Conversations That Matter: Environmentalist Patrick Moore

conversations that matter is a partner program for the Center for dialogue at Simon Fraser University the production of this program is made possible thanks to the support of the following and viewers like you our guest today is environmental consultant dr. Patrick Moore in 1971 he was one of the cofounders of Greenpeace today he is considered one of the most controversial environmental activists in the world in co-founding Greenpeace he was following principles he believed in today he does the same in the 80s he looked at Greenpeace and said the environmental movement had lost sight of what was important and lost touch with science Greenpeace said it was in fact him who had lost his way today we hear what he has to say on a variety of topics like climate the environmental movement and genetically modified organisms welcome thanks Stuart nice to be here you are somebody that I've been wanting to talk to for a long time because I find right now the discussion that's going on around Environment and anything to do with it is so charged that if you don't completely agree with somebody then you must be drinking the bathwater or you've been paid off and I can't think of anybody who has like deeper sort of credentials in the environmental activism world than you and the moment that you start to look at things and say well let me look at this versus this they don't it's as though you did things on a campaign by campaign basis what's the science behind it why are we doing these things the moment you question any of those objectives all of a sudden you are to be discredited how did we get to this point well one of the reasons we got to this point was because in the earlier years of the environmental movement we addressed successfully the what you call the low-hanging fruit I mean the obvious issues you need nuclear war killing whales toxic waste those things were addressed the air is so much cleaner now in our big cities the West then it was at that time in the 70s mm-hmm the Chinese have some work to do but they're doing it now that they're getting some wealth and have discretionary income as it's called when it's personal they can address their climate and their pollution issues so I think that the problem is is we kind of got to a point where we won so we were so successful that you almost had to invent issues in order to remain on the opposite side against the establishment because the establishment had basically adopted pretty well all of the issues that we championed in those early years because they made sense they did make sense and now we've got a bunch of issues let's start with genetic modification mm-hmm there is nothing in those seeds that is harmful there's no ghosts in there there's no devil in there there's no evil in there and so it ends up being directed towards Monsanto as an evil company mm-hmm because there's really nothing in the seeds the seeds are actually preferred by farmers that's why they buy them if they're allowed to in many countries 66 I think GM seeds are banned so the farmers cannot buy them but if they were legalized they would because they're better mm-hmm and so an improvement in technology is being shunned and made to seem evil and and and harmful for no reason whatsoever it's sort of like when trains were invented and people said we don't want trains we're going to stay with horses yeah but what's also interesting that you bring up GMO is if we take a look at the case of mark Lynas who was the leading advocate against he starts to examine the science and says I was wrong the people who followed behind him on the anti GMO campaign weren't willing to listen to his reasoning about why he had changed his stance there and so it comes back to well then why are they so opposed to this that if even the guy who is leading the charge in the anti GMO globally says you know now I've looked at the science I got it wrong there's there's money in it in being opposed I mean the march against Monsanto and and that the GM watch and Greenpeace are raising millions of dollars hundreds of millions of dollars on being opposed to GMOs and it's I mean it's way bigger than the anti-vaxxer movement which is also completely stupid but the GMO movement got traction with Frankenstein seeds and killer tomatoes and Terminator seeds all you know it was a total propaganda campaign because propaganda is really about making what it should be a neutral descriptor like genetic modification right there's nothing evil sounding about it if you just look at the two words genetic okay it's got to do with DNA and modifying like I'm genetically modified I'm not identical to my parents right so every moment you get ill your genetically modified well your genomic structure changes just by being injured or getting ill and so everything's changing all the time it is and every single individual organism that was produced by sexual reproduction is genetically modified so the term is being used in a very narrow way when actually it's a very broad term mmm-hmm and then they say this never happens in nature that's not true it's not true no it's called horizontal gene transfer by bacteria and has been going on since bacteria which were the first organisms of any were able to reproduce in a 3.5 billion years ago bacteria have been carrying pieces of DNA into other cells all through the history of evolution as a matter of fact horizontal gene transfer is an important part of evolution along with radiation which brings us to nuclear energy and there's another subject where people are deathly afraid you know in both charitable and Fukushima and Chernobyl there were deaths most of them were fighting the fire and trying to contain the situation but they got heavily irradiated a lot of those people yes and that that reactor class should never have been built in the first place the Russians took a shortcut during the Cold War the West had no say in what Russia was doing and they took their weapons reactors and cookie cutters them all across the former Soviet Union into power reactors with a design that could blow up well as flawed engineering and probably flawed construction as well well flood practice at the time of the explosion they did something that they should never have done they turned off the safety systems so they wouldn't interfere with their experiment mm-hmm so it wasn't during normal operating procedures that charitable blew up it was during an experiment mm-hmm and the experiment went very bad but so and Fukushima nobody died right right and in both cases they evacuated all these people in Fukushima they evacuated them ahead of the radiation yes in Chernobyl they waited for a week or two so people are already irradiated in both cases it is clear that the damage caused by the evacuation was far more severe than if they left the people where they were they maybe should have made sure they didn't eat food that was grown in that soil for a while but 1,600 people died due to the evacuation in Fukushima for example they do to the evacuate yes they evacuated at an intensive care unit in a hospital to a gymnasium many of those people died because they didn't have intensive care anymore and in in charitable it was even worse like in three hundred and forty thousand people who were evacuated after Chernobyl they were put into tenement blocks around the city of Kiev from their rural homes around the reactor the suicide murder drug abuse alcoholism wife-beating and child abuse and everything else that occurred as a result of that in this ghetto that they created for these three hundred and forty thousand people there isn't one known case of cancer in those people that can be attributed to radiation and so terrible social situation occurred when and even the World Health Organization they've taken it down probably because they've been pressured into doing it but for some time they had a statement saying that the effect of the evacuation was far worse than anything that could have been affected from them staying where they were I gotta get a hang on for just one second while we take a quick commercial break we'll be right back conversations that matter is a not-for-profit program made possible thanks to the charitable support of the following and from viewers like you please visit conversations that matter dot TV and help us to continue to produce this program so to go back a little bit further what happened around 3 Mile Island nothing there was an evacuation of pregnant women but that was you know in anticipation of there being a problem the problem never occurred and yet to this day there are myth there's Mythology around all of these things Greenpeace says 300,000 people died from charitable you know of course they don't have names and there's no graves but they just make it up mm-hmm and and that's a hallmark of the movement today is that they just make stuff up they're making up for example this ocean acidification story around the climate issue and co2 mm-hmm that all the that the shellfish and corals are going to melt because the ocean is going to become acidic mm-hmm when in fact that could never happen the ocean is actually basic ok I have trouble understanding that because I have no way of knowing how do you measure whether or not the ocean is becoming acidic but I had somebody they can't actually yeah I had Brian Radel from the Pacific salmon foundation and he talks about ocean acidification of God the US consulate bringing in an expert Scott Downey from the East Coast who wants to come and talk about ocean acidification and I'm going ok it's a meme it's fabricated they say here's how it all starts with them saying that since 1750 the pH of the world's ocean has gone down by 0.1 of a pH from 8.2 to 8.1 or is it 8.3 to 8.2 whatever the pH of the ocean changes on a daily basis by more than half a pH of 0.5 it changes all around the world near shore where water's coming in from the land it can be way down into the low seventh even into the six point five or so so there is no Avenue pH of the oceans and these guys are saying that it was 8.3 or whatever in 1750 and now it's 8.2 because of co2 nobody measured the pH of the oceans in 1750 as a matter of fact the concept of pH wasn't invented until 1913 and it wasn't till 1924 that an accurate tool was created to measure pH and you can't measure pH continuously you can only measure it once and then you have to measure it again mm-hmm with a sample it you there's no tool that you can just put in the water that gives you a tract reading like you can with temperature or or high humidity so you're saying that the comparison between 1715 now is just made up in a model so you find in all these things when you go down to it they're saying evidence they say there's evidence that oxygen need to be depleted in the oceans by 2030 that's a big one just came out it's on all the media oxygen will be depleted and they say there's evidence where is the evidence it's in a computer model that they put the assumptions into so they build a computer model that gives them the answer they want and then tell you they've got evidence that this is going to happen in the future that's what the climate models are the same the IPCC models there's a hundred and two of them now 102 different long 100 and 200 million dollar-plus models every institution that studying climate has to have its own supercomputer model of the future climate and so they feed the information into it we learned when we were punching cards back in university that garbage in garbage out right we knew that back then and you if there's a there's a very good graph you can get it on the internet just google IPCC climate model versus reality or something like that and you'll see that the climate models are taken it off the top and reality is down here barely changing mm-hmm there hasn't you know until I've tried to read a number of those reports and I don't get very far it becomes incredibly confusing to me it's very thick and but but here's that here's the here's the kind of thing you have to parse this stuff they say it's extremely likely that we are the main cause of the warming since nineteen 50 they call it mid-20s 1880 mid 20th century they only we do go back there we have that's when they first measured co2 in the environment in Hawaii 1959 Keeling that's the first accurate measurement of co2 on a continuous basis was started in 1959 but the IPCC recognizes that the amount of co2 emissions from human activity before 1950 was not significant compared to what it has been now it's an exponential curve mm-hm and that's true it's happening but the temperature of the earth is not going up on an exponential curve it's basically been flat for 20 years except for this last El Nino which spiked like it did in 98 yes so they all go whoo there it is we're warming yeah but that's an El Nino effect yes which is completely different it will come back down to La Nina yes and and we don't know where it's gonna go from here this is our second break but I'm anxious to get back to this we'll be back in a moment conversations that matter is a not-for-profit program made possible thanks to the charitable support of the following and from viewers like you please visit conversations that matter dot TV and help us to continue to produce this program you know the problem is is people who say they can predict the future seem smarter than than everybody else because if you say oh no I can't predict the future like that guy can you know but they can't predict the future people have been Trent will mostly the predictions of the future are about doom there's very and those are the only ones that seem to take hold yeah oh my gosh I'm gonna die if I but if I predict it there'll be record grain harvests in 2040 mm-hmm who's gonna pay attention to that nobody's even interested in it well because they but you must be getting paid by somebody to make that prediction precisely yet there are record grain harvests this year and even with the drought in India this year they've maintained their grain harvests because of Technology and GMOs and GM well not so much there's no GMO grains in India not anymore there's no GMO grains anywhere because bread is sacred and it's the staff of life and so we mustn't allow genetically modified wheat and even though they have produced genetically modified wheat that is superior to the wheat we have now in terms of resistance to weeds and insects and all of that it's not being permitted and here's a good example Philippines has one genetically modified crop approved corn mmm-hmm Bangladesh has one genetically approved crop eggplant they call brinjal India has one genetically modified crop cotton so each of their all in South Asia I mean surely they could all have all three would be sort of logical if the Philippines gonna have corn why can't Bangladesh in India if India can have cotton why can't Bangladesh in the Philippines where's the logic there there isn't any it's pure politics and and you know I I am still an activist in that I for three years now have been campaigning for Golden Rice right and there is a situation where the anti human aspect of the green movement comes right to the top two million kids die every year from vitamin A deficiency a quarter of a million of those have gone blind before they die and Greenpeace is opposed to Golden Rice which if it was a medicine that could cure malaria or AIDS or Ebola or this new virus then it would be adopted immediately and 15 years later Golden Rice is still not approved and is still opposed by the mainstream environmental movement even though it could save 2 million kids every year and they have all these trucko to all these arguments about how it's fake and about how it will cause disruption of the gene pool in the world or whatever you know they've got a ton of arguments that that to some people might look valid because they they put them out there they say there will be unforeseen human health and environmental consequences from Golden Rice when someone says unforeseen it's kind of like a boogeyman behind a tree somewhere you know that's going to come out and scare you but what it really means is we don't know a damn thing about this what could go wrong because if they knew an actual thing that could go wrong they would say what it was so the word unforeseen is really a tricky piece of propaganda because it makes people afraid of the unknown when in fact that's just it it's unknown there's nothing known and it could go wrong but that has been the course of human development we try things we find out what's gonna happen we make adjustments exactly but that's my perspective these people what their position is is we mustn't try it in the we mustn't do anything so the so-called precautionary principle which is actually not a principle if it was you wouldn't get out of bed in the morning mm-hmm but the precautionary approach is look both ways before you cross the street then look again but you're gonna cross the street and when you see that the coast is clear a jet plane comes out or a grand piano falls out of a window upstairs and kills you while you're crossing the street that was the risk you took even though you had tried your best to avoid any risk you cannot eliminate risk I love your passion unfortunately I've gotta take a quick commercial break here we'll be back in a moment conversations that matter is a not-for-profit program made possible thanks to the charitable support of the following and from viewers like you please visit conversations that matter dot TV and help us to continue to produce this program you hear people say yeah okay that's an individual risk of what we're talking about is existential risk if we get this wrong we're done I was at an event just the other night where somebody was saying mmm we got a year or two and then we're done like what a horrible way to feel when you wake up in the morning thinking how about what a horrible way to teach your children mm-hmm that's the thing that really bothers me is our children are being taught that we are evil and nature is good and we are destroying H nature and it's all and we're and we're done right it's all going to be over we're digging ourselves into extinction are all you know a beautiful young woman in a grade 11 class in New York City says to me dr. Moore when do you think the world is going to come to an end right as if it's going to happen in her lifetime and that's what people are being taught and with the climate issue especially which you know the climate issue has corrupted science more than anything since the Enlightenment it's like right back to Galileo and the Inquisition mm-hmm I mean most people don't know that Galileo was actually put under house arrest for the remainder of his life that's right and he was the only one speaking up he was a skeptic yeah and nowadays we're told that the skeptic should be put in jail there's not just one skeptic on climate there's thousands of us mm-hmm including people like Freeman Dyson and we'll have you know the top physicists Ivor how many pounds his last name G haver noted Nobel laureate who walked away from the physicist Society of America saying yes the science how can you say the science is complete because science is never complete the corruption is public funding of science and it's it's turned into I mean the private sector would never fund this because what's the product is there a useful product coming out of climate research what is the main product it's fear and so fear baguettes more public money so like the IPCC for example everybody thinks it's the top science institution it's a political institution to begin with it's part of the United Nations it's not a science institution but they use science in a way to perpetuate themselves most people think the IPCC is studying the climate no their mandate is only to look at human effects on the climate not the natural effects that have been changing the climate for millions of years they just only look at the human effects so if they said well it's not actually being caused by humans it's being caused by the Sun and ultraviolet radiation activity yeah if they said that or even if they said well it is being caused by people but it's not a disaster it's not a catastrophe a little bit of warming is going to be good and besides the carbon dioxide is making all the trees and food crops grow 15% faster than they did 50 years ago and that's a really positive thing so a little bit of warming and fertilizing finally putting co2 back up to a level that plants find more productive is a good thing as you can see dr. more is an impassioned guest so impassioned that we went way beyond our allotted time and he provided us with enough material for two shows so we're gonna end this conversation now and then pick it up in a later episode [Music] you

Channel: Vancouver Sun

Views: 108,930

Keywords: conversations that matter, patrick moore, environmentalist, green peace, activist, stu mcnish, climate change, vancouver sun, vs news, opinion, op-ed, business, commercial-real-estate

Id: vb-52nlv0qs

Length: 23min 0sec (1380 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 24 2018