Green New Deal Would Kill Almost Everyone, Warns Greenpeace Co-Founder

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CALGARY, Canada — The “Green New Deal” proposed by congressional Democrats is a “recipe for mass suicide” and the “most ridiculous scenario I ever heard,” Greenpeace Co-Founder Patrick Moore (shown) warned in an exclusive interview with The New American. In fact, Dr. Moore warned that if the “completely preposterous” prescriptions in the scheme were actually implemented, Americans could be forced to turn to cannibalism to avoid starvation — and they still would not survive. Other experts such as Craig Rucker, the executive director of the environmental group Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), also sounded the alarm about the “green” proposal in Congress, comparing it to Soviet five-year plans and calling it a “prescription for disaster.”

The so-called Green New Deal is a massive scheme to, among other goals, restructure the U.S. economy. It is being advanced by a coalition of radical communist and socialist Democrats in Congress led by U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). A resolution (H. Res. 109) “recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal (GND)” already has 67 co-sponsors in the House. If the scheme outlined in the resolution expressing the “sense of the House” is implemented, it would seek to eliminate air travel, the eating of steaks, the use of hydrocarbons, and more. It would aim to completely end all emissions of CO2 — an essential gas exhaled by every living person and required by plants — over the coming decade.

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Moore, who was one of six international directors of Greenpeace, was flabbergasted that something so ludicrous could even be proposed, much less be advanced in the U.S. government. “It is quite amazing that someone that is in government — actually elected to the government of the United States of America — would propose that we eliminate all fossil fuels in 12 years,” he said in an on-camera interview with The New American from Canada. “This would basically result, if we did it on a global level, it would result in the decimation of the human population from 7-odd billion down to who knows how few people.” It would end up killing almost everyone on the planet, he added.

Worse than mass death would be the way people reacted. “It would basically begin a process of cannibalization among the human species, because the food could not be delivered to the stores in the middle of the cities anymore,” Moore continued. “The point that bothers me the most is that if you eliminated fossil fuels, every tree in the world would be cut for fuel. There is no other source for heating and cooking once you eliminate fossil fuels. You could use animal dung, if there were any animals left, but the animals would all die too because they would all get eaten.”

Moore also slammed the “social aspects” of the Green New Deal proposals such as “paying people who are unwilling to work,” according to a FAQ released by Ocasio-Cortez’ office. “I can’t believe that anyone would write that in a proposal for law in the United States of America,” he said, calling it “just unbelievable.” Indeed, that language and other half-baked ideas caused nationwide ridicule of Ocasio-Cortez and others involved in pushing the “New Deal.” The ridicule got so intense that one of its proponents eventually lied, claiming that mischievous Republicans might have put out a fake Green New Deal document to make Democrats look ridiculous. But then the truth came out, despite the FAQ being removed from Cortez’s congressional website.

But the absurdity of it all may be a boost to Republicans and President Donald Trump. “We have a situation where something completely preposterous is being backed by a large number of Democratic congressional elected representatives in the United States of America,” Moore said. “This is actually going to put Trump right over the top. I cannot see how this can possibly be negative for him. It can only be positive, because people recognize when something is preposterous. And I think that is the best word for it.”

“The best term for it is actually mass-suicidal,” Moore added. “Why would anyone vote for something that was going to result in the death of nearly all humans on Earth?” As far as what Americans could do who support the environment but not mass suicide, Moore urged people not to vote for anyone who would support the “Green New Deal.”

Speaking at a conference put on by the Economic Education Association of Alberta over the weekend, Moore also explained that so much of what climate alarmists were pushing was pseudo-science and easily discredited lies. For instance, carbon dioxide is actually doing great things in terms of greening the planet — after all, it is plant food, Moore said. He also lambasted those who say coral reefs are dying due to alleged man-made global warming, something he said was not true. Noting that trucks need hydrocarbon fuels to bring produce to market in cities, Dr. Moore explained that just that one problem alone would be absolutely catastrophic if CO2 emissions were ended.

Moore has since left the Greenpeace he helped found, because it left him. When the group was founded, “we wanted to save civilization, we didn’t want to destroy it,” he told The New American. “By the time I left Greenpeace, it had drifted into a situation in which all they had left was the green. They kind of dropped the peace, which was the human side of the situation. And now they were characterizing people as the enemies of the Earth — the human species as the enemies of nature, as if we were the only evil species.”

One of the most outrageous campaigns by Greenpeace, Moore said, was when the leadership — which had no formal science education — decided to try to ban chlorine use worldwide. “Yes, chlorine can be toxic, it was used as a weapon in World War I,” he said. “But the fact that it is toxic is why it is the most important element in public health and medicine. Adding it to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health … that has saved hundreds of millions of lives through the time that we learned to use chlorine as an anti-bacterial agent.” Nature, he added, is full of toxic materials.

In his own keynote address at the conference, CFACT’s Rucker — who famously boarded Greenpeace ships to “punk” them with propaganda banners reading “ship of lies” and “propaganda warrior” — explained that much of the environmentalist movement has it backwards. The real key to preserving the environment, he said, is free markets, private property, and prosperity. Poor nations do not have the resources to protect the environment. And socialist-ruled nations have the worst environmental track-records of all. Meanwhile, freer and wealthier nations such as the United States, Canada, Japan, and Western Europe have remarkably clean environments.

In an interview with The New American, Rucker celebrated freedom. “What’s good for people is good for nature,” he said, calling for pro-growth policies that benefit people rather than government-enforced scarcity. “It’s like the old Chinese proverb: When there is food on the table, there are many problems; when there is no food on the table, there is one problem. Societies that do not take care of their people don’t have the resources to take care of the planet.”

Rucker, a top leader of the non-totalitarian environmental movement, also slammed the “Green New Deal” being advanced in Congress. “It is a horrible idea,” he said, blasting the original New Deal as well. “But I actually think it is more like the Soviet 5-year plan…. They want to be off fossil fuels within 10 years. That is insane. It is not that we are embracing fossil fuels, but this is a government-driven objective much like the old Soviet plans were government-driven objectives. It is going to fail. And the problem is, it is going to take a lot of people down with it… This is going to really hurt people. It is a prescription for disaster.”

Citing University of Maryland business Professor Julian Simon, Rucker used a hillarious example to illustrate the point. If the ideology of the sustainable-development movement were used 100 years ago, there would be great concern about where humanity was going to get enough whale oil to use as lighting. But of course, since then, electricity and light bulbs have taken the place of whale oil, thereby eliminating the alleged prospect of resources running out. The same concept applies to other resources, too, he said. When the price goes up due to scarcity, people will find substitutes and new ways of getting what they need — at least they will if markets are allowed to operate. “People are not just mouths, they are also hands and a brain,” he said.

He also drew a distinction between the “conservation” ethic, in which man is included in how to protect the planet, and the “preservation” ethic and the “Deep Green ecology” that views man as a “virus on the planet” that needs to be removed. Obviously, efforts to conserve nature should have the well-being of man in mind, he said.

Rucker and Moore both served at keynote speakers at the annual “FreedomTalk” conference hosted by Economic Education Association of Alberta. This writer gave a speech focusing on the indoctrination of children taking place in public schools — and particularly the implications of it for freedom. Other speakers highlighted the problems with the man-made global-warming hypothesis, the looming public pension disaster, and much more.

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook.