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This reminded me of Pascal Husting, a director of Greenpeace (!) who commuted from Luxembourg to Amsterdam by flying up and down several times a month. It compl

This reminded me of Pascal Husting, a director of Greenpeace (!) who commuted from Luxembourg to Amsterdam by flying up and down several times a month. It completely soured my opinion of Greenpeace, and I've avoided donating ever since. I just looked up the aftermath, and it turns he stopped flying his commute in 2014, and switched to the train in response to the criticism. It's interesting that a poorly judged action could do quite a lot of long term reputational damage, caused in part — I suspect — by initially defending that choice.

jajko 2y ago
Thats the thing with reputation - hard to gradually win, trivial to lose for good if you do something completely against the values you try to project as your core ones. Greenpeace specifically has little sympathies - they often fulfill the definition of eco-terrorists. Its like those idiots spraying beautiful old masters paintings worth tens of millions to 'send strong ecological message so people wake up'. Well, network protocol failed on that sending, you just painted yourself as arrogant aggressive a-holes I want to have absolutely nothing with, harming the cause significantly.
- pjc50 2y ago
  While I'm defending Greenpeace, I'm convinced that Extinction Rebellion are an 'op' run by UK security services because of how counterproductive they are. Especially after the revelations of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lambert_(undercover_police_officer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lambert_(undercover_police...
  - ben_w 2y ago
    My gut says otherwise, given the apparent decentralised structure and international range, making them difficult for a secret hand to guide while also being more prone to any one local group having their own Leeroy Jenkins. That said, I've seen the inside of the American Green Party, and what I saw had vibes of someone deliberately following the CIA guide to organisational sabotage — though even then, also a lot of amateurs with no idea how small and irrelevant they are and thus obliviously attempting to directly change the whole world rather than focus on what they actually have the power to influence, and I suspect that was where the majority of their mistakes came from. (Also a few genuine experts who were busy trying to sort out the internal issues, but "busy" tends to also mean "quiet").
SunlitCat 2y ago
Which makes you wonder, in what kind of world do those people live to not see the irony of being the Greenpeace CEO and traveling several times a month by using a airplane?
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Yeah just like this here, except this guy will travel 3200km 3 times a week!
stavros 2y ago
What soured my opinion of Greenpeace is how they kept us burning fossil fuels for decades longer than we should have been, with their anti-nuclear propaganda. I don't know if that was paid for by fossil fuel companies, but it sure really suited them. Greenpeace did untold damage to the climate by campaigning against nuclear (and, implicitly, for fossil fuels, as there weren't other economically competitive eco-friendly choices back then).
- pjc50 2y ago
  Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaigning came from the "peace" in their name: the inextricable link of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. Their campaign against nuclear weapons testing was met with considerable violence and carried out at significant personal risk, culminating in the French government carrying out a terrorist attack in New Zealand resulting in the death of a Greenpeace member. You cannot accuse them of being paid actors in that era. https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/about/our-history/bombing-of-the-rainbow-warrior/ https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/about/our-history/bombin... There was also a lot of campaigning against the practice of dumping nuclear waste at sea. I think we're long enough past Chernobyl to have forgotten the impact of that on Europe, but perhaps if a stray shell hits the Zaporizhzhia or Kursk nuclear reactor we'll be reminded of that again.
  - orwin 2y ago
    > perhaps if a stray shell hits the Zaporizhzhia or Kursk nuclear reactor we'll be reminded of that again. We don't use graphene reactors anymore, so at worst we will experience a Fukushima-level event. And by that I mean what was expected from Fukushima in the worst-case scenario which did not happen (still, people in the exclusion zone were forcibly moved out of their houses)
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      The pollution from Fukushima into the ocean was huge. It's not only about human death counts. And yes the same reactors as in Chernobyl are still in operation today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#List_of_RBMK_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#List_of_RBMK_reactors . Including in Kursk where fighting between Russia and Ukraine is currently going on. This isn't an imaginary situation. They were mitigated to avoid this particular issue but I wouldn't consider them 'safe' without a containment building etc. And it's not graphene, it's graphite. Graphene is a nanomaterial that didn't exist for production during the envisioning of RBMK reactors. It was only theoretical and produced from 2004 onwards.
shiroiushi 2y ago
The guy's clueless, but to be fair to him, I just looked up the travel time between Luxembourg and Amsterdam by train and it's around 7.5 hours, so I can see why he wouldn't want to travel that way when a plane is much faster. Even traveling that distance by car is faster! (~4.5h) Honestly, that kind of travel time by train is just shameful. Meanwhile, just over the border, traveling between various mid-size German cities by ICE train is very quick, and roughly 2x as fast as driving. Even between Brussels and Amsterdam is reasonably quick (~2h on Eurostar), so I guess the problem is just Luxembourg? If that guy needed to go to work in Amsterdam, the proper solution would have been to move.
- ionwake 2y ago
  Compare a graduate, wearing a suit, walking around streets in the summer, trying to get work at any company that will hire him for programming, then any cafe that will just let him serve drinks, and still not get hired. Compare this smart kid, who might have not got a perfect grade due to unforeseen circumstances, smart , intelligent, willing to do anything, for a job that pays $5 an hour in his field. Compare this 21 year old, to another man, who is CEO , of a company, that somehow exists solely to protect the planet, through humanitys good will. Now imagine that 21 year old, not moving to amsterdam, to live in a flat, to do his best for not just his peers, and respect to the company, but for the "good side" of every well meaning, often poor citizen willing to help improve the planet. Imagine this kid saying, nah I rather fly in a jet, that helps destroy the environment, and inconvenience my peers, and cost everyone involved with me and the company just so I can be closer to my garden. It doesn't come down to whether the CEO train timetable is slightly out of whack. Its literally everything. Some humans exist and grew on a plane of existence so different to the reality of the greater majority, that its often too hard for them to even comprehend it. I'm not bitter really, I retired young. But I could never bring myself to be that CEO, even now that I have money. This isn't a humble brag I'm just explaining how alien some peoples lives are, including most of you, with your 6 figure salaries compared to the "norm". Just a friendly reminder. /rant
  - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
    I mean if you dig into any of these "non-profits"/NGOs the behavior seems entirely par for the course and it's more expected that they be filled with people like that.

jajko 2y ago

Thats the thing with reputation - hard to gradually win, trivial to lose for good if you do something completely against the values you try to project as your core ones. Greenpeace specifically has little sympathies - they often fulfill the definition of eco-terrorists. Its like those idiots spraying beautiful old masters paintings worth tens of millions to 'send strong ecological message so people wake up'. Well, network protocol failed on that sending, you just painted yourself as arrogant aggressive a-holes I want to have absolutely nothing with, harming the cause significantly.

pjc50 2y ago
While I'm defending Greenpeace, I'm convinced that Extinction Rebellion are an 'op' run by UK security services because of how counterproductive they are. Especially after the revelations of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lambert_(undercover_police_officer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lambert_(undercover_police...
- ben_w 2y ago
  My gut says otherwise, given the apparent decentralised structure and international range, making them difficult for a secret hand to guide while also being more prone to any one local group having their own Leeroy Jenkins. That said, I've seen the inside of the American Green Party, and what I saw had vibes of someone deliberately following the CIA guide to organisational sabotage — though even then, also a lot of amateurs with no idea how small and irrelevant they are and thus obliviously attempting to directly change the whole world rather than focus on what they actually have the power to influence, and I suspect that was where the majority of their mistakes came from. (Also a few genuine experts who were busy trying to sort out the internal issues, but "busy" tends to also mean "quiet").

SunlitCat 2y ago

Which makes you wonder, in what kind of world do those people live to not see the irony of being the Greenpeace CEO and traveling several times a month by using a airplane?

wkat4242 2y ago
Yeah just like this here, except this guy will travel 3200km 3 times a week!

stavros 2y ago

What soured my opinion of Greenpeace is how they kept us burning fossil fuels for decades longer than we should have been, with their anti-nuclear propaganda. I don't know if that was paid for by fossil fuel companies, but it sure really suited them. Greenpeace did untold damage to the climate by campaigning against nuclear (and, implicitly, for fossil fuels, as there weren't other economically competitive eco-friendly choices back then).

pjc50 2y ago
Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaigning came from the "peace" in their name: the inextricable link of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. Their campaign against nuclear weapons testing was met with considerable violence and carried out at significant personal risk, culminating in the French government carrying out a terrorist attack in New Zealand resulting in the death of a Greenpeace member. You cannot accuse them of being paid actors in that era. https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/about/our-history/bombing-of-the-rainbow-warrior/ https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/about/our-history/bombin... There was also a lot of campaigning against the practice of dumping nuclear waste at sea. I think we're long enough past Chernobyl to have forgotten the impact of that on Europe, but perhaps if a stray shell hits the Zaporizhzhia or Kursk nuclear reactor we'll be reminded of that again.
- orwin 2y ago
  > perhaps if a stray shell hits the Zaporizhzhia or Kursk nuclear reactor we'll be reminded of that again. We don't use graphene reactors anymore, so at worst we will experience a Fukushima-level event. And by that I mean what was expected from Fukushima in the worst-case scenario which did not happen (still, people in the exclusion zone were forcibly moved out of their houses)
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    The pollution from Fukushima into the ocean was huge. It's not only about human death counts. And yes the same reactors as in Chernobyl are still in operation today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#List_of_RBMK_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#List_of_RBMK_reactors . Including in Kursk where fighting between Russia and Ukraine is currently going on. This isn't an imaginary situation. They were mitigated to avoid this particular issue but I wouldn't consider them 'safe' without a containment building etc. And it's not graphene, it's graphite. Graphene is a nanomaterial that didn't exist for production during the envisioning of RBMK reactors. It was only theoretical and produced from 2004 onwards.

shiroiushi 2y ago

The guy's clueless, but to be fair to him, I just looked up the travel time between Luxembourg and Amsterdam by train and it's around 7.5 hours, so I can see why he wouldn't want to travel that way when a plane is much faster. Even traveling that distance by car is faster! (~4.5h) Honestly, that kind of travel time by train is just shameful. Meanwhile, just over the border, traveling between various mid-size German cities by ICE train is very quick, and roughly 2x as fast as driving. Even between Brussels and Amsterdam is reasonably quick (~2h on Eurostar), so I guess the problem is just Luxembourg? If that guy needed to go to work in Amsterdam, the proper solution would have been to move.

ionwake 2y ago
Compare a graduate, wearing a suit, walking around streets in the summer, trying to get work at any company that will hire him for programming, then any cafe that will just let him serve drinks, and still not get hired. Compare this smart kid, who might have not got a perfect grade due to unforeseen circumstances, smart , intelligent, willing to do anything, for a job that pays $5 an hour in his field. Compare this 21 year old, to another man, who is CEO , of a company, that somehow exists solely to protect the planet, through humanitys good will. Now imagine that 21 year old, not moving to amsterdam, to live in a flat, to do his best for not just his peers, and respect to the company, but for the "good side" of every well meaning, often poor citizen willing to help improve the planet. Imagine this kid saying, nah I rather fly in a jet, that helps destroy the environment, and inconvenience my peers, and cost everyone involved with me and the company just so I can be closer to my garden. It doesn't come down to whether the CEO train timetable is slightly out of whack. Its literally everything. Some humans exist and grew on a plane of existence so different to the reality of the greater majority, that its often too hard for them to even comprehend it. I'm not bitter really, I retired young. But I could never bring myself to be that CEO, even now that I have money. This isn't a humble brag I'm just explaining how alien some peoples lives are, including most of you, with your 6 figure salaries compared to the "norm". Just a friendly reminder. /rant
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  I mean if you dig into any of these "non-profits"/NGOs the behavior seems entirely par for the course and it's more expected that they be filled with people like that.