Interview: Patrick Moore “It Will Cost millions, Even Billions of Lives! Not Just Jobs,” Greenpeace Co-founder Explains The Green New Deal

Exclusive and uncensored interview with Dr. Patrick Moore, the former president of Greenpeace Canada, about the New Green Deal proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which he is calling a 'suicide pact' for America and the world. 

“The New Green deal is a fairy tale. It is a fantasy and it is made to make people afraid. It is using fear and also guilt,’ explains the co-founder of Greenpeace Dr. Patrick Moore.   

 

The Green New Deal Is a ‘Suicide Pact’ For America and the World

 

We got to talk with Dr. Patrick Moore, the former president of Greenpeace Canada, about the New Green Deal proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which he is calling a ‘suicide pact’ for America and the world.

 

Mark Jackson: The Green New Deal aims to slow climate change by eliminating greenhouse gas emissions within 10 years. It includes measures to replace air travel with high speed rails, upgrade all buildings in the U S and phase out fossil fuels altogether. Dr. Moore, what do you think of the GND? 

Dr. Patrick Moore: I think it’s basically a suicide pact for the United States economy and for the people. We all need air to breathe and water to drink. But after that, the two most important things we need our food and energy. We cannot live without them. Just like we cannot live without air and water. And people take food very much for granted, especially today when the vast majority of people live in cities where they find their food at the supermarket and we simply cannot end the use of fossil fuels if we want to continue growing and transporting our food to where it’s needed.

So what would happen, say just for example, if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow? Very quickly, the food would not be produced in sufficient quantity and then it would not reach the center of the cities. So from the center of the cities would begin the starvation.

What would people eat? Well first they would eat their pets and any other animals that they could find like is happening in Venezuela right now because of shortage of food due to the collapse of the system. But if you stopped using fossil fuels, the system would collapse very quickly and soon people would eat each other and this would spread out from the center of the cities and would be an absolute and total disaster for civilization. It’s actually crazy and when I hear people say, Oh, this could cost millions of jobs if we stopped using fossil fuels. No, it will cost millions, even billions of lives, not just jobs.

 

 

Mark Jackson: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the world will end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change. Is that an established scientific finding?

Dr. Patrick Moore: This is pure apocalypse talk. This is superstition at the very best you can say it is a lie. The world is not coming to an end, but what she is proposing, the end to fossil fuels and many of her other proposals would be far worse and cause far more loss of life. If we were to actually adopt this, what does she expect us to actually do? Well first she says we must reset every single building in the United States to meet new energy efficiency standards. Just this one aspect would use up nearly the entire gross domestic product of the United States to achieve in 10 years and that’s the only one of the things that this green new deal is saying we should do. There is so much wrong about this Green New Deal that it has actually brought me out of semi retirement at this point to help do something to fight it because it is suicide! It is not salvation as she is saying. It is a terrible, terrible proposal and for some reason the Democratic Party in the United States has gone into this ultra left socialist politics while they watched just now Venezuela collapsing because of the same kind of politics adopted there over the years.

 

Mark Jackson: Why is there so much anxiety about global warming?

Dr. Moore: It is an overarching issue. It can be sent to affect everything because the climate is everywhere on the earth. The temperature is everywhere and that makes it very effective from a political and communications point of view, but the real problem is what we have here is a powerful convergence of interests among key elites in our society. I’ll just name them clearly. First you have the green movement, which I helped to create but which I left many years ago because it was hijacked by the far political left and used for sensation and fear and misinformation instead of science and logic, but the green political left is using this issue to raise funds and promote fear in the population. It is basically a very effective fundraising tool.

Then you have the media which is using the climate change argument to make sensation. In other words, to sell advertising. So there’s a huge revenue stream for the green movement in fundraising on the fear of climate change and for the media on fundraising because they get to have headlines which are sensational and this is what makes people buy the newspapers and watch the TV.

Then you have the green scientists who are almost all on government grants. They are not being paid to do their research by companies or private interests, whereas who only pay for research that’s going to get them something that might be useful. The product of climate change research is fear. It is just making people afraid of the future with these predictions of terrible crisis and apocalypse. Then you have the green politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and she is a classic case of an opportunistic politician who is using this issue to get votes. I making people afraid for their children and she’s going to say to them, and then you have the green businesses who are using this issue to get huge subsidies and huge tax breaks to build all these wind farms and solar farms, which would not exist. There wouldn’t be one of them if it were not for the heavy subsidies and tax advantages, etc. We would just be using fossil fuels, nuclear energy and hydroelectric energy, so it’s a con game and all of those interests, all of it includes Hollywood too, which is kind of part of the media. That’s why this is such a powerful subject because it’s a powerful convergence of interests among key elites in our society.

 

Mark Jackson: The Green New Deal is based on the assumption that global warming and carbon dioxide are bad. What if that assumption is wrong? More says it’s important to view climate change from an objective scientific perspective.

Dr. Moore: Yes.

Mark Jackson: What is the correct view on climate change?

Dr. Moore: Correct view is that carbon dioxide is entirely beneficial primarily because we already know for a fact and NASA says this and on their website and so does the Australian top science organizations, and many others are telling us that our emissions of carbon dioxide are resulting in a massive increase in the growth of forest and food crops and plants all around the world. Because carbon dioxide is like a fertilizer for plants and because it has been very low, the plants are starving for it and so when we give them more, they grow better. All you have to do is Google ‘greening of the earth’ and you will see tremendous amount of knowledge on this. And also go to a website called CO2 coalition, of which I am a director and many very top scientists are directors and members of this organization based in Washington DC.

And we believe that carbon dioxide emissions from human use of fossil fuels is entirely beneficial both because it is greening the earth. And because a little bit of warming, which is actually all that has happened in the last 300 years, the earth has only warmed by a little more than one degree Celsius. This is not apocalypse. This means that food can be grown in more northern latitudes in Canada and Russia where it could not be grown before that even two or three degrees of warming would be so much better than two or three degrees of cooling, which would cause a collapse in food production worldwide. So we should hope that it doesn’t get cooler and that it does, if anything get a little bit warmer. But let me say one thing that I think is really important between China and India and Russia, you have 40% of the world’s population and now coming close to 50% of the world’s co two emissions.

And those three countries are doing nothing to reduce their CO2 emissions. China’s emissions are increasing, India’s emissions are increasing. Russia’s emissions are increasing. Really the only large industrial country where CO2 emissions are decreasing is the United States. The United States CO2 emissions have been declining for nearly 10 years, whereas Russia, India and China emissions are still going up. Russia doesn’t even pay lip service to it, but China and India pay lip service, they say yes, of course that we have this climate change and yes, of course we must do something, but then they do nothing. So obviously they don’t really believe it because they too would be affected negatively by this if it was real. So they don’t believe it’s real. They actually don’t, especially the Russian Academy of Sciences, they don’t believe it’s real. In fact the only scientists in any large number who claimed that it’s real are the ones which are on political grants where politicians are paying the scientists basically to give them the scare story so they can scare the public so they can get elected.

For example, with this Paris agreement, I saw that none of the people in the United Nations organization were talking about climate science. They were all talking about how they’re going to get people’s money and how they’re going to distribute it away from wealthy countries to poor countries. It was all about wealth distribution. It had nothing to do with science! Whereas we skeptic scientists, we’re talking about science and talking about how we could move forward with a better understanding of the world’s climate, but I also know that the ones who say it’s a crisis and an apocalypse are wrong. All of CO2 we’re putting back in. The atmosphere came from lights in the first place. It was taken out of the atmosphere.

The CO2 in the atmosphere was put there by volcanoes when the earth was young and hotter during huge volcanic eruptions. One of the reasons it was declining in the last billion years or so was because it wasn’t going back in the atmosphere very fast compared to how it was in the beginning and life forces in, in, in especially the calcium carbonate deposits have been removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the oceans for millions of years. That’s why it came down so low and that’s why inadvertently it wasn’t, we didn’t do it on purpose, but inadvertently we have become the salvation of life on earth, not it’s destroyer. By putting some CO2 back in the atmosphere where it continues to fertilize the plants and the foods that we eat every day and all our forests rowing in the mountains and valleys around the world.

Mark Jackson: Of the two thousands the UN said 90 something percent of scientists agreed on climate change. Could you comment on that?

Dr. Moore: Well, there are many layers to this onion as they say. First, the fundamental question is global warming happening. Of course, 97% of scientists would agree with that, because we know it is. But what is the reason? Why is it happening? So then you ask, is the global warming caused by human activity and then how much of the global warming is caused by human activity and how much of it is naturally caused? We don’t really know the answer there. We don’t even know if any of it is caused by human activity. But that is a question. So depending on how you put that question, you will get a very different percentage. And then the final question is, is the global warming, which is caused by human activity going to destroy the world, uh, there you won’t get 97%.

Mark Jackson: Many say the weather is becoming more and more extreme. Can you explain this?

Dr. Moore: Well, I’ll just start by saying there is no increase in extreme weather events. And even if there was, there’s no evidence that it would be caused by CO2. But let me tell you that even the intergovernmental panel on climate change, which is pretty extreme in its positions on the, you know, the doom and gloom story about how we’re going to have overheating of the planet and all of that, even they admit, because we have good records of hurricanes and droughts, have floods, tornadoes and other major weather events, even the intergovernmental panel on climate change clearly admits that there is no increase in extreme weather events. But the extremists ignore that. You see, they used to say it was global warming. Then the warming kind of stopped around the year 2000 really stopped going up like it had for the previous 20 years.

So then they said, let’s call it climate change. And once they changed from global warming to climate change, now nearly everything that happened could be attributed to carbon dioxide. And that’s how they made that switch. But if you said, for example, back in the early two thousands if you said, well, yes, but that was a very cold winter last year, they would say, oh no, no, no. That’s just the weather. That’s not climate. You have to make a difference between the weather and the climate. Now what do they talk about? All I talk about is the weather. They talk about extreme weather events and what they call the fingerprints of climate change and the fingerprints like that is not a scientific thing to say that there’s a fingerprint of climate change on the weather and so the language has all been distorted with this thing about climate deniers.

No legitimate scientists would ever use such a word to describe scientists who were skeptical and in fact no legitimate scientist, whatever turns skeptical into a negative word because that’s what scientists are supposed to be–skeptical. That’s the whole nature of science. You’re supposed to constantly question the assumptions that have been made before and try to find new explanations and new knowledge of what is going on in the world and we have this, we have the fact that CO2 is greening the earth and that it isn’t causing catastrophic warming. They’d been warning about this for 50 years now and nothing severe has happened yet.

I know that this is a hoax, this climate change situation that is, that it’s going to cause the end of the earth. It is true. It’s a way of getting control and that’s why politicians like it so much because they can get control of people’s minds and their votes by scaring them into thinking that something terrible will happen if the politician doesn’t help save them and their children from certain doom. And that’s the psychology of it.

Mark Jackson:A group that supports the Green New Deal is the Sunrise Movement. According to its website “Sunrise is a movement of young people uniting to stops the climate crisis”. They’ve occupied and lobbied congressional offices in February. Is the Sunrise Movement one example of how people and the science are being used for politics? 

Dr. Moore: That’s the thing about the climate change argument. It not only uses fear, fear that by driving your car you are killing your grandchildren, but guilt that you are doing this yourself, that it’s your own fault that you are causing this damage. Guilt and fear are two of the largest motivators of people’s thinking and how they want to react and so a lot of people are thinking now because of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that they shouldn’t have children because the world is going to end in 12 years and children are being propagandized in the schools. Young teachers are being propagandized by Ocasio-Cortez movement, which is called the Sunrise Movement and they are going into the schools and brainwashing young students. I say this is child abuse. It is not right to brainwash young children to act as your soldiers in a campaign like this. This is absolutely wrong to do this. It is basically, I’d say, a crime against humanity to abuse children in this way.

Mark Jackson: Why did you leave Greenpeace?

Dr. Moore: When Greenpeace began, I was doing my PHD in ecology at the University of British Columbia and I had become radicalized in the hippie time. Uh, the threat of all out nuclear war, the height of the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the newly emerging consciousness of the environment. So while I was doing my PHD in Ecology, I learned about this tiny group beginning to meet in a church basement in Vancouver called the Don’t Make a Wave Committee. This became Greenpeace. I joined this group. I wanted to do something, not just study. So I joined this group and went on a boat with 12 people to Alaska against the US hydrogen bomb testing at the height of the Cold War. And we helped succeed in ending those nuclear tests. This was the beginning of Greenpeace. Then we attacked French atmospheric nuclear testing and stopped to the atmospheric testing in the South Pacific. Then we talked, went after the Soviet Russian and Japanese factory whaling boats in the Pacific killing 30,000 wales every year and we stopped that.

Then we went after toxic waste dumping the rivers of Europe. And when we finished they were alive again with fishing. So we did a lot of good work from when I began in 1971 until I left in 1986. By 1986 we had become an international famous organization. Over $100 million was being given to us by people to continue doing our good work. And the way I put it is we were hijacked by the far left. The opportunists who saw there was power and money and we’re better at politics than we were because I was an ecologist, a scientist. I wasn’t a politician or you know, the sort of manipulation and propaganda type person. I wasn’t that type of person and I wasn’t seeking power. I was seeking truth and they took it over. And for 33 years since I left Greenpeace, I have found myself having difficulty to get my voice heard again because I was the main spokesman for Greenpeace for many, many years and I had my voice heard because we did good things, but eventually they just started to think only about fundraising and how to make the most sensational headline even if there was no truth behind it.

Using fear and misinformation as their tools rather than science and logic, which I decided I would go away from them and make an environmentalism based on science and logic. I call myself the sensible environmentalist because I believe that I am saying the truth about these environmental issues and not making a sensation and propaganda to raise money. I know sometimes organizations go bad and Greenpeace went bad and today they are using their power just to get money from people.

Mark Jackson: How do you think the green new deal will impact the 2020 election?

Dr. Moore: My general thought, and maybe I’m just overly optimistic, is that you can’t fool all the people all the time. And when people begin to understand what it would mean to end fossil fuel use in 10 years, they will not accept that because they shouldn’t accept it. Because as I said, it’s basically like a suicide pact and it’s all propaganda and all window dressing and all fantasy. It’s, it’s like completely ridiculous is what it is. And so I believe that these sane heads will prevail, that logic will w w we’ll win in this and that they will not be able to succeed in their propaganda. I, I surely hope this is the case.

I think the Democratic Party in the United States has moved so far to the left that they will begin to lose many of their own supporters. And what most people don’t understand is that president Trump is actually appealing to this center group of people. He has people on his right who don’t agree with him. And of course he has all the people on his left who don’t agree with him on the left and the Democratic Party primarily. But mostly he has the people in the middle, in the middle of the country and in the middle of the extremism. And I think that this is going to grow when people start understanding what is reasonable and what is really based on science and truth and that he will win in 2020. I try not to be bitter, but it has been difficult to be overshadowed by this extremism and this, uh, attempt to stifle any opposition or skepticism or other opinions. It’s, it’s all about free speech. And right now we’re at this point where many of those on the left are working very hard to destroy this free speech from people like myself. And I’m very happy that now I am. It’s been an opportunity again to speak, uh, in, in a way that I was when I was with green peace in those days. And I think maybe the pendulum is beginning to swing back into a more position in the middle, which would be a good thing.

Dr. Moore left Greenpeace after 15 years and is now critical of the group, even writing the book, “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist.”

 

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Today’s quote is from Dale Carnegie,
“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.”