Expose of Extremist Deception and Lies

Apologies For "Climate Scare"

Prominent Environmental Activist Michael Shellenberger Speaks Out 

Thomas D. Williams
Breitbart News

Well-known climate activist Michael Shellenberger has issued a public apology for the unfounded panic caused by environmentalists over the fabricated horrors of global warming.

Writing for Forbes Monday, Mr. Shellenberger — a Time magazine Hero of the Environment and winner of the 2008 Green Book Award — said that on behalf of environmentalists everywhere, “I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years.”

“Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem,” Shellenberger declares.  As an Expert Reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public,” he states.

Mr. Shellenberger proceeds to deny 12 climate myths that have been drummed into the modern psyche, but which have no basis in scientific fact.  “Humans are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction,’” he begins, the Amazon “is not ‘the lungs of the world,’ and climate change “is not making natural disasters worse.”

Moreover, he continues, a few key facts help put global warming and its supposed effects into perspective.  “Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003,” he states, and the amount of land we currently use for meat “has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska.”

Blown Away By Cursed, Dirty Wind Power

UK Wind Farms Paid Millions Per Day NOT to Run Turbines


Kurt Zindulka
Breitbart London

Last week, millions of pounds in “constraint payments” were paid to wind energy farms to not run their turbines.

Over £12 million was handed out to wind farms in the United Kingdom last week, following a major outage in a powerline that transported energy from Scottish wind farms to England. The handouts will be tacked onto consumers’ energy bills throughout the country. 

The firms were paid between 25 and 80 per cent more than they would have earned were the turbines actually running, reports The Telegraph.

A study conducted in December by the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) found that the UK handed out a record high £136 million to 86 wind farm owners last year in “constraint payments” when the grid was incapable of handling the energy flow.

Dr John Constable, the director of the REF, condemned the spate of wind farm development in Scotland saying: 

“The Scottish Government has permitted excessive and environmentally damaging growth in wind power north of the border which has put the electricity system under great strain and burdened English and Welsh consumers not only with constraint payments but also with the additional expense of a £1 billion interconnector that is itself proving unreliable. The environment and the consumer have been betrayed over and over again.”

Greenists Propagating a Grand Deceit

Enivoronmentalists Have Exacerbated Australian Fires

James Delingpole
Breitbart London

Australia is on fire, at least 17 people have been killed, hundreds of homes have been destroyed, and an estimated half-billion animals — both livestock and wildlife — have been burned alive. The area burned in the bush fires so far is considerably bigger than the area burned either in last year’s Amazon rainforest fires or the fires in California.  But let us not allow the heartbreak and the emotion to distract us from the truth about this natural disaster: it has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘climate change’.

First, let’s look at rainfall. All the data and graphs that follows are from the Australian BOM:


As we can see, rainfall in NSW over the last three months is well below average, but no worse than several previous years on record.

The same applies to temperature.

Would Someone Please Tell That Greta Kid

We’ve Just Had the Best Decade in Human History. Seriously

Little of this made the news, because good news is no news

Matt Ridley
The Spectator


Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.

Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I’ve been watching it all closely. Ever since I wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010, I’ve been faced with ‘what about…’ questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.

Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.

Thank Goodness the "Scientists" Are Standing Up

‘Climate Emergency Is Real’ Warns ‘Professor Micky Mouse’. . . 

 and 11,000 Other ‘Scientists’


James Delingpole
Breitbart London

The world faces ‘untold suffering due to the climate crisis’, 11,000 scientists have warned in a statement published by the journal BioScience.

“We declare clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency”

Unfortunately for the statement’s credibility, among the signatories is one “Mouse, Micky [sic], Professor, at the Micky Mouse Institute for the Blind, Namibia.”

In the statement published by the journal BioScience, the scientists claim:

“We declare clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency…An immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis….The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle…To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live…”

But while the statement has received generous coverage from the usual gullible hysterics at CBS, ABC News, CNN and the Guardian others have responded with scepticism and mockery.

New Zealand's Travelling Envirocrats

Expensive Self-Congratulation Is Always Ugly

Wars are expensive undertakings.  International bureaucratic talkfests crafting war plans, strategies, targets, timetables, and bloated bellies are likewise very expensive.  But since it is all necessary in the "war against climate change" such spending is absolute, industrial grade, highest quality kosher salt.

Of course communication via electronic means has never been more pervasive and cheaper.  But this has merely seemed to convince our spendthrift government masters of the need to revert to ancient forms of global communication.  In order to "fight" against climate change, face-to-face communication is absolutely essential.  The electronic age has strangely ushered in a global, "whites of their eyes" old-style model of communication.

According to Stuff, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent and wasted by our travelling climate change warriors:

Another French Revolution In the Offing?

President Macron Is Heading for His Green Waterloo

James Delingpole
Breitbart News

As the Gilets Jaunes protests in France catch fire, French President Emmanuel Macron is heading for his green Waterloo. And really, humiliation, defeat and — with luck — exile somewhere really remote just couldn’t happen to a more deserving candidate.

One reason this dime store Napoleon has it coming is outlined in a characteristically incisive piece by Dominic Lawson in the Mail. It’s headlined: “Why It’s Hard Not to Gloat at the Travails of the Strutting French President Who Called Brexiteers Liars.”

Lawson points out that of all the European leaders, no one has gone further out of his way to try to shaft Britain’s Brexit prospects than the pint-sized Mummy’s Boy Macron.

He has, more than any other European leader, expressed his own political vision as a direct rebuke to the idea of national self-assertion (making him a hero to British anti Brexit campaigners).  At the Salzburg EU summit in September, Macron denounced the British politicians behind Brexit as ‘liars’ — a most unusual intervention in a gathering where leaders are not meant to take sides in the debates of neighbouring countries.

But the main reason he deserves to lose this one — and lose horribly — is that the protests in France are an entirely self-inflicted disaster, the product of Macron’s suicidal decision to embrace the globalist cause of green lunacy just as it has begun to fall out of fashion.

The Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) protests are a perfect example of how the tide of public opinion is turning on green policy.    Yes, there are other reasons too: resentment at the tax cuts Macron has offered the super-rich in order to lure them to France; the fact that permanent revolt is the natural state for all Frenchmen…

But the main one is the 23 per cent hike in the price of diesel which Macron has inflicted on motorists. And to which he has then added insult to injury by telling them in a classic “Let them eat cake” moment, that it’s all OK — they can just use public transport instead.

Yeah, that’s just the way to appease all those drivers in rural France — where anti-Macron, anti-EU, anti-green sentiment is strongest: tell them that, for the good of the environment, they should accept not being able to use their own cars and vans and lorries.

And guess where all the money raised by these taxes is going…

Rupert Darwall has the dirt:

But when it comes to the higher fuel taxes that sparked the gilets jaunes protests, all the proceeds – €5bn this year, €7-8bn next – are being used to subsidise wind and solar energy, which in turn means higher energy prices. Higher taxes, higher electricity costs, worsened business competitiveness is Macron’s triple whammy for nil social benefit.

This was an entirely unforced error on Macron’s part. Of all the countries in Europe, France can lay claim to the title of the “greenest” or most “global-warming-friendly” because of the happy historical accident that it has so much nuclear power. Though greens generally hate nuclear power it is by far the most carbon-neutral. France has lots of it because of a policy introduced in the Georges Pompidou era and embraced by Valery Giscard d’Estaing whereby France would demonstrate its technological prowess while simultaneously freeing itself from vulnerability to OPEC-induced oil shocks.

And now, in order to kowtow to the kind of rabid green ideologues who’d probably hate him anyway regardless of what he does, Macron has chosen to indulge the eco-loons’ anti-growth, junk-science-fuelled renewable energy nonsense at the expense both of his economy and of popular support from the electorate.  Under Macron, France now looks in serious danger of squandering all its energy advantages in order to imitate the kind of renewable energy policies which have proved such a disaster in Germany.

Darwall again:

At present, France is the efficient part of the European electricity market and Germany the inefficient part. At a cost of hundreds of billions of euros, Germany’s Energiewende has seen Germany turn into Europe’s largest energy exporter, dumping its low grade, surplus electricity on its neighbours, sometimes even paying them to take it when too much wind and sun turn wholesale prices negative. In ten years, German electricity exports more than doubled from 20 Terrawatt hours in 2006 to over 50 TWh in 2016 compared to some 37TWh of French electricity exports.  

A study by two green think tanks in Germany and France argued that France can’t accommodate the growth of wind and solar unless it shrunk its nuclear fleet, a vivid demonstration of the Pretzel Effect. Macron alluded to this in his speech. In talking of developing interconnections so that France and its neighbours can benefit from the lowest cost electricity, Macron committed the fundamental economic fallacy of confusing cost and value. The value of electricity depends on when it’s demanded. If lots of electricity is produced when it’s not wanted, its value plunges along with the price it fetches.

Tuesday’s speech sounds the death knell of France’s nuclear programme. Macron’s announced the closure of 14 nuclear reactors between now and 2035. New nuclear power stations after the troubled Flamanville project would have to be price competitive. The problem, as shown by the premature closure of nuclear plants in the US, is having large amounts wind and solar destroy the economics of nuclear – transferring the inefficiency of wind and solar makes nuclear less efficient, raising the price at which it can break even. Nuclear doesn’t make for a good pretzel.

Macron is a very, very silly boy. He will pay a terrible price for his foolishness.

One of The Great Rorts Of Our Time

Cycleways--A Thing of Deceptive Beauty

When public bodies waste taxpayers' money, blood begins to simmer on its way to boiling.  It now turns out that Auckland--New Zealand's largest city--has been the victim of a scam.  The deception, apparently, has been carefully engineered by a bunch of anti-car, cycle zealots whose view of the future is soooo righteous, it justifies dissembling and lying.

We live close to the Great South Road as it makes its way down towards the Hunua ranges.  That main arterial road was once a main highway south, with two lanes heading south, and two north.  Now it is one lane either side.  But one both sides of the road there is a vacant cycle way to encourage and facilitate bike use.  What used to be two lanes of traffic each way is now one traffic lane and a cycle way.  At all times during the day and night, even in commuter rush hours, the cycle lane is more empty and barren than the Sahara.  As a consequence, traffic is gridlocked.

Commentator Mike Hoskings has also had his fill of this deceit and chicanery.

Bleeding Out

Christmas Is Here, Everyone!

James Delingpole
BreitbartLondon

Environmental Protection Agency officials are “leaving in droves”, reports the New York Times.
More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Trump took office, a wave of departures that puts the administration nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration.

What marvellous news to ease us all into the festive Christmas spirit, eh readers?

Why, it’s like the final scene in A Christmas Carol where Scrooge repents of all his miserliness, his nephew Fred gets a big fat turkey, Bob Cratchit gets a pay rise and Tiny Tim declares “God bless us, every one!”

Not, of course, that this is quite the way the New York Times sees it. It wants us to believe that this is an attack on both science and the environment.

Within the agency, science in particular is taking a hard hit. More than 27 percent of those who left this year were scientists, including 34 biologists and microbiologists; 19 chemists; 81 environmental engineers and environmental scientists; and more than a dozen toxicologists, life scientists and geologists. Employees say the exodus has left the agency depleted of decades of knowledge about protecting the nation’s air and water. Many also said they saw the departures as part of a more worrisome trend of muting government scientists, cutting research budgets and making it more difficult for academic scientists to serve on advisory boards.

Actually, though, what it really is is #winning.  EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is achieving what President Trump appointed him to do. He is draining the swamp.

Letter From America (About Murderous Greenists)

The Lynch Mob Targets Scott Pruitt


‘If he has had enough serious death threats, then he shouldn’t have proposed the deep cuts to the EPA budget.’

By Julie Kelly
National Review Online

Scott Pruitt, Trump’s EPA administrator, is the top target of the anti-Trump lynch mob. He’s enduring daily attack pieces in the media and threats of violence against him and his family. It’s hard to think of any cabinet member — current or former — who has been subjected to more vitriol and vilification than Pruitt, and he’s been on the job for less than a year. Suddenly, everything from overlooked Superfund sites to the Flint water crisis to “toxic” pesticides are Pruitt’s fault, which of course means he is poisoning children and destroying the planet.

According to the EPA inspector general’s office, Pruitt has received “four to five times the number of threats” that his predecessor, Gina McCarthy, did. The level of concern for Pruitt’s safety is so deep that agents are being added to his round-the-clock security detail. In a recent Bloomberg News interview, Pruitt said, “The quantity and the volume — as well as the type — of threats are different. What’s really disappointing to me as it’s not just me — it’s family.”

Why are Pruitt and his family in the crosshairs?

Falsehoods And Urban Legends

Friends of the Earth Slammed by Advertising Standards Twice

‘Misleading’ Fracking Claims

Donna Rachel Edmunds
BreitbartLondon

Friends of the Earth (FoE) has been twice rebuked by Britain’s advertising standards watchdog this week after it tried to deny that claims it made about fracking were false.

Earlier this week the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) ruled that FoE had failed to substantiate claims made in a leaflet that fracking could cause cancer, lower house prices, contaminate water, and increase asthma rates.  It said that FoE had agreed not to make the claims again, or claims to the same effect, allowing it to close the case without making a formal ruling, The Times has reported.

The case is listed on the ASA’s website as “informally resolved”, along with 50 other such cases to have come before the agency this week.  However, in an appearance on Channel 4 News on Wednesday night, Rose Dickinson, a spokesman for FoE, said: “All we have said to the ASA is that we will not continue to circulate an old leaflet about fracking. We stand by everything in the leaflet.”

On the same day, FoE published an article by fellow campaigner Tony Bosworth saying that the ASA had closed the case “without making a ruling”, before going on to repeat claims that fracking adversely effects heath and the environment.

But the advertising watchdog has insisted that the environmentalists have given a false account of proceedings. A spokesman said it had now written to FoE “to remind them of the agreement they signed up to and the consequences if we receive a complaint about these claims being made by them again”.

ASA chief executive Guy Parker, yesterday followed this up by publishing a statement on the agency’s website, writing: “[L]et me be clear. We told Friends of the Earth that, based on the evidence we’d seen, claims it made in its anti-fracking leaflet, or claims with the same meaning, cannot be repeated and asked for an assurance that they wouldn’t be. Friends of the Earth gave us an assurance to that effect.

“Friends of the Earth has said we ‘dropped the case’. That’s not an accurate reflection of what’s happened. We thoroughly investigated the complaints we received and closed the case on receipt of the above assurance. Because of that, we decided against publishing a formal ruling, but plainly that’s not the same thing as ‘dropping the case’. Crucially, the claims under the microscope mustn’t reappear in ads, unless the evidence changes. Dropped cases don’t have that outcome.”

In response, FoE has said it will be speaking again to ASA as it did not accept its account of what had taken place.

The row comes as fracking company Cuadrilla begins preparing a site in Lancashire for fracking to commence around September. Chief executive Francis Egan hailed the work as an “important milestone” as permission to drill was initially denied by Lancashire County Council, despite advice to the contrary from both their planning and legal departments, and the Department for Energy and Climate Change.

Follow the Money

Why Brexit Would Be Good for the Enviroment

The old adage says, Follow the money.  If you want to make an educated guess about the bed folk are going to end up lying in, think about the motivation of filthy lucre.  Granted, this is a pretty cynical view, but more often than not it gets you close to the animus of the matter.

The big debate of the moment in the UK is Brexit.  Should the UK leave the security of the European Union and bravely cast off for a foreign shore?   We were surprised (at least initially) to hear that Greenpeace and its fellow travellers have come forward to oppose leaving the European Union.  What on earth does Britain's potential exit from Brusselmania have to do with saving the Antarctic penguins?  In order to answer that question, we have to follow the money.

The Institute of  Economic Affairs has done just that.  Christopher Snowden has written a piece entitled: Euro Puppets: The European Commission’s remaking of civil society.   In it he argues that the éminences grises of Europe use money to bind all kinds of social groups to do their bidding.  Mostly they fund groups which reflect their own centralist, statist political ideology.  They fund a veritable panopoly of left wing causes and groups.

Take environmental groups like Greenpeace, for example.  Writes Snowden:

"Environment" Is Now a Meaningless Construct

The Greens Have Fouled Their Own Nest

Greenism has become so extreme in New Zealand that it has lost its way as a credible political force.  The Green Party now depends substantially on a protest vote of former Labour Party stalwarts who no longer find that party to their more radical taste.

The term "environment" and the phrase "environmental protection" has become so inflated in the hands of the Greens that they can no longer define it in any meaningful sense, except to say that it embraces and encompasses everything.  As the hapless Dennis Denuto so eloquently put it: " It's. . . um. . . the Constitution of Australia. . . . It's just the vibe of the thing.  It's all parts of it.  It's the vibe of it. . . .   It's the Constitution. It's Mabo.  It's justice.  It's the vibe.  No that's it.  It's the vibe.  I rest my case."

One struggles to imagine a more inept and inane response than Denuto's were members of the current Green Party of Aotearoa to be asked, "What is the 'environment' "?  It's so big, so vast, so important that it's everything.  "It's all of it.  It's the vibe."

The Government in New Zealand has put forward some modest proposals to restrict the more draconian provisions of the Resource Management Act ("RMA").  This pernicious act, under the guise of environmental protection, places huge impediments over the development of land in New Zealand.  In most cases land development is subject to an objection process which allows objectors to claim all kinds of environmental degradation if the development were to proceed.

But the Greens have so inflated the concept of the "environment" that it now embraces personal aesthetics and tastes and preferences of everyone else--or at least the aesthetics of Greenist fanatics.

Letter From America (About Recycling)

The Reign of Recycling

By John Tierney

The New York Times

IF you live in the United States, you probably do some form of recycling. It’s likely that you separate paper from plastic and glass and metal. You rinse the bottles and cans, and you might put food scraps in a container destined for a composting facility. As you sort everything into the right bins, you probably assume that recycling is helping your community and protecting the environment. But is it? Are you in fact wasting your time? . . . . 

Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted because of lower oil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel plans for new technologies. The mood is so gloomy that one industry veteran tried to cheer up her colleagues this summer with an article in a trade journal titled, “Recycling Is Not Dead!”

While politicians set higher and higher goals, the national rate of recycling has stagnated in recent years. Yes, it’s popular in affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and in cities like San Francisco, but residents of the Bronx and Houston don’t have the same fervor for sorting garbage in their spare time.

The future for recycling looks even worse. As cities move beyond recycling paper and metals, and into glass, food scraps and assorted plastics, the costs rise sharply while the environmental benefits decline and sometimes vanish.

A Man-Made Disaster

California's Drought

Carly Fiorina describes how the worst ever drought in California is due to the ignorance of the pagan natives.

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina said Monday that California’s water crisis is the result of “liberal environmentalists” who are “willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology.”

“With different policies over the last 20 years, all of this could be avoided,” Fiorina said on Glenn Beck’s radio program. “Despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia, liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California’s population has doubled.”  Fiorina said that as a result, 70 percent of California’s rainfall “washes out to sea” year after year. . . .

“In California, fish and frogs and flies are really important — far more important apparently than the 40 percent unemployment rate in certain parts of central valley,” Fiorina said. “So the Senate and the president could waive some of those water restrictions. They have been asked to do so, and they have refused to do so.”  [TheBlaze]

Making Matters Much Worse

When Solutions are the Problem

One of the reasons Western capitalist societies are struggling is due to a bizarre approach to supply and demand.  We say, "one" of the reasons, for there are legion.  Nonetheless the deliberate skewing of supply and demand is a significant impediment.

Let's consider some of the ways the productive economy is inhibited and made inefficient by inappropriate interference with the buying and selling, investing and producing populace.

The first is a relentless compulsion to restrict the supply of resources useful for constructing and delivering goods and services.  This is largely driven by the notion that natural resources are finite and are running out.  Oil, gas, energy, land, timber, coal, steel, water, etc. are all limited.  Consumption will reduce their supply.  Therefore, it is prudent to restrict their use and application to make them last longer.  But rumours of the disappearance of natural resources are greatly exaggerated.  Remember the shrill, siren calls of the looming, dooming devastation of "peak-oil" about to wreak havoc upon us all.  The Sirens began shrieking in around 2008; "peak-oil" was supposed to hit in 2012.  Now, world oil supply is such that we presently have a glut.  Go figure.    

A second inhibition comes from the various ideologies of Greenism.

Letter From the UK (About Wolves)

Britain Needs More Wolves Like it Needs the Black Death 

By James Delingpole
21 Jul 2014
Breitbart London

Eco campaigner George Monbiot has been howling in the Guardian about a wicked government conspiracy to prevent wolves (and other locally extinct wild animals) being reintroduced to mainland Britain.

He is incensed that the government is preparing to pass a bill in which any animal species that "is not ordinarily resident in, or a regular visitor to, Great Britain in a wild state" will be classified as non-native and subject to potential "eradication or control".

Monbiot lists some of the former British natives that fit into this category. They include: the lynx; the wolf, the European beaver; the brown bear; the spotted hyena; the lion; the wolverine; and the blue stag beetle.
What maddens Monbiot is that by declaring all such  species personae non gratae the government is trampling on his latest masterplan - explained in more detail in his latest book Feral - to repopulate Britain's landscape with exotic beasties.

Apparently there is great public appetite for this. Or so he claims:

Greenpeace Chutzpah

Self-Righteous Hooligans

At last.  Maybe.  Julie Bishop, Australia's foreign minister, has indicated that the Australian government may require Greenpeace to pay the costs to the Australian government of one of their staffers getting arrested in Russian waters.  It amounts to around $35,000.  We hope the New Zealand government is paying attention. 

It is normal for diplomatic resources to swing in to support citizens in trouble overseas.  But ought they--when the reckless actions of citizens gets them into trouble.  If citizens travelling overseas ignore travel advisory warnings, break the local laws, commit crimes--should the tax payer foot the bill?  Maybe.  It's arguable, but not a slam-dunk one.  Far less justifiable is when a citizen deliberately plans to go overseas and break the law.  To our mind any costs incurred by the taxpayers must be reimbursed. 

One of the "activists" Greenpeace put forward to help climb up on to a Russian arctic drilling platform was Tasmanian, Colin Russell.  Upon returning home after a relatively short stint in the Russian penal system, he had the gall to complain that the Aussie government had not done enough to support him.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Luddite Zealots

Here comes yet another confrontation between the law-abiding and Greenpeace.  West of Taranaki a Greenpeace flotilla is attempting to stop a deep-sea drilling rig commencing exploratory drilling for oil.  As things stand, Greenpeace is currently (and proudly) breaking the law.  This from the NZ Herald:

The scene is set for a skirmish off the North Island's west coast this morning as protest vessels hold fast to Anadarko oil drilling ship the Noble Bob Douglas. Anadarko had intended to begin drilling 185km off the coast of Raglan on Thursday or Friday but has been shadowed by a flotilla of six protest vessels. One, the Vega, remains within the 500m exclusion zone. Among those on board the 11.5m ketch are Greenpeace NZ chief executive Bunny McDiarmid and former Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons.

This confrontation is a bit more interesting this time around, however.

"Peaceful" Activism--a Greenpeace Artform

Not Playing By the Rules

We confess being guilty of the odd smile or two when news broke that Greenpeace has tilted its lance at Russia.  This is not to say, of course, that the Russian record when it comes to preservation of the environment is stellar.  Far from it.  But Greenpeace has a higher calling than ordinary human beings.  It is more than willing to disregard the law when it comes to its own particular, peculiar version of  rabid environmentalism.  When the "fragile" arctic environment was deemed to be at risk from Russian offshore drilling, Greenpeace engaged in its trademark "peaceful" protest which involved assailing and climbing up on the rig.  The Russian coastguard steamed in and arrested the lot, seizing its boat.

Now Greenpeace has been getting away with this sort of thing for years in the West.