Greenpeace Moves Into Deeper Water

An Inuit seal-hunter. Picture by Ansgar Walk.

If environmentalists wonder why they're losing ground to 'nutty climate deniers,' they should look no further than northern Greenland. Here, in the pristine Arctic wilderness inhabited by only a few hundred indigenous peoples who still hunt and fish as their ancestors did centuries ago, they are protesting against the titanic efforts of Scottish energy firm Cairn Energy to scour the ocean floor for oil. Oil, they say, is an unnecessary fossil fuel that is polluting the landscape and causing climate change, and drilling for it in the Arctic will destroy the traditional lifestyle of the inhabitants, and the environment that they have sustainably exploited for generations.

Now, that may or may not be true. I don't wish to turn this into a climate change blog, simply because both supporters and opponents of that theory are both wasting too much time and money on the wrong solutions - it is far better to use our resources to adapt to a change in global temperature, which, as the Ice Ages prove, changes with or without CO2, than it is to make futile attempts at combating it. But environmentalists do seem to miss the irony here.

They would not be warm, they would not be fed, they would not have lights, they would not have transport. In fact, it would be pretty much impossible for them to get that far north in the first place without oil, yet still they seem to think that oil is unnecessary? Their clothes, boats, and planes are made out of and powered by oil, without which their construction would have been impossible. Not only are Greenpeace now well out of date, with environmentalism having long since been adopted by national governments several decades ago, they still believe in one of the most ridiculous assertions of the modern era: oil is unnecessary? How do you get around, the bus?

Still, we shouldn't mock, because Cairn Energy has filed for a lawsuit in Denmark that could bankrupt them. That should cut down on most of their carbon emissions, at least...