Patrick Moore has reported Greenpeace–the charity he co-founded in the 1970s–to the FBI for what he claims are a series of offences, including “outright breach of the RICO, wire-fraud, witness-tampering and obstruction-of-committee statutes.”
Greenpeace, Moore says, is now “an enemy of the State, an enemy of humanity and, indeed, an enemy of all species on Earth.”
Moore was responding to an attempted sting conducted by Greenpeace against the distinguished physicist Professor William Happer.
Happer–due to testify today in Congress–has long been in Greenpeace’s sights as one of the most prominent scientists publicly to reject the climate alarmist consensus. Chairman of the George Marshall Institute and formerly Director of Energy Research at the US Department of Energy, the Princeton professor has previously testified to Congress: “I believe that the increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind”.
The Greenpeace sting operation was conducted out of a rent-by-the-hour office block in Beirut.
Someone calling himself Hamilton Ellis contacted Happer–supposedly on behalf of a “business consultancy” representing a client “concerned about the impacts of the UN climate talks”–to see whether he might be prepared to produce a “very short paper” which could work in the client’s favour.
As Happer told Moore, “I was suspicious about the email exchange from the start, so I wrote every response assuming that it might be public someday. But what I wrote expressed exactly what I believed to be true.”
Moore has published a full account of the sting operation here.
What’s clear is that every stage Happer’s behaviour was morally and scientifically unimpeachable.
Happer stressed from the start that his opinion could not be bought – that is, he would only say in his paper what he believed anyway.
“To be sure your client is not misled on my views, it is clear there are real pollutants associated with the combustion of fossil fuels, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen for most of them, fly ash and heavy metals for coal, volatile organics for gasoline, etc. I fully support regulations for cost-effective control of these real pollutants. But the Paris climate talks are based on the premise that CO2 itself is a pollutant. This is completely false. More CO2 will benefit the world. The only way to limit CO2 would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be a profoundly immoral and irrational policy.”
Nor did he wish to benefit personally from the fee, but preferred that the money should go to a tax-exempt educational charity, which pays only his travel expenses.
“My activities to push back against climate extremism are a labor of love, to defend the cherished ideals of science that have been so corrupted by the climate-change cult. If your client was considering reimbursing me for writing something, I would ask that whatever fee would have come to me would go directly to the CO2 Coalition.”
All this was evidently far too above-board for Greenpeace’s agent provocateur, who attempted to coax Happer into tarnishing his name by other means.
Would the CO2 Coalition be happy to take a direct donation on condition the donor remained anonymous?
“Presumably there are other donors in a similar position to us?”, fished Greenpeace’s agent.
Might Happer be able to get his paper peer-reviewed by sympathetic authors?
With regards to peer review, I raised this issue because Matt Ridley’s article on Dr Indur Goklany’s recent CO2 report said that it had been thoroughly peer reviewed. Would it be possible to ask the same journal to peer review our paper given that it has a similar thrust to Goklany’s? It’s not a deal-breaker, but I felt that it helped strengthen that piece of work.
Then, finally, Greenpeace sprung its trap. According to Moore’s account:
On December 7 he received an email from one Maeve McClenaghan of Greenpeace, telling him that they had conducted what she grandiosely described as an “undercover investigation” – actually a criminal entrapment scam contrary to the RICO and wire-fraud statutes, and a flagrant attempt both to tamper with a Congressional witness (he is due to testify today, 8 December) and to obstruct committee proceedings – and that they intended to publish a “news article … regarding the funding of climate sceptic science.
She said: “Our article explores how fossil fuel companies are able to pay academics to produce research which is of benefit to them” and added that the story would be published on a Greenpeace website and “promoted widely” in the media. She gave Professor Happer only hours to respond.
Many of the points she said she proposed to include in the article were crafted in such a way as to distort what the above correspondence makes plain were wholly innocent and honest statements, so as to make them sound sinister. The libels Ms McClenaghan proposed to circulate will not be circulated here.
Moore has now reported Greenpeace to the FBI.
Accordingly, I have decided to inform the Federal Bureau of Investigation of Greenpeace’s dishonest and disfiguring attempt at entrapment of Professor Happer, whom I know to be a first-rate scientist, colleague and friend, one of the world’s half-dozen most eminent and experienced physicists, and one who would never provide any scientific advice unless in his professional opinion that advice was correct.
The organization’s timing was clearly intended to spring the trap on Professor Happer hours before he was due to appear in front of Congress. This misconduct constitutes a serious – and on many counts criminal – interference with the democratic process that America cherishes.
I have reported Greenpeace to the FBI under 18 USC 96 (RICO statute); 18 USC 1343 (wire fraud); 18 USC 1512 (attempting to intimidate a witness due to appear at a Congressional hearing); and 18 USC 1505 (obstruction of proceedings before committees).
I shall also be asking the Bureau to investigate Greenpeace’s sources of funding. It is now an enemy of the State, an enemy of humanity and, indeed, an enemy of all species on Earth.