Donald Trump spent Tuesday morning binge-watching Fox and excitedly tweeting out everything he saw. Honestly, it’s lucky America didn’t get an update about Matthew McConaughey’s driving choices, or those bears that use toilet paper. Instead Trump delivered something even more stupid—a tweet about how the “co-founder of Greenpeace” declared that climate change is “fake science” and that “carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.”
Even leaving aside the fact that carbon dioxide is not the building block of all life, the environmental expert Trump cites here was Patrick Moore—who has been getting another round of attention lately as a conservative darling. He’s beloved on the right not just for reliably railing against climate change, and the Endangered Species Act, and anything else where “even the founder of Greenpeace is against it!” would be handy, but also for calling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a "pompous little twit.” In fact, that insult alone was enough to get him a whole segment on Fox News.
But here’s the thing the “fair and balanced” network isn’t saying about their favorite Greenpeace founder. . . . He wasn’t a founder of Greenpeace. Moore was an early member, joining Greenpeace about a year after it started, but he’s no more a “founder” than everyone who worked at Apple or Google in their first year.
Moore didn’t stick with Greenpeace long, because he found a much more lucrative scam. Thirty-three years ago, he left the organization and created a “consulting group” (which seems to consist only of himself) named Greenspirit Enterprises. And what does Greenspirit do? Represent oil companies. And coal companies. And uranium mining companies. And pesticide manufacturers. And basically anyone who wants to take a massive dump on the environment while putting an arm around the guy who was “the founder of Greenpeace.”
As Greenpeace says, Moore was “not a co-founder of Greenpeace. He does not represent Greenpeace. He is a paid lobbyist, not an independent source.” Patrick Moore is this guy. The one who corporations bring in to “prove” whatever jackassery they’re up to is “safe.”
