Shooting themselves in the foot with lead-free bullets

This week, the world celebrates the award of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize to the International Atomic Energy Authority and its Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei.

Well, most of the world. Out of step as usual with the rest of the planet comes Greenpeace, huffing and puffing about how inappropriate it is to give a peace prize to an organisation which promotes the peaceful use of nuclear power, because, y’know, one minute you’re generating electricity and the next you’re letting off nuclear weapons on…on….(at which point the penny drops that since Nagasaki nobody actually has exploded an atomic weapon in conflict, a record very largely due to the efforts of the IAEA).

Actually I lied there: the penny has never dropped for Greenpeace. Read this and you’ll see what I mean.

It’s amusing to note from this comedy script that Greenpeace appears to have swallowed whole the American line that Iran is developing nuclear weapons and that the desire of the IAEA to await hard evidence shows that they are in the pocket of the nuclear industry. Greenpeace also seem to be the only people on the planet apart from George W Bush and Tony Blair who actually believe Iraq to have had nuclear weapons.

Greenpeace’s spokespeople (mouthpeaces?) of course rarely trouble themselves with inconvenient facts, happily admitting that they lied about the environmental impact of sinking the Brent Spar oil platform in the North Sea but considering it justified as a publicity stunt. Meanwhile they dumped their own burned-out Rainbow Warrior at sea and claimed that it would create an artificial reef which would support increased marine life. (I’m not making this up.) See the article on pages 3-8 of this, which was written by Patrick Moore: not the monocled TV astronomer but one of Greenpeace’s founders, who is appalled at what Greenpeace has since become. Its leaders are no longer concerned with saving the planet so much as saving their own positions on the media gravy train. The ideology is the important thing: science comes later, and people last of all.

To take an example, Bjorn Lomborg is routinely derided by Greenpeace as a “global warming sceptic” in the pay of the fossil fuel industry. In fact, if you read The Skeptical Environmentalist Lomborg clearly not only believes in global warming but believes that human activity is the main cause of it, which puts him at the credulous rather than the sceptical end of the GW spectrum. No, Lomborg’s sin is that as an economist he raises questions about whether spending billions of pounds every year to implement the Kyoto agreement is the best use of the money. We can’t stop global warming or turn it back, merely slow down its progress, and Lomborg asks whether buying a few decades’ delay (at most) is a better use of the money than protective measures (flood defences etc) for when it eventually - and unavoidably - does hit us. The latter would free sufficient resources to provide the entire developing world with clean water, for example, thus ending millions of needless deaths every year. But Greenpeace are interested in rising sea-levels: not to alleviate the damage from them, but to be photographed pontificating about them. Rising death tolls among Asians and Africans are of no publicity value for Greenpeace, so who cares? They’ve got Bob Geldof, right?

Or take James Lovelock. If anyone could lay claim to a degree of respect from the environmental movement it’s surely Lovelock, whose equipment helped draw attention to pesticide residues and the effects of CFCs, and whose Gaia hypothesis has been enormously influential. (He even appears - along with Lomborg - on that Prospect magazine list of intellectuals.) Lovelock believes that global warming is a clear and present danger, so clear and so present that we need to use the most effective means at our disposal to reduce greenhouse emissions. Hence his support for increased use of nuclear power now, while we continue to develop other technologies which may be better some day.

So. On the one hand we have people like James Lovelock, Bjorn Lomborg, Patrick Moore and Mohamed Elbaradei. People who care about the world they live in and are trying to do something positive about its problems. On the other hand, bitterly opposed to them all, we have Greenpeace: blissfully unconcerned with the practicalities of world peace, rising sea levels and dying children a long way away, worried only that somebody might solve some of the problems from which they make such a good living. I know who I’d rather trust with the planet. Anti-nuclear ideologues? No thanks.

You know what? Next time the French conduct a nuclear test in the Pacific, and Greenpeace sail their little flotilla into the zone, the French should make no attempt to move them out. In fact, they should encourage as many members as possible to join them. It’s difficult to justify conducting nuclear tests these days; and it would be ironic to enlist Greenpeace in support.