Greenpeace: Voice of the IPCC
A member of Greenpeace wrote the portion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recent report on how renewables will replace fossil fuels. This is akin to allowing the wolf into the chicken house and reporting that there is a need for more chickens.
The British have a wonderful name for people like the Greenpeace activist. They call them “campaigners” because that’s what they do: Campaign to get their programs adopted.
A campaigner shouldn’t be writing a scientific report that is obviously biased, for an organization that is supposed to be unbiased.
This was only part of the problem.
Based on the biased report, the IPCC issued a press release saying that renewables could supply 77% of the world’s energy needs by 2050.
They issued the press release a few weeks before issuing the actual report, so it wasn’t possible for the media and others to determine how Greenpeace, excuse me, the IPCC could make such a claim.
Surprise, surprise: The IPCC report assumed that energy use would drop by nearly 15%, even though the world’s population is expected to increase by some 2 billion people.
This is the kind of bogus headline that is behind the IPCC’s call for the United States to cut its CO2 emissions 80% by 2050.
This latest IPCC headline follows one last year about how the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2030, which was found to be fraudulent and written by another campaigner. Then there are the leaked e-mails from the IPCC that became known as Climategate.
How can anyone trust an organization like the IPCC?
The IPCC would quickly be found irrelevant if it weren’t that they are the ones predicting disaster if CO2 levels in the atmosphere are allowed to reach the magic number of 450 ppm. Currently, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is 385 ppm.
To avoid this catastrophe, the IPCC says the world must cut its CO2 emissions 50% by 2050, but requires the United States to cut its CO2 emissions by 80% so that developing countries, like China and India, can continue to increase their emissions.
Only the uninformed can accept Greenpeace’s proposition that renewables can replace huge amounts of fossil fuels.
An earlier Greenpeace report, and presumably the one on which the IPCC’s latest pronouncement is based, made discredited claims such as:
- Solar panels on roof tops could provide 70% of U.S. electricity.
- Energy “equity” would shift energy from developed countries to a “fair, worldwide energy supply distribution.” (From those who have, to those who need. Sound familiar?)
- “Industrialized countries (i.e., the United States) consume much more [energy] than their fair share.”
- “Enhanced Geothermal” i.e., Hot Rocks, can provide an additional 92,000 MW of installed geothermal capacity. (Hot Rock experiments that began in Australia ten years ago still haven’t worked.)
- An analysis of the Greenpeace report in 2009 showed that Americans would have to cut their use of electricity by nearly half, i.e., 47%.
These are the people writing for the IPCC.
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