Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (80 page)

[105]
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Sunday Times
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[106]
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[107]
. “Current Sea Level Rise,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise

[108]
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[109]
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[110]
. “Pacific Islands ‘Growing not Shrinking’ Due to Climate Change,” Paul Chapman, the
Telegraph,
June 3, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/tuvalu/7799503/Pacific-islands-growing-not-shrinking-due-to-climate-change.html

[111]
. Steve McIntyre, “IPCC and the ‘Trick’,” climateaudit.org, December 10, 2009, http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/10/ipcc-and-the-trick/

[112]
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[113]
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[114]
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[115]
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[116]
. Lawrence Solomon, “ClimateChange Partisans Find Mere Sins of Omission,”
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[117]
. James Delingpole, “Climategate: the Final Nail in the Coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?”
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[118]
. Bishop Hill, “Climate Cuttings 33,” November 20, 2009, http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html

[119]
. Michael McCarthy, “Environment in Crisis: ‘We Are Past the Point of No Return’,”
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[120]
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[121]
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[122]
. Ibid.

[123]
. “New Energy for America,” Organizing for America, http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/newenergy_more

[124]
. “In Denial: The Meltdown of the Climate Campaign,” Steven F. Hayward,
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[125]
. “The Deniers,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deniers:_The_world-renowned_scientists_who_stood_up_against_global_warming_hysteria,_political_persecution,_and_fraud

[126]
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[127]
. Neil Reynolds, “Please Remain Calm: The Earth Will Heal Itself,”
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[128]
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[129]
. Nicholas Dawidoff, “The Civil Heretic,”
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[130]
. Steve McIntyre, “Institute of Physics Submission,”
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Chapter 21 -
Charting a Sensible Course to a Sustainable Future

Having grown up around boats and as I still spend quite a bit of time at sea, I have always been attracted to nautical expressions as metaphors for the greater human enterprise. Stay the course, steady as she goes, all hands on deck, alter course, full speed ahead—damn the torpedoes. As crew members of this mighty galleon called planet earth, we all have a duty to help chart a course to a sustainable future. But there is discord among the ranks, right up to the senior officers on the bridge. The breakdown of the Copenhagen climate negotiations in December 2009 indicates how divergent the visions for our future have become. We have struck a large reef, so we must have been off course.

My friend Dave Hatherton’s late father told him, “The best thing about falling down is getting back up again.” I don’t believe we need to go back to square one, but we certainly do need to rethink how we could get back on a sensible tack. I suggest setting the following course:

We should recognize that the liberal democratic form of governance is the right model for balancing individual rights and social responsibility. There is no place for dictatorship, totalitarianism, or fundamentalism of the Taliban variety in a sustainable world. As Winston Churchill said, “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Those countries that enjoy freedom of expression, assembly, religion, and individual rights should increase their efforts to defeat, peacefully if possible, the kind of repression and corruption that exists in so many countries, including Zimbabwe, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.

Our public policies on everything from agriculture to zebra conservation should be based on science and logic. The hysteria that has crept into and taken over the environmental movement must be replaced by a commitment to a more logical approach that balances human needs with environmental values. Some species will be reduced or perhaps even lost in the evolution of life during this era of increasing human dominance. At the same time we should do what we can to protect areas of wilderness and the species that depend on them. But humans should not play second fiddle to other species except where a majority consciously chooses to do so. And we should not choose to do so on the basis that we are somehow inferior to other species.

Perhaps the greatest flaw in the more extreme environmental rhetoric is the tendency to characterize humans as a disease on the earth. This, in combination with doomsday predictions, causes people, especially young people, to give up hope for the future. Nothing could undermine more our prospects for finding solutions to environmental problems. We need bright young citizens with hope for the future, citizens who can apply their intelligence to solving problems and who can reject policies based on faulty logic and bad science.

In the introduction I outlined the positions that I would argue over the course of this book. As I repeat them here, I hope you will consider them again and determine if you now have some new perspectives on these important issues:

• We should be growing more trees and using more wood, not cutting fewer trees and using less wood as Greenpeace and its allies contend. Wood is the most important renewable material
  and
  energy resource.
  
• Those countries that have reserves of potential hydroelectric energy should build the dams required to deliver that energy. There is nothing wrong with creating more lakes in this world.
  
• Nuclear energy is essential for our future energy supply, especially if we wish to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. It has proven to be clean safe, reliable, and cost-effective
  
• Geothermal heat pumps, which too few people know about, are far more important and cost-effective than either solar panels or windmills as a source of renewable energy. They should be required in all new buildings unless there is a good reason to use some other technology for heating, cooling, and making hot water.
  
• The most effective way to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels is to encourage the development of technologies that require less or no fossil fuels to operate. Electric cars, heat pumps, nuclear and hydroelectric energy, and biofuels are the answer, not cumbersome regulatory systems that stifle economic activity.
  
• Genetic science, including genetic engineering, will improve nutrition and end malnutrition, improve crop yields, reduce the environmental impact of farming, and make people and the environment healthier.
  
• Many activist campaigns designed to make us fear useful chemicals are based on misinformation and unwarranted fear.
  
• Aquaculture, including salmon and shrimp farming, will be one of our most important future sources of healthy food. It will also take pressure off depleted wild fish stocks and will employ millions of people productively.
  
• There is no cause for alarm about climate change. The climate is always changing. Some of the proposed “solutions” would be far worse than any imaginable consequence of global warming, which will likely be mostly positive. Cooling is what we should fear.
  
• Poverty is the worst environmental problem. Wealth and urbanization will stabilize the human population. Agriculture should be mechanized throughout the developing world. Disease and malnutrition can be largely eliminated by the application of modern technology. Health care, sanitation, literacy, and electrification should be provided to everyone.
  
• No whale or dolphin should be killed or captured anywhere, ever. This is one of my few religious beliefs. They are the only species on earth whose brains are larger than ours and it is impossible to kill or capture them humanely. Anyone who needs proof of this should view the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, an expose of the Japanese capture and slaughter of dolphins.
  

For me, the most gratifying result of the 15 years I spent with Greenpeace is that many whale species are now recovering around the world. It is disturbing that a few countries— namely, Japan, Iceland and Norway—continue to kill whales in violation of the moratorium established in 1981. I hope this will someday end and that these gentle creatures will once again live without fear of humans, as they did for 60 million years before we began to hunt them.

I encourage you to take the helm and in your own way help chart a course for a sustainable future, for the benefit of the environment and all the thousands of species, including our own, that live on this beautiful planet.