We had a visitor here in Kingston, the Greenpeace MV Artic Sunrise was out here for a visit. It demonstrated both against nuclear power and coal fired power stations. Mind you, its engines: Main engine: MAK 9M452AK 2495 IHP 1619kW
Aux engines: 2 x Deutz BF6M716 208hp (175 kva)
Bow & stern thrusters: 400 hp each
are most likely fired by sunlight and water as Greenpeace is all about renewable energy. I understand its all-metal hull is also constructed from ecologically harmless materials such as ... steel...?
Anyway, I have actually a lot of time for much of the work Greenpeace is doing. What irritates me is that it does so in ways that makes one wonder about the credibility of its message. Painting a steel based hull in green doesn't change the fact that the organisation's own mode of transport invalidates the very message it tries to convey. I mean, they could have cycled down to Kingston to tell the locals that coal based energy stations and nuclear power are bad, yet instead they transported themselves in a metal container weighing about 949 tonnes.
Which brings me to another gripe I have about Greenpeace, namely its consistency in terms of picking middle-class causes, some of which seem to be chosen not in terms of their objective priority but on aesthetic grounds alone. It's whales they're concerned about, and not pigs and other higher mammals that are being continuously tortured and eventually killed by the millions in our mass breeding factories. Surely reducing sentient beings to objects of meat production and keeping them in these factories of suffering and death is a greater moral evil than the killing of a few hundred or thousand whales in the open seas. I am not in favour of the latter, and I am glad that Greenpeace campaigns against whale hunting, but surely one has to wonder whether it's fundraisers who decide which cause (or animal) the organisation campaigns on (for)...
