Greenpeace, an NGO who should be most well known for their part in ensuring millions of children go die of Vitamin A Deficiency (VAD) each year but somehow isn’t, have taken their long running campaign against nuclear energy to the European Commission in Brussels.
They’ve now installed a giant dinosaur, which they are calling Taxonosaurus Rex, outside the headquarters of the European Commission in Brussels in protest at the possible inclusion of nuclear energy in upcoming EU sustainable investment guidelines.
They say nuclear isn’t green, that it should “go extinct,” and they have decided the best way to put across this message is with a 4-metre-tall dinosaur, made of scrap metal, that looks like the school art project of a child who mistook enthusiasm with effort.
As it becomes more and more apparent to both the public and policy makers that nuclear energy is the only viable option which will allow countries to achieve their climate related policy objectives without impoverishing their own populations, we should expect to see more of Greenpeace on this issue. But it’s worth remember that, despite Greenpeace’s wonderfully positive public image, Greenpeace has never let simple things like science, common sense, or even basic human decency get in the way of making an ideological point.
This is probably not a bad point to note that Greenpeace, by demonising nuclear power for decades, has ensured the continued existence of more polluting forms of energy and, because of that, contributed to the release of levels of carbon into the atmosphere that would make an oil baron blush.
Golden Rice is perhaps the best example of Greenpeace’s callous disregard towards the question of human suffering.
Golden Rice is a genetically modified strain of rice, the details of which were released in 2000, designed to have more Vitamin A in it than standard rice. VAD is not really something we think about in Ireland, but in 2016 it was estimated that 1.2-3 million children every year die from VAD, and many go blind due to it – it is the leading cause of preventable childhood blindness in the world. Golden Rice, by offering some of the poorest people in the world easy access to a foodstuff rich in Vitamin A, represented one of the best chances we’ve ever had to end the suffering caused by VAD.
The problem is that Golden Rice is a GMO, and Greenpeace have spent a considerable amount of time making sure as many people as possible believe the highly distorted view of GMOs that Greenpeace pushes. They were damned if they were going to let something like Golden Rice take that away from them by showing GMOs in a positive light.
They campaigned relentlessly against the rice, supporting restrictions on the development, trade, or deployment of GMOs, both generally and specifically as it related to Golden Rice. Greenpeace themselves now argue that the failure of Golden Rice to see wider adoption is evidence that the foodstuff is not fit for purpose, and that further research and development into Golden Rice is inhumane. What they don’t mention there is that Greenpeace has deliberately acted to ensure Golden Rice is not adopted, both by supporting crushing levels of regulation on GMOs, or by directly campaigning against the foodstuff in some of the world’s poorest country. Activists supported by Greenpeace have gone as far as destroyed test fields of the crop.
In every situation, and for every occasion, Greenpeace has found a reason why Golden Rice is wrong for you. They told farmers the rice was “environmentally irresponsible,” they told the public the rice “poses risks to human health.” Even if Golden Rice did everything it was claimed it could do that success could, according to Greenpeace, “make malnutrition worse because it encourages a diet based solely on rice.”
Greenpeace’s alternatives to Golden Rice have so far consisted mostly of suggestions for things like “home gardening” and “ecologically farmed home and community gardens.”
It is unfair to blame Greenpeace entirely for the barriers that were put in front of Golden Rice, the EU certainly played its own part, but at every junction these people, these people who presumably believe themselves to be good people, cheered on and promoted actions which ensured that millions of children would continue to die each year, and hundreds of thousands of children would go blind.
In 2016, 158 Nobel laureates wrote an open letter condemning Greenpeace for what they called Greenpeace’s misrepresentation of the “risks, benefits, and impacts” of GMOs. Greenpeace, they said, “supported the criminal destruction of approved field trials and research projects.” The laureates asked Greenpeace to cease their campaigning against Golden Rice, as the food “has the potential to reduce or eliminate much of the death and disease caused by VAD, which has the greatest impact on the poorest people in Africa and Southern Asia.”
That letter closed with this question, “How many poor people in the world must die before this a ‘crime against humanity’?”