exxon sued greenpeace over its use of there e$$o logo

if whales are not an endangered species
someone ought to tell the World Wildlife Fund.

`Of the original three gray whale populations, one is extinct in the North Atlantic, one is critically endangered in the Western North Pacific with as few as 100 individuals remaining, and one has recovered from very low levels in the Eastern North Pacific and was removed from the U.S. Endangered Species List in 1994.'
 http://www.worldwildlife.org/species/speciessection.cfm?sectionid=193&newspaperid=21&contentid=552

and that is just the grey whale!


exxon was bush`s biggest financial backer during his election campaign.


What is it you are trying to say?

Any atttack on an oil company is good for starters.


Secondly, Esso dont invest a single penny in renewable energy sources, unlike the other oil companys although they are the biggest oil comany making over 15 billion dollars a year.

Esso are open in dismissing global warming as bollocks, and just as tobacco companies denied the link between cancer and smoking, esso deny the link between burning fossil fuels and global warming.

The letter from Esso front groups to the whitehouse asking bush to get his negotiators to keep potential global warming of the table and out of the spotlight at Johannesburg is irrelevant is it? The fact that Esso applauded bush for not attending the summit in person is fine is it?

Shut up and piss off exxon man!

Whilst some of us shall continue to campaign against esso you should get up off your ass, stop complaining and get active.

This is very likely to be a hoax against Greenpeace. Particularly the story about an alleged whale-hoax suggests that. The article may actually be quite an interesting example for pr activities against NGOs.

Some particular whale spieces may be endangered, BUT the spieces presently being hunted are absolutly NOT endangered. It´s a bit surprising that the opinions of scientists concerning this matter isn´t more well known by enviromental activists.
In Norway, the former head of Greenpeace left the organisation in protest against Greenpeace´s "save the whales"-hoax!
Furthermore, in Norway (which is a whalehunting country but ALSO a country whose serious engagement in enviromental issuses is widely known) the parliament once decided that it´s restaurant should serve it´s guests whale meat for lunch, as a protest against non whale hunting countries dubious opinions in this question.
Check the facts before take part in this debate.
Why do you think Greenpeace is so concerned with animals as majestic, fascinating Whales and sweet seals with big eyes staring back at you? Has this probably got something to do with fund raising among ignorant, uneducated people like you?

Depending which scientists connected with the environment are telling that the whales are not in danger, you'll find out that scientists from the fishing industry are telling the opposite, that obvious. Economic interests are more important than whales or human being for that matter.
So Ola check out which scientists say what.

I´m enviromentally concerned and I´m also very concerned about Greenpeace´s hoax concerning whales. Why?
My opinion about Greenpeace is that they cause harm to persons who are making serious attempts to rescue a threatened enviroment, simply put.
I wonder why a lot of contributors, raising their high pitched voices here on the internet, aren´t more interested in the thoughtful internal critique delivered by Greenpeace Hamburg in this case. They confirm the lack of independent critical thinking in the enviromental movement of today!
As a matter of advice; a lot of helpful material is to be found out by searching the web for information about "whales".

The point is...

endangered or not endangered, if humans can continue to kill the largest, amazing, most spiritual, of animals on our beautiful planet, what chance have we got...

(However, I still think they're endangered.)

Also, just because I admire the amazing work of greenpeace who incidently have a enviable long list of successes in environmental campaigning, does not mean that I swallow up everything they tell me.

It is for this reason, that is to give reasoning to their supporters, that Greenpeace publish reports showing clearly the evidence for why they are targeting particular orgaisations/people, like esso.

Mayb you should start reading them...
see www.greenpeace.org.uk

Oh, and also, the esso campaign has not been unsucessful, indeed, Esso has had 20% (thats £55 billion worth) of share holders vote for investment in renewables, the whole of Esso in luxemurg has been shut down this week, their profits have dropped by something like 20 odd percent in a year with over 1 million people boycotting them...

shall i go on...

Now I finally see the light. We should care about creatures who appear to be "spiritual" from our limited viewpoint, we shouldn´t care the slightest about rats, insects and other horrid creatures.
See U next monday in nursery school.

while it is wise to support the most endangered species first, rather than the cutest ones, and equally wise to avoid any disinformation or unproved claims, this article sounds like coming from american rightwing or libertarian voices.
these insist that the state as well as the NGOs have no clue and no right about environmental concerns. regulations on pollution and biodiversity issues to them are "communist" attempts for controlled economy and redistributing wealth.
they simply say, the corporations who develop the technologies have the best insight and reason to protect their environment. (but they also say, weapons in every household protect their families better than law enforcement. after all, they are all good people....)

but we must be warned, that hyped revealing of environmental damage caused by some enterprise, may have its roots within another (competing) company, that is not necessary the _beningn_ player in the game.

I welcome contributions like the one above, showing, in a very well put manner, that critical, rational thinking has NOT been left aside in the environmental movement. Greenpeace leaders have accomplished a lot of good work, but MAYBE they´ve become addicts to their own notion of infallibility.

Looks like the spin merchants are out there trying to create propaganda against Greenpeace.

Neither "Greenpeace Hamburg" nor "Ola" sound convincing.

I'll bet they're from a PR firm sponsored by an oil company.

Anyone remember the case of Bivings (a PR company) and Monsanto (a producer of GM seeds and toxic chemicals) which created two fictional individuals to put their case on the Internet? Since this article (below) appeared they have never been heard from again...



The fake persuaders

Corporations are inventing people to rubbish their opponents on the internet

George Monbiot
Tuesday May 14, 2002
The Guardian

Persuasion works best when it's invisible. The most effective marketing worms its way into our consciousness, leaving intact the perception that we have reached our opinions and made our choices independently. As old as humankind itself, over the past few years this approach has been refined, with the help of the internet, into a technique called "viral marketing". Last month, the viruses appear to have murdered their host. One of the world's foremost scientific journals was persuaded to do something it had never done before, and retract a paper it had published.
While, in the past, companies have created fake citizens' groups to campaign in favour of trashing forests or polluting rivers, now they create fake citizens. Messages purporting to come from disinterested punters are planted on listservers at critical moments, disseminating misleading information in the hope of recruiting real people to the cause. Detective work by the campaigner Jonathan Matthews and the freelance journalist Andy Rowell shows how a PR firm contracted to the biotech company Monsanto appears to have played a crucial but invisible role in shaping scientific discourse.

Monsanto knows better than any other corporation the costs of visibility. Its clumsy attempts, in 1997, to persuade people that they wanted to eat GM food all but destroyed the market for its crops. Determined never to make that mistake again, it has engaged the services of a firm which knows how to persuade without being seen to persuade. The Bivings Group specialises in internet lobbying.

An article on its website, entitled Viral Marketing: How to Infect the World, warns that "there are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organisation is directly involved... it simply is not an intelligent PR move. In cases such as this, it is important to first 'listen' to what is being said online... Once you are plugged into this world, it is possible to make postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party... Perhaps the greatest advantage of viral marketing is that your message is placed into a context where it is more likely to be considered seriously." A senior executive from Monsanto is quoted on the Bivings site thanking the PR firm for its "outstanding work".

On November 29 last year, two researchers at the University of California, Berkeley published a paper in Nature magazine, which claimed that native maize in Mexico had been contaminated, across vast distances, by GM pollen. The paper was a disaster for the biotech companies seeking to persuade Mexico, Brazil and the European Union to lift their embargos on GM crops.

Even before publication, the researchers knew their work was hazardous. One of them, Ignacio Chapela, was approached by the director of a Mexican corporation, who first offered him a glittering research post if he withheld his paper, then told him that he knew where to find his children. In the US, Chapela's opponents have chosen a different form of assassination.

On the day the paper was published, messages started to appear on a biotechnology listserver used by more than 3,000 scientists, called AgBioWorld. The first came from a correspondent named "Mary Murphy". Chapela is on the board of directors of the Pesticide Action Network, and therefore, she claimed, "not exactly what you'd call an unbiased writer". Her posting was followed by a message from an "Andura Smetacek", claiming, falsely, that Chapela's paper had not been peer-reviewed, that he was "first and foremost an activist" and that the research had been published in collusion with environmentalists. The next day, another email from "Smetacek" asked "how much money does Chapela take in speaking fees, travel reimbursements and other donations... for his help in misleading fear-based marketing campaigns?"

The messages from Murphy and Smetacek stimulated hundreds of others, some of which repeated or embellished the accusations they had made. Senior biotechnologists called for Chapela to be sacked from Berkeley. AgBioWorld launched a petition pointing to the paper's "fundamental flaws".

There do appear to be methodological problems with the research Chapela and his colleague David Quist had published, but this is hardly unprecedented in a scientific journal. All science is, and should be, subject to challenge and disproof. But in this case the pressure on Nature was so severe that its editor did something unparalleled in its 133-year history: last month he published, alongside two papers challenging Quist and Chapela's, a retraction in which he wrote that their research should never have been published.

So the campaign against the researchers was extraordinarily successful; but who precisely started it? Who are "Mary Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek"?

Both claim to be ordinary citizens, without any corporate links. The Bivings Group says it has "no knowledge of them". "Mary Murphy" uses a hotmail account for posting messages to AgBioWorld. But a message satirising the opponents of biotech, sent by "Mary Murphy" from the same hotmail account to another server two years ago, contains the identification bw6.bivwood.com. Bivwood.com is the property of Bivings Woodell, which is part of the Bivings Group.

When I wrote to her to ask whether she was employed by Bivings and whether Mary Murphy was her real name, she replied that she had "no ties to industry". But she refused to answer my questions on the grounds that "I can see by your articles that you made your mind up long ago about biotech". The interesting thing about this response is that my message to her did not mention biotechnology. I told her only that I was researching an article about internet lobbying.

Smetacek has, on different occasions, given her address as "London" and "New York". But the electoral rolls, telephone directories and credit card records in both London and the entire US reveal no "Andura Smetacek". Her name appears only on AgBioWorld and a few other listservers, on which she has posted scores of messages falsely accusing groups such as Greenpeace of terrorism. My letters to her have elicited no response. But a clue to her possible identity is suggested by her constant promotion of "the Centre For Food and Agricultural Research". The centre appears not to exist, except as a website, which repeatedly accuses greens of plotting violence. Cffar.org is registered to someone called Manuel Theodorov. Manuel Theodorov is the "director of associations" at Bivings Woodell.

Even the website on which the campaign against the paper in Nature was launched has attracted suspicion. Its moderator, the biotech enthusiast Professor CS Prakash, claims to have no connection to the Bivings Group. But when Jonathan Matthews was searching the site's archives he received the following error message: "can't connect to MySQL server on apollo.bivings.com". Apollo.bivings.com is the main server of the Bivings Group.

"Sometimes," Bivings boasts, "we win awards. Sometimes only the client knows the precise role we played." Sometimes, in other words, real people have no idea that they are being managed by fake ones.

I agree that the ones verging on extinction should come first but thats no reason not to protect the endangered ones that I kind of see as a symbol for the wildlife world.

I also agree with the person who published monbiot's article.

Having been active with greenpeace for a couple of years, and having recently been to the national skillshare, I can safely say there is no misfeeling in Greenpeace UK amongst the activists, indeed quite the opposite. We reckon the stop esso campaign is very worthwhile.

I cant speak for "Hamburg Greenpeace" but they do sound a bit oil company-pr-ish!

time to go back to basics.