Patrick Albert Moore (born June 15, 1947) is a Canadian industry consultant, former activist and an early member and past president of Greenpeace Canada. Since leaving Greenpeace in 1986, Moore has criticized the environmental movement for what he sees as scare tactics and disinformation, saying that the environmental movement "abandoned science and logic in favour of emotion and sensationalism". Greenpeace has criticized Moore, calling him "a paid spokesman for the nuclear industry, the logging industry, and genetic engineering industry" who "exploits long-gone ties with Greenpeace to sell himself as a speaker and pro-corporate spokesperson".
Since leaving Greenpeace, Moore has frequently taken sharp public stances against a number of major environmental groups, including Greenpeace itself, on many issues including forestry, nuclear energy, genetically modified organisms, and pesticide use. Moore has also denied the established consensus of the scientific community on climate change, for example by claiming that increased carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere is beneficial, that there is no proof that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for global warming, and that even if true, increased temperature would be beneficial to life on Earth. These views are contradicted by the scientific consensus on the effects of global warming, which holds that climate change is expected to have a significant and irreversible negative impact on climate and weather events around the world, posing severe risks like ocean acidification and sea level rise to human society and to other organisms.
Early life Moore was born in 1947 to Bill and Beverley Moore in Port Alice, British Columbia, and raised in Winter Harbour, on Vancouver Island. He is the third generation of a British Columbian family with a long history in forestry and fishing. His father, William D. Moore, was the president of the B.C. Truck Loggers Association and past president of the Pacific Logging Congress.Moore Resume Moore was educated at St. George's School, then attended the University of British Columbia, where he obtained a B.Sc. in Forest Biology in 1969, and a Ph.D. in 1974. For his PhD, Moore researched heavy metal contamination in Rupert Inlet by mine tailings. He concluded that existing mechanisms had failed to prevent unacceptable pollution.
Career
Greenpeace The Don't Make a Wave Committee (DMWC) was formed in January 1970 by Dorothy and Irving Stowe, Ben Metcalfe, Marie and Jim Bohlen, Paul Cote, and Bob Hunter and incorporated in October 1970.Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World by Rex Weyler, Published by Rodale Press in 2003, pages 59ff The committee had formed to plan opposition to the testing of a one megaton hydrogen bomb in 1969 by the United States Atomic Energy Commission on Amchitka Island in the Aleutians. In 1971, Moore joined the committee as a member of the crew of the Greenpeace, a chartered fishing boat originally named the Phyllis Cormack which the Committee sent across the North Pacific to draw attention to the US testing of a 5 megaton bomb planned for September of that year.Weyler, Rex. "Waves of Compassion". Utne Reader. Retrieved May 4, 2017. As Greenpeace co-founder Bob Hunter wrote, "Moore was quickly accepted into the inner circle on the basis of his scientific background, his reputation [as an environmental activist], and his ability to inject practical, no-nonsense insights into the discussions."Hunter, Robert. (1979) Warriors of the Rainbow: A Chronicle of the Greenpeace Movement. Henry Holt & Company. p9 In May 1971, Moore travelled to Alaska with Jim Bohlen, representing the DMWC at US Atomic Energy Commission hearings. Moore attended DMWC meetings, and was part of the committee when its name was changed to the Greenpeace Foundation. Other committee members included committee founders Bob Hunter, Rod Marining and Ben Metcalfe. Moore describes himself as a founding member of Greenpeace, but the organization denies this claim.
Following US President Richard Nixon's cancellation of the remaining hydrogen bomb tests planned for Amchitka Island in early 1972, Greenpeace turned its attention to French atmospheric nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific. In May 1972, Moore travelled to New York with Jim Bohlen and Marie Bohlen to lobby the key United Nations delegations from the Pacific Rim countries involved. Moore then went to Europe together with Ben Metcalfe, Dorothy Metcalfe, Lyle Thurston and Rod Marining where they received an audience with Pope Paul VI and protested at Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral. In June, they attended the first UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm where they convinced New Zealand to propose a vote condemning French nuclear testing, which passed with a strong majority.Warriors of the Rainbow, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1979, Page 116,
Moore again crewed the Phyllis Cormack in 1975 during the first campaign to save whales, as Greenpeace met the Soviet whaling fleet off the coast of California. During the confrontation, film footage was caught of the Soviet whaling boat firing a harpoon over the heads of Greenpeace members in a Zodiac inflatable and into the back of a female sperm whale.DeLuca, Kevin Michael (2005) Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism Routledge p99 The film footage made the evening news the next day on all three US national networks, initiating Greenpeace's debut on the world media stage, and prompting a swift rise in public support of the charity.Moruroa: Journey into the bomb ; Greenpeace.org; April 27, 2005 Patrick Moore and Bob Hunter appeared on Dr. Bill Wattenburg's talk radio show on KGO and appealed for a lawyer to help them incorporate a branch office in San Francisco and to manage donations. David Tussman, a young lawyer, volunteered to help Moore, Hunter, and Paul Spong set up an office at Fort Mason. The Greenpeace Foundation of America (since changed to Greenpeace USA), then became the major fundraising center for the expansion of Greenpeace worldwide."The history of Greenpeace"; Greenpeace.org; September 14, 2009
Presidency of Greenpeace Foundation in Canada In January 1977 at the annual general meeting of the Greenpeace Foundation, Moore ran for president against Bob Hunter, eventually losing by a single vote. Soon after, Hunter stepped down and Moore assumed the presidency, inheriting an organization deeply in debt. Greenpeace organizations began to form throughout North America, including cities such as Toronto, Montreal, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco. Not all of these offices accepted the authority of the founding organization in Canada. Moore's presidency and governance style proved controversial. Moore and his chosen board in Vancouver called for two meetings to formalize his governance proposals. During this time David Tussman, together with the rest of the founders, early activists of Greenpeace, and the majority of Greenpeace staff members announced that the board of the San Francisco group intended to separate Patrick Moore's Greenpeace Foundation from the rest of the Greenpeace movement. After efforts to settle the matter failed, the Greenpeace Foundation filed a civil lawsuit in San Francisco charging that the San Francisco group was in violation of trademark and copyright by using the Greenpeace name without permission of the Greenpeace Foundation.
The lawsuit was settled at a meeting on October 10, 1979, in the offices of lawyer David Gibbons in Vancouver. Attending were Moore, Hunter, David McTaggart, Rex Weyler, and about six others. At this meeting it was agreed that Greenpeace International would be created. This meant that Greenpeace would remain a single organization rather than an amorphous collection of individual offices. McTaggart, who had come to represent all the other Greenpeace groups against the Greenpeace Foundation, was named chairman. Moore became president of Greenpeace Canada (the new name for Greenpeace Foundation) and a director of Greenpeace International. Other directors were appointed from the US, France, the UK, and the Netherlands. He served for nine years as president of Greenpeace Canada, as well as six years as a director of Greenpeace International.
In 1985, Moore was on board the Rainbow Warrior when it was bombed and sunk by the French government.
After Greenpeace In 1986, after leaving Greenpeace over differences in policy, Moore established Quatsino Seafarms—a family salmon farming business at his home in Winter Harbour—and became a director of the BC Salmon Farmers Association. He later commented that he left Greenpeace because it "took a sharp turn to the political left" and "evolved into an organization of extremism and politically motivated agendas". Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada's Oil Sands, Ezra Levant p145
From 1990 to 1994 he was a member of the British Columbia Round Table on the Environment and the Economy and founded and chaired the B.C. Carbon Project. In 1991, he joined the board of the Forest Alliance of BC, an initiative of the CEOs of the major forest companies in British Columbia. As chair of the Sustainable Forestry Committee of the Forest Alliance he spent ten years developing the Principles of Sustainable Forestry, which were later adopted by much of the industry. In 1991, Moore also founded Greenspirit to "promote sustainable development from a scientific environmental platform".Greenspirit In 2002, Tom Tevlin and Trevor Figueiredo joined Moore to form the environmental consultancy company Greenspirit Strategies Ltd.
Moore served for four years as vice president of environment for Waterfurnace International manufacturing geothermal heat pumps. In 2000, Moore published Green Spirit — Trees are the Answer, a photo-book on forests and the role they can play in solving some current environmental problems. He also made two appearances on Penn & Teller: Bullshit! in episodes Environmental Hysteria (2003) and Endangered Species (2005). In 2006, Moore became co-chair (with Christine Todd Whitman) of a new industry-funded initiative, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which promotes increased use of nuclear energy. In 2010, Moore was recruited to represent the Indonesian logging firm Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), a multi-national accused by activist groups of widespread and illegal rainforest clearance practices, although this is strongly disputed by Moore.Guardian article "Why is a former Greenpeace activist siding with Indonesia's logging industry?" by George Monbiot. December 2, 2010.
Moore is a policy advisor on climate and energy at The Heartland Institute (a conservative and libertarian think tank).
In March 2019, Donald Trump tweeted about an interview Moore gave on the Fox News program Fox & Friends, where he denied that climate change was a threat. Moore also opposed Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal, which is a resolution that aims to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the impact of climate change in the US. Moore called Ocasio-Cortez a "twit" and suggested that global warming might be beneficial as carbon dioxide is a "building block of life". In the ongoing dispute between Moore and Greenpeace, the group continued to distance itself from Moore and his claims and views, including his denial of climate change.
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