Members of the anti-science activist group Greenpeace risked their lives Wednesday for a futile publicity stunt, climbing a 270-foot crane in downtown Washington DC to unfurl a giant 35 foot-by-75-foot orange and black anti-Trump banner that read: “Resist.” The banner was visible from the White House.
In recent months, far-left agitators have appropriated terms like “resist” and “revolution,” farcically conjuring up the image of jungle-dwelling anti-imperialist guerillas intent on detonating makeshift explosives near government buildings, to oppose the supposedly “fascist” reign of President Donald J. Trump.
Greenpeace’s “protest” had all the hallmarks of a contemporary leftist exercise in moral preening. For one, the disruptive act did nothing to change the reality on the ground. Trump is still president. Both houses of Congress are still controlled by the Republican Party. But more importantly, the self-styled environmentalist group’s theatrics only managed to harm everyday people, rather than those frolicking the halls of powers. The group was allegedly protesting the Trump administration’s decision to green light the Keystone XL pipeline and Dakota Access pipeline projects.
DC residents were blocked from getting to work, thanks to the “resistance” fighters.
“D.C. police waited out the seven protesters, shutting down traffic at a major intersection through the morning commute and into the evening and suspending work on new offices for Fannie Mae at 15th and L streets NW,” reports The Washington Post. “The action is one of several protests in the District since just before the presidential inauguration, and more are planned in the coming weeks.” Great job sticking it to the man.
The protesters were apparently all expert climbers equipped with safety harnesses and helmets, according to Greenpeace. They remained suspended 270-feet in the air for several hours until all seven activists finally came down from the crane only to be arrested by police waiting down below. “They were charged with second-degree burglary, unlawful entry, and destruction of property,” notes The Post.
When the protest finally ended at 10 pm, taxpayer-funded emergency services, including firemen, paramedics, and police officers, had been stuck playing the waiting game for 18 hours.
Fortunately, nobody was hurt during the stunt.
Despite the seemingly impish nature of Wednesday’s stunt, Greenpeace’s usual modi operandi are far from innocuous.
Indeed, the activist group is infamous for its “resistance” against genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Propagating anti-science rhetoric and alternative facts, Greenpeace has waged a war against the scientific community and its unequivocal endorsement of GMOs as a safe and sustainable.
Perhaps the most vocal votary of the anti-science Left, Greenpeace has attempted to infect the body politic with ignorance and fear-mongering to peddle a conspiratorial agenda about “Frankenfoods.”
Unfortunately, the group’s activism isn’t just restricted to rhetoric.
Comprised of mostly over-privileged and well-fed white Westerners, Greenpeace has worked to disrupt the development and distribution of Golden Rice, a Vitamin A-infused GMO rice product that was hailed by scientists as a panacea to curing children in underdeveloped regions of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, of blindness and death due to Vitamin A deficiency.
Vandalizing farms and harassing impoverished Golden Rice farmers in the Philippines and elsewhere, Greenpeace activists delayed the developmental process only to deprive desperate, dying children of the life-saving product.
In addition, the group initiated a PR war against NGOs and charities, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, devoted to distributing the product to the poorest regions of the world.
“By 2002, Golden Rice was technically ready to go. Animal testing had found no health risks. Syngenta, which had figured out how to insert the Vitamin A–producing gene from carrots into rice, had handed all financial interests over to a non-profit organization, so there would be no resistance to the life-saving technology from GMO opponents who resist genetic modification because big biotech companies profit from it,” explains Scientific American’s David Ropeik. “Except for the regulatory approval process, Golden Rice was ready to start saving millions of lives and preventing tens of millions of cases of blindness in people around the world who suffer from Vitamin A deficiency.”
Today, the distribution of Golden Rice is limited, largely due to the disruptive actions of anti-GMO groups like Greenpeace.
Ropeik continues (emphasis added):
…two agricultural economists, one from the Technical University of Munich, the other from the University of California, Berkeley, have quantified the price of that opposition, in human health, and the numbers are truly frightening.
Their study, published in the journal Environment and Development Economics, estimates that the delayed application of Golden Rice in India alone has cost 1,424,000 life years since 2002. That odd sounding metric – not just lives but ‘life years’ – accounts not only for those who died, but also for the blindness and other health disabilities that Vitamin A deficiency causes. The majority of those who went blind or died because they did not have access to Golden Rice were children.
These are real deaths, real disability, real suffering, not the phantom fears about the human health effects of Golden Rice thrown around by opponents, none of which have held up to objective scientific scrutiny. It is absolutely fair to charge that opposition to this particular application of genetically modified food has contributed to the deaths of and injuries to millions of people. The opponents of Golden Rice who have caused this harm should be held accountable.
Greenpeace’s opposition to Golden Rice has been so egregious that 107 Nobel laureates actually penned a letter in the summer of 2016, condemning the activist group’s macabre remonstrations.
“We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies, and abandon their campaign against ‘GMOs’ in general and Golden Rice in particular,” the letter reads.
The letter campaign was organized by Richard Roberts, the chief scientific officer of New England Biolabs and Phillip Sharp, winner of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
“We’re scientists. We understand the logic of science. It’s easy to see what Greenpeace is doing is damaging and is anti-science,” Roberts explained in an interview with The Post. “Greenpeace initially, and then some of their allies, deliberately went out of their way to scare people. It was a way for them to raise money for their cause.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) details the deleterious health effects of Vitamin A deficiency: “Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is the leading cause of preventable blindness in children and increases the risk of disease and death from severe infections. In pregnant women VAD causes night blindness and may increase the risk of maternal mortality. Vitamin A deficiency is a public health problem in more than half of all countries, especially in Africa and South-East Asia, hitting hardest young children and pregnant women in low-income countries. Crucial for maternal and child survival, supplying adequate vitamin A in high-risk areas can significantly reduce mortality. Conversely, its absence causes a needlessly high risk of disease and death.”
Death and blindness from Vitamin A deficiency are entirely preventable. And yet, innumerable children in dire need of the vitamin have no means of accessing cheap foods with enough Vitamin A to keep them healthy.
“An estimated 250 million preschool children are vitamin A deficient and it is likely that in vitamin A deficient areas a substantial proportion of pregnant women is vitamin A deficient,” notes WHO. “An estimated 250 000 to 500 000 vitamin A-deficient children become blind every year, half of them dying within 12 months of losing their sight.”
Sadly, Greenpeace isn’t alone in its dangerous anti-science crusade.
From promoting anti-vaccine hysteria to peddling homeopathy in lieu of conventional medicine to sabotaging the development of life-saving GMO products, the anti-science Left is destroying lives with a near fanatical, if not cult-like, zeal.
Rather than climbing tall cranes to protest a democratically elected president and block rush hour traffic, perhaps the folks at Greenpeace should sit down, shut up, and stop needlessly contributing to the deaths and disabilities of children in countries far less fortunate than the United States.