Green Corps, part 2: Ozone Action / Green Corps / Greenpeace blur

In my blog post last week, I used a bit of likely inadvertent misinformation from a National Journal article on outgoing Greenpeace USA Executive Director Phil Radford as an item to segue into an examination of how the Green Corps organization seems to place Ross Gelbspan in high regard despite easily found problems with his narratives about ‘industry-corrupted’ skeptic climate scientists. Now, let’s re-examine that same two-sentence bit from the NJ article to illustrate how just the most basic of looks into any aspect of the corrupt skeptics accusation runs headlong into inconsistent details.

… Radford moved on to other issues working for the Public Interest Research Groups while studying political science and business at Washington University in St. Louis. He later helped organize Green Corps, a nonprofit focused on grassroots organizing, and the group was hired as a contractor for Ozone Action, which prodded politicians to address climate change and protect the Earth’s ozone layer.

Within that entire biographical article on Radford, that is the only mention of the Ozone Action organization. Read through the paragraph before it and one after, and a simple timeline can be produced for Radford:  High school anti-incinerator advocacy –> college PIRG work –> “created” Green Corps –> created Power Shift organization (details of which turn out to be murky rather than above reproach) –> joined Greenpeace. But a key detail is missing.

Followers of my work know that Radford’s work at Ozone Action is a critical element of his work history, since I have repeatedly shown the Ozone Action/Ross Gelbspan connection with regard to the widespread insinuation that skeptic climate scientists are industry-paid / industry-instructed in a sinister conspiracy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact“, and followers also know how I’ve mentioned several times that Radford’s boss at Ozone Action merged that group into Greenpeace USA and took over as the new Executive Director of Greenpeace USA. Some of my followers may remember I had to ask the editor at American Thinker to amend my 2010 article noting how Radford’s then-current Greenpeace bio had its Ozone Action reference erased – a line which now contradicts the one in red from the NJ article. (more on this in my upcoming Green Corps part 3 blog post).

For independent corroboration, Radford’s own LinkedIn resumé has the complete timeline sequence, fully disclosing his move from Green Corps into Ozone Action.

Fun how Radford’s own resumé hugely clarifies the National Journal article’s ‘helped organize Green Corps‘ bit. But regarding a different line in that same NJ paragraph ….

…. Radford joined Greenpeace to help launch the group’s first “grassroots department.”

…Radford’s boss at Greenpeace, John Passacantando, backs up the line in a Green Corps endorsement at their own web site (full text here):

“We’ve been so impressed in our work with Green Corps that we hired a Green Corps graduate to lead our national grassroots program, and we’re looking for more.”
—– Greenpeace Executive Director John Passacantando

Oh, wait. Radford’s boss John Passacantando contradicts the line in the National Journal article, with a swap of the name of the organization he headed at the time (full text here).

“We’ve been so impressed in our work with Green Corps that we hired a Green Corps graduate to lead our national grassroots program, and we’re looking for more.”
-John Passacantando, Executive Director, Ozone Action

Oops. But if a person wants to have fun with technicalities, Passacantando could be said to have corroborated the ‘launch the group’s first “grassroots department”NJ line, as Radford’s own personal resumé information shows he was hired by Greenpeace as a grassroots organizer. The NJ line just didn’t bother to say Passacantando hired Radford a second time for the same basic position, first at Ozone Action and then at an organization which could have been titled “Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action” under Passacantando’s leadership. Lest anyone forget, Al Gore’s spokesperson Kalee Kreider preceded Passacantando into Greenpeace USA directly from Ozone Action, and Kert Davies followed Passacantando straight into Greenpeace from Ozone Action.

Then there is one more item from Radford’s resumé that further blurs the overall picture.

Director, Board of Directors of Green Corps
Green Corps
July 2011 – Present (4 years 2 months)

CEO of Greenpeace and Greenpeace Fund
Greenpeace
May 2009 – April 2014 (5 years)

From July 2011 until his April 2014 departure from Greenpeace, he was ‘at’ both organizations at the same time. He arguably started his career beginning in college with the organization that created Green Corps, an organization itself having people who weren’t the least bit subtle about praising Ross Gelbspan’s work, and he is back at Green Corps now, an organization which put heavy emphasis on the value of Gelbspan.

In a roundabout way, you could say Radford never left Green Corps, he just sort of drifted away from it on a couple of occasions, but never basically all that far from core efforts surrounding it. But if this blurry mess makes any one thing crystal clear, what we have here ultimately is a small centralized clique of people on a well-organized mission to keep the global warming issue alive by destroying the character of its critics through a reliance on Ross Gelbspan’s work.

Read the National Journal Radford biography as a standalone piece, and you want to cheer for a person who rose from Green Corps to be the leader of Greenpeace, having the unwavering goal of saving the planet. Read any pro-global warming narrative as a standalone piece, for that matter, and you’ll want “climate change deniers” prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Start dissecting their narratives, comparing them side-by-side while looking for physical evidence corroborating Ross Gelbspan’s ‘industry corruption’ accusation against skeptic climate scientists, and a very different picture becomes clear:  these people’s narratives don’t line up right, they collectively have no evidence backing up their accusation, and this prompts serious questions of whether core leaders of the global warming movement are totally oblivious to this situation, or if they knew their narratives had no merit from the start.
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Next up: Green Corps, part 3: Why can’t we get a straight story on which organization flipped Senator John McCain into being a global warming believer?