Greepeace leader Gerd Leipold admitted in an interview with BBC reporter Stephen Sackur (full interview here) that the environmental activist group included an unsupported (and indeed false) claim in an announcement made last month that sounded an alarm over the need for immediate action against global warming under the headline “Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts”.
The July 15th press release stated that all of the Arctic ice would disappear by 2030, however when pressed in the interview, Leipold did not hesitate to call that claim “a mistake”. However, despite the alarming but false information, Leipold defended the organization’s practice of “emotionalizing issues” to persuade public opinion.
Later in the interview, a more expansive agenda that went beyond environmentalism was given to Greenpeace’s motives. “We will definitely have to move to a different concept of growth. … The lifestyle of the rich in the world is not a sustainable model,” Leipold said. “If you take the lifestyle, its cost on the environment, and you multiply it with the billions of people and an increasing world population, you come up with numbers which are truly scary.”
Leipold said later in the BBC interview that there is an urgent need for the suppression of economic growth in the United States and around the world. He said annual growth rates of 3 percent to 8 percent cannot continue without serious consequences for the climate.
What do you think? Hopefully we can all agree that accurate information should be used to persuade the public, but what about the practice of intentionally adding emotion to what is allegedly otherwise just a scientific argument?