Greenpeace

Two years and one month ago, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute and the leading authority on global warming, wrote that we have “at most ten years” to drastically change our ways if we are to avoid the worst consequences of global warming.

Dr. Hansen wrote to a nation still in shock from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast in the late summer of 2005.

Three years after Katrina and two years after James Hansen’s warning, we seem to have learned nothing from either the storm or the scientist.

Another storm, Gustav, gathers strength over the warm waters of the Gulf as residents of likely landfalls collect important papers and keepsakes and head inland. Behind Gustav, tropical storm Hanna approaches the Antilles and an unnamed tropical low pressure system forms off the west coast of Africa.

But it’s not just hurricane season: it’s political season too. Candidates and their surrogates create their own masses of hot air in convention cities. The Republicans – whose candidate John McCain has been traversing the nation shouting, Drill Here! Drill Now! – announce in one breath that they may postpone their convention if Gustav’s havoc is as severe as feared.

In the next breath, Mr. McCain names Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. The GOP hopes Ms. Palin will contrast Mr. McCain – female vs. male, young vs. old, governor vs. senator – but when it comes to energy all she wants to do is drill, drill, drill.

The Democrats are not much better, as Barack Obama says he would support some offshore drilling in exchange for other, undefined environmental protections.

Is it possible no politician understands that drilling, mining and burning fossil fuels stokes the storms that rip into America’s southern coast?

Is it possible they don’t realize the other perils of offshore drilling, either? There are over 400 oil and gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico that are threatened right now by Gustav. At best, the storm (and Hanna behind it) will cause a temporary interruption and another spike in the price of gas. At worst, the storms will cause oil spills and ruin among the rigs – and resulting energy prices may bankrupt working families all through the winter, while the oil spills themselves would harm wildlife and devastate ecosystems.

And still the call from across the political spectrum is, “more offshore drilling.” More rigs in the Gulf? Or off the coast of Florida, or the Carolinas, also favorite targets of hurricanes? Or off the earthquake-prone coast of California?

America is addicted to oil. Our addiction is making the planet uninhabitable. The cure for an oil addiction is not to seek more places to drill for it. The economic and environmental instability caused by our oil addiction can only be cured by changing the way we find and use energy.

We need to use far less energy and we need to generate it with clean, renewable sources. Many nations are ahead of the United States in this regard. They are more than willing to help us catch up. All that is required is the vision and the will to do better, both in our leaders and in ourselves.

One way to measure success is to consider the reaction provoked by your action.  Greenpeace released its report on the retail marketing of unsustainable seafood (“Carting Away the Oceans: How Grocery Stores are Emptying the Seas”) on June 17. One reaction has been immediate howls of outrage from the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), particularly a man named Gavin Gibbon.  That’s understandable, since NFI is a trade group representing many vendors who are selling fish that are unsustainably taken from the oceans.

But this discussion shouldn’t be about our respective identities.  It should be about facts and arguments and so far, all Mr. Gibbon has served up has been some pretty thin soup (or in this case, bisque).

Mr. Gibbon leads off by calling our report “unscientific,” which is tactic 1A from the public relations playbook developed by the cigarette industry in the 1960s.  He claims in various blog posts that he’s read our entire report, but I guess he missed the 48 endnotes that cite our sources, which include the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, the Marine Resource Assessment Group and scholarly journals like Nature and Marine Policy.

Next, NFI’s Mr. Gibbon says it’s “absurd” for Greenpeace to call for stores to stop selling the 22 species that comprise our “red list.”  We didn’t draw up our red list with the aim of taking an extreme position.  Greenpeace came to our conclusion in this case – as we do with all issues – based on what actions are needed to restore and protect a healthy environment.  It’s an unfortunate – and inconvenient - truth that in this age of industrial fishing, we humans have managed to strip so many fish from the sea so quickly that these 22 species have been pushed to the edge of population collapse.

To be sure, it is with an air of profound sadness that Greenpeace has to be the messenger that the state of our oceans have come to this and that we need to call for such drastic remedies.  But then we consider the likely consequences of failing to take drastic action.  In too many instances around the world, many fishing grounds, including the Georges Banks off New England and the Canadian Maritime Provinces, have been fished so hard that they’ve suffered major stock collapses.  Let’s be clear – the stocks off the northeast coast and in all seas where all these 22 species live can recover but to accomplish that, we must give these fish population time to recover and when I write time, I’m not writing about months or years, but decades.

Across our oceanic globe, we also need to create permanent marine reserves – areas forever closed to fishing, so fish populations can always have regions where they can reproduce without pressure from our extremely efficient fishing technology.

As I said above, Greenpeace bases its recommendations on what the environment needs to restore and maintain its health.  There’s also a dash of human-centric interest at work here.  Seafood is a valuable part of our human culture and heritage.  If we want that to continue for our children and grandchildren, we have to take steps – necessarily drastic steps – now, so we can leave this legacy intact for future generations.

Mark Floegel
Greenpeace Research Unit