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Greenpeace

1.2. Greenpeace’s business model Greenpeace expands its business by running campaigns and maintains brand recognition by investing an average of 9% of its income on media & communications 7 Greenpeace runs its campaigns along the lines recommended by their former strategy advisor, Dr. Chris Rose, in his book “HOW TO WIN CAMPAIGNS”. This book provides a lot of insight into Greenpeace’s philosophies and views on campaigning, and in Appendix 3, we include a detailed synopsis. However, for brevity here, Dr. Rose’s recommendations can be summarised as follows: 1. Choose a campaigning issue that you label as catastrophic and urgent. 2. Choose a villain (enemy agent) who can’t put up much of a defence. 3. You (the good guy) propose a plausible solution to the campaigning issue, and accuse the villain (for selfish reasons) of preventing the solution from being implemented. 4. Issue a call to action and provide a way for people to become engaged (protest marches, face painting, financial contributions, etc.), so that they can become committed to the campaign. 5. Choose media outlets where you control the narrative. Don’t debate with the bad guys. As we discuss in Appendix 3.2, Rose believes that Greenpeace’s goal of campaigning is directly opposed to the goal of education. He argues that education increases knowledge and understanding, leading to a more nuanced and reflective discussion on the topic. However, he argues that campaigning groups should fight against education by deliberately oversimplifying the issue and reducing awareness of the available options. In that way, he argues people are more likely to become concerned and angry at what they believe is an urgent problem, leading to action. Another problem from Greenpeace’s perspective of encouraging a nuanced discussion is that people may come up with a workable solution for the problem, thus prematurely ending the need for Greenpeace’s campaign. A typical Greenpeace can take 4-5 years to set up and implement, which would mean a lot of wasted time and investment, if the campaign becomes redundant too quickly. For this reason, Greenpeace intentionally propose “solutions” to their problems which they know are unlikely to be ever implemented. They also try to discredit any groups that are proposing more realistic solutions that look like they could be implemented, e.g., see Sections 3 or 5.4 for two examples of this. In order to grow their business, Greenpeace continually tries out new campaigns; discontinues non- performing campaigns; or renames and invigorates declining campaigns. For example, in 1997, they abandoned their “Biodiversity” campaigns, and instead introduced a campaign against GM food. However, as this campaign began to become less successful in the mid-2000s, they began to wind it down and discontinued it in 2009. 8 The “Peace” in Greenpeace is partly derived from the fact that they were originally set up to oppose nuclear development and promote disarmament. In 1995, this was their biggest campaign ($13.5m). However, since that peak in 1995, they have been gradually deprioritizing this campaign. By 2006, they changed its name to “Peace and Disarmament” and continued to reduce its budget before finally discontinuing the campaign in 2009. The continual dynamic restructuring of campaigns is a key component of their business model. When some campaigns look particularly promising, they increase expenditure on them, but when others start to lose momentum, they reduce expenditure or even completely discontinue the campaign. Below is a breakdown of their annual campaign expenditure for each year from 1994 to 2015: 9 If we sum the total expenditure over the entire period (and extrapolate up to 2017 – see Excel file for details), the breakdown is as follows: We can see that the three largest campaigns have been: 1. Climate & Energy. $521 million ($0.52 billion) since 1994 10 2. Forests. $240 million ($0.24 billion) since 1994 3. Oceans. $205 million ($0.21 billion) since 1994 The breakdown of each of these campaigns is shown below: Although “Climate & Energy” has been their biggest campaign over the last decade, and as of 2015 still was their largest, it can be seen that expenditure actually peaked in 2013. However, in 2015, they announced that they were going to start prioritising a new sub-campaign of the “Oceans” campaign – campaigning against “Single Use Plastics”, which they claimed were responsible for a new crisis: “ocean plastic pollution”. This relatively new campaign seems to have been remarkably popular for them, and other like-minded groups have joined in with them to help create a widespread public concern that the Western world’s usage of “single use plastics” is causing a catastrophic “ocean pollution crisis”. 11 In Section 5, we will show how this “ocean pollution crisis” has been invented by Greenpeace through the deliberate distortion of the work of well-meaning environmentalists looking at a similar- sounding, but very different, issue which Greenpeace are intentionally misrepresenting. Before then, however, in Sections 2-4, we will focus on the campaign that Greenpeace have invested the most into, i.e., “Climate and energy”.

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