-activist campaigns against coal-fired power plants,
natural gas-fueled turbines, and nuclear and hydroelectric
facilities in India, Ghana, South Africa, Uganda and
elsewhere. The Obama Administration joined Big Greeen in
refusing to support loans for these critically needed
projects, citing climate change and other claims.
As American University
adjunct professor Caleb Rossiter asked in a recent Wall
Street Journal article, “Where is the justice when the U.S.
discourages World Bank funding for electricity-generation
projects in Africa that involve fossil fuels, and when the
European Union places a ‘global warming’ tax on cargo
flights importing perishable African goods?”
Where is the justice in Obama
advisor John Holdren saying ultra-green elites in rich
countries should define and dictate “ecologically feasible
development” for poor countries? As the Indian government
said in banning foreign NGO funding of anti-development
groups, poor nations have “a right to grow.”
Imagine your life without
abundant, reliable, affordable electricity and
transportation fuels. Imagine living under conditions
endured by impoverished, malnourished, diseased Indians and
Africans whose life expectancy is 49 to 59 years. And then
dare to object to their pleas and aspirations, especially on
the basis of “dangerous manmade global warming” speculation
and GIGO computer models. Real pollution from modern
coal-fired power plants (particulates, sulfates, nitrates
and so on) is a tiny fraction of what they emitted 40 years
ago – and far less harmful than pollutants from
zero-electricity wood fires.
Big Green activists say
anything other than solar panels and bird-butchering wind
turbines would not be “sustainable.” Like climate change,
“sustainability” is infinitely elastic and malleable, making
it a perfect weapon for anti-development activists. Whatever
they support is sustainable. Whatever they oppose is
unsustainable. To them, apparently, the diseases and death
tolls are sustainable, just, ethical and moral.
Whatever they advocate also
complies with the “precautionary principle.” Whatever they
disdain violates it. Worse, their perverse guideline always
focuses on the risks of using technologies – but never on
the risks of not using them. It spotlights risks that a
technology – coal-fired power plants, biotech foods or DDT,
for example – might cause, but ignores risks the technology
would reduce or prevent.
Genetically engineered Golden
Rice incorporates a gene from corn (maize) to make it rich
in beta-carotene, which humans can convert to Vitamin A, to
prevent blindness and save lives. The rice would be made
available at no cost to poor farmers. Just two ounces a day
would virtually end the childhood malnutrition, blindness
and deaths. But Greenpeace and its “ethical” collaborators
have battled Golden Rice for years, while eight million
children died from Vitamin A deficiency since the rice was
invented.
In Uganda malnourished people
depend as heavily on Vitamin A-deficient bananas, as their
Asian counterparts do on minimally nutritious rice. A new
banana incorporates genes from wild bananas, to boost the
fruit’s Vitamin A levels tenfold. But anti-biotechnology
activists repeatedly pressure legislators not to approve
biotech crops for sale. Other crops are genetically
engineered to resist insects, drought and diseases, reducing
the need for pesticides and allowing farmers to grow more
food on less land with less water. However, Big Green
opposes them too, while millions die from malnutrition and
starvation.
Sprayed in tiny amounts on
walls of homes, DDT repels mosquitoes for six months or
more. It kills any that land on the walls and irritates
those it does not kill or repel, so they leave the house
without biting anyone. No other chemical – at any price –
can do all that. Where DDT and other insecticides are used,
malaria cases and deaths plummet – by as much as 80 percent.
Used this way, the chemical is safe for humans and animals,
and malaria-carrying mosquitoes are far less likely to build
immunities to DDT than to other pesticides, which are still
used heavily in agriculture and do pose risks to humans.
But in another crime against
humanity, Greenpeace, WWF and their ilk constantly battle
DDT use – while half a billion people get malaria every
year, making them unable to work for weeks on end, leaving
millions with permanent brain damage, and killing a million
people per year, mostly women and children.
India and other countries can
fight back, by terminating the NGOs’ tax-exempt status, as
Canada did with Greenpeace. They could hold the pressure
groups to the same standards they demand of for-profit
corporations: honesty, transparency, social responsibility,
accountability and personal liability. They could excoriate
the Big Green groups for their crimes against humanity – and
penalize them for the malnutrition, disease, economic
retractions and deaths they perpetrate or perpetuate.
Actions like these would
improve billions of lives and bring some accountability to
Big Green(backs).
Paul Driessen is senior
policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow
(www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power –
Black death.
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