Greenpeace’s China fetish

Last week, an Alberta judge fined a group of Greenpeace activists for breaking into and trespassing on the outside of the Calgary Tower and hanging an anti-oil sands banner accusing Canadian politicians of being corrupted by oil interests: “Separate Oil and State” it said. “While oil may run your car, it shouldn’t run your government,” said a Greenpeace spokesman at the time.

A few weeks earlier Greenpeace praised China for being a world leader in addressing climate change.

This is not a joke.

But perhaps Greenpeace is. This is what this multinational environmental corporation has become. It wants us to believe that Canadian governments, which enforce some of the toughest environmental standards on earth, are inseparable from the oil industry, while it celebrates China, a country whose government actually is the oil industry. The Communist state government really does control its petro-giants, including PetroChina and Sinopec.

Greenpeace’s claim that China is leading the world in climate-change efforts is bizarre enough on its own, since the country is already the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, though its economy is still roughly just a third of the size of America’s. And its emissions are projected to double over the next two decades. The country has been opening up not one but two new coal-fired power plants every single week. Underground coalmine fires in China that have burned for years are responsible for emitting more GHGs annually than all the projects in Canada’s oil sands region put together. But Greenpeace thinks China is worth celebrating because it’s lately been the world’s “biggest investor in renewable technology”. That’s like applauding Roseanne Barr as a leader in weight-loss just because she spends the most money on diet products.

But even if you don’t count carbon dioxide emissions, China’s environmental record is easily one of the worst on the planet. There have been thousands of riots in the last few years as citizens try protesting against the horrendous environmental conditions they’re forced to live in. In 2007, the World Bank estimated that the atrocious pollution of China’s air and water costs the economy $100 billion a year, or an incredible 6% of its GDP. Just try and keep track of all of China’s cover-ups of its regular oil spills. And the country’s Three Gorges Dam not only submerged 1,350 villages, displacing 1.3 million people, endangered a number of species, and increased droughts, its immense size appears to have actually caused the planet to move. Talk about an environmental impact.

When a PetroChina factory exploded in 2005 in Jilin, it released 100 tonnes of poisonous benzene and other toxins into a river that supplied water to nearly 4 million people. Their entire drinking water supply was cut off, and 10,000 people had to flee the immediate area. China, naturally, responded with a Chernobyl-style cover up of the whole incident, not even telling locals for a week what had happened. And the most strident criticism Greenpeace could muster about that environmental and human enormity was to “urge the Chinese government to make even greater efforts in protecting the local people and the environment.” As if the Chinese government was interested in making any effort to begin with.

None of this makes any sense, unless of course you understand the relationship Greenpeace has with the Chinese government. Greenpeace, like so many Western corporations, has identified China as an untapped  market for growth – a place where it can do what it does best: raise millions and millions of dollars.  But when you want to be a politically active group in a country where politically active groups are illegal, you have to mute your criticisms of the regime. How else can one explain Greenpeace’s strident criticisms of Canada, and muted criticism of China?

You can’t blame them: Greenpeace claims to have 3 million members worldwide. If it can get just 1% of the Chinese population to sign up as donors, that would more than quadruple the group’s size. Sure, that may mean pretending that China is a world leader in environmental progress while spreading damaging, and false, propaganda about Canadian society. But that’s the cost of doing business. As one of Greenpeace’s original founders, Patrick Moore, has said, all Greenpeacers are about now is “looking to enrich themselves.”

So let’s at least not pretend that’s not what the group’s actions are all about. China’s iron-fisted control measures are precisely what earns it a pass from Greenpeace while Canada’s open, ethical society, where governments actually respond to citizens’ concerns, is what makes it such a big, juicy and frequent target for a money-hungry organization like Greenpeace. That’s why their supporters sometimes break laws and hang banners here, and not over there.

Mike Hudema, the organization’s anti-oilsands point man, called the criminals who were sentenced last week “courageous” for standing up to the Canadian government.

Really? Let’s see Greenpeace try a stunt like that in China to protest the truly grievous environmental destruction going on in that country. Then we’ll talk about courage.

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