DOMINIC LAWSON: Ministers are right to cut off Greenpeace. It's not just the PM's house, it has a...
Never let it be said that Greenpeace lacks a sense of its own importance. After the government broke off all contacts with the ecological campaign group, following its invasion of the Prime Minister's family home in North Yorkshire (draping it with black cloth in protest over new North Sea oil licensing), Greenpeace issued a statement of epic pomposity. It declared last Thursday that to block its access to meetings with civil servants and ministers was a 'worrying signal about the future of our democracy'. In an interview with the Guardian, the directors of Greenpeace's UK arm, Areeba Hamid and Will McCallum, said that 'important meetings' had already been cancelled and that this 'unprecedented' move 'could have disastrous consequences for environmental policy'. I don't think so. On the contrary, I can think of many reasons why Greenpeace while it has a kind of PR genius at drawing attention to itself should never have been given such high-level access to government in the first place. Its most spectacular action against our North Sea oil industry was in 1995, when it launched a ferocious campaign to prevent Shell from dismantling, at sea, an offshore oil-storage installation, Brent Spar. Greenpeace insisted the depot contained more than 5,000 tonnes of crude oil, and that to release this into the ocean would be an ecological catastrophe. Shell repeatedly said that the Brent Spar contained between 50 and 100 tonnes of a mixture of oil and silt a relatively trivial amount. Greenpeace then occupied the Brent Spar, combining that with what the oil company described as 'violence against Shell service stations, accompanied by threats to Shell staff'. This eventually compelled Shell to bring the entire Brent Spar structure onshore, at vast expense, where its contents were disposed of, to no net environmental gain. Even Nature magazine described this as 'a needless dereliction of rationality'. Oh, and by the way, Shell had given the correct figure all along. But when it was proven that Greenpeace had inflated the amount almost 100-fold, the organisation's UK 'head of science' dismissed this as just 'a minor mistake'. Bear that in mind when you read Greenpeace complaining that it provides valuable 'evidence' to civil servants, now made unavailable to them after the government announced that 'Greenpeace's criminal activity demonstrates that they are not a serious organisation'. To be fair, it a very serious organisation, with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues and thousands of employees. I am much more concerned about its history of serious and effective misinformation than I am about its intrusion at the PM's home, scandalous though it is that the local police were unable to prevent it. For example, it has been the most vehement and successful campaigner against 'golden rice', a not-for-profit project, backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which would modify conventional rice with the genes for beta-carotene so that it provides much more vitamin A per bowl and save countless lives in the developing world. Greenpeace has done everything it can to block this, because of its ideological opposition to any form of GM technology. The most telling critic of its campaigning against golden rice is Mark Lynas, once a Greenpeace supporter who had participated in the destruction of GM crops being tested by scientists in the UK. Lynas is now a convert to the potential benefits and declared: 'Vitamin A deficiency is one of the leading causes of death in South East Asia. It has led to blindness and the deaths of about a quarter of a million people a year.' He denounces Greenpeace's highly successful campaign against its introduction as 'just superstition. There are tens of thousands of kids who are dead who wouldn't be dead otherwise. I don't see how you could put this any other way'. Lynas in 2008 won the Royal Society's prestigious prize for science writing, in recognition of his book Six Degrees: Our Future On A Hotter Planet. It is in this context climate change that Greenpeace's profoundly anti-scientific approach has had the most perverse consequences. Along with many in the environmentalist movement, Lynas had come to recognise that, if countries want to produce reliable, non-intermittent energy without CO2 emissions, then only nuclear power fits the bill. Wind and solar power alone can't do it. Yet Greenpeace, whose origins were in the movement against the testing of nuclear weapons the clue is in the name has been most influential of all in its opposition to civil nuclear power. It is true that the birth of this industry was linked to the military programme: Winston Churchill gave the go-ahead for the world's first nuclear power station, at Calder Hall, because it would supply weapons-grade plutonium. The official reason was to inaugurate a new era of clean energy. And it did. But Greenpeace continues, falsely, to equate civil nuclear energy with weapons of mass destruction. Its website declares: 'Nuclear power is dirty, dangerous and expensive. Say no to new nukes.' The truth is that nuclear energy is extraordinarily safe, if you measure it in terms of deaths caused, relative to power generated. According to the authoritative Statista organisation, nuclear power, even over the decades that included the Chernobyl disaster, has been responsible for fewer deaths per thousand terawatt hours than hydro-power, and even wind power. Japan's Fukushima plant disaster in March 2011 is frequently cited by Greenpeace. It was indeed crazy that the plant had been built on top of one of the world's most active geological faults. But, despite the fact that it was hit by a colossal earthquake, followed by a tsunami, and the reactor suffered three nuclear meltdowns, none of the deaths were a consequence of this. They were all from drowning, as inhabitants were swept away by the mountainous tidal wave. Ten years later, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) released its official report on the effects of the Fukushima incident. It announced: 'No adverse health effects among Fukushima residents have been documented that could be directly attributed to radiation exposure.' UNSCEAR went on to estimate that the future effects on health from radiation increases 'are not likely to be discernible. There has been no credible evidence of excess congenital abnormalities related to radiation exposure'. Yet the Germans, influenced by Greenpeace scare stories about Fukushima, have just completed the closure of their entire nuclear-energy industry. The result has been self-defeating in terms of their campaign to reduce CO2 emissions. To avoid the blackouts that would be caused by over-reliance on its vaunted wind-power programme, over the past 12 months Germany has recommissioned almost 20 coal-fired power stations. So, following Greenpeace-approved policies has led to a return to the most carbon- intensive form of mass energy production much more carbon-intensive than the North Sea oil whose support by the Government Greenpeace used as justification for its invasion of Rishi Sunak's home. This is a matter that the electors of Mid Bedfordshire might like to put to their Labour Party candidate, Alistair Strathern, when that constituency has the by-election contingent on the anticipated resignation of its sitting MP, Nadine Dorries. For Mr Strathern dressed up as a zombie in a Greenpeace protest outside Parliament last November (alongside his partner Megan Corton-Scott, a full-time political campaigner for Greenpeace). Meanwhile, in the context of the war in Ukraine, Greenpeace has claimed that the Russian seizing of Europe's largest nuclear plant, at Zaporizhzhia, shows the risks of civil nuclear power (though its reactors are built to withstand even a jumbo jet crashing on them, and these immense casings prevented any breach during the shelling by Russian troops). Perhaps Greenpeace might like to consider a different aspect at the heart of its 'peace' mission. If Ukraine had not acceded to the demand by the Western powers, when it gained independence, to relinquish all the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union, would Putin have dared to launch his war? It would almost be worth having Greenpeace's directors back for one last meeting in Whitehall, just to see the look on their faces when asked this question.