Greenpeace is an extremist environmental activist organisation. It cares little for the plight of humanity, which it no doubt regards as a plague of locusts upon Gaia’s unblemished cheek, and is only concerned about “saving the planet”:

Greenpeace exists because this fragile Earth deserves a voice. It needs solutions. It needs change. It needs action! (source)

Fragile. Hmm. It’s been here 4.5 billion years… Ask the people of Pompeii or Krakatoa if they thought the planet was fragile.

Given that, it is extremely unlikely that any report issued by such an organisation on environmental matters would be balanced, fair or impartial, taking, as it necessarily would, the worst case scenarios to advance their fanatical crusades.

Their latest publication evidences this:

For more than two decades, climate scientists have warned that, unless heat-trapping emissions are reduced significantly, severe consequences from climate change will follow. Avoiding the worst impacts means limiting the rise in global temperatures to below 2°C – in itself an extremely rapid change compared with the Earth’s past. In November 2012, both the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the World Bank cautioned that the world is heading to a temperature increase of between 3.6°C and 4°C. With the additional CO2 from these 14 projects, the average global temperature will more likely exceed 4°C and quite possibly 6°C – the worst scenarios identified by climate scientists.

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The impact on people if we trigger catastrophic climate change will be terrible. In September 2012, a new report, commissioned by 20 governments, gave an insight into the disaster that is coming. It estimated that climate change is already taking 5 million lives a year. By 2030, deaths could total 100 million.

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Clean and safe renewable energy [with the exception of clean, safe nuclear generation, of course, the only real alternative to fossil fuels, because that is ideologically forbidden – Ed], coupled with a much-increased implementation of energy efficiency, can provide the power needed to run the planet and avoid the risks of pushing us ever closer to catastrophic climate change. That is abundantly clear from the astounding progress in the development of renewable energy over the past decade.

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The world is clearly at a Point of No Return: either replace coal, oil and gas with renewable energy, or face a future turned upside down by climate change.

So it is surprising that the ABC chooses to bestow respectability on this alarmism by soberly reporting on it in a mainstream news item, even going as far as embedding the PDF for easy access and download:

A new report has warned Australia to stop expanding coal exports or risk inflicting “catastrophic” effects of climate change on the world.

The Greenpeace-commissioned study identifies the expansion of Australian coal exports as one of 14 proposed coal, oil and gas projects around the world that will raise greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020.

The study predicts Australia will increase coal exports to 408 million tonnes a year, producing an estimated 1,200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Greenpeace’s Georgina Woods says if the projects go ahead, they will warm the globe more than two degrees Celsius.

Whilst it seems that it is perfectly acceptable ABC editorial policy to plug an environmental activist group’s agenda, without any counterbalancing views, I think we can all imagine the howls of protest that would result if the ABC did the same with a report from, say, the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Not only that, but the ABC would ensure that they lined up a series of “experts” to debunk anything the GWPF claimed, and would make sure that the organisation was ridiculed and humiliated in the process (think about the ABC’s treatment of The Great Global Warming Swindle, where Tony Jones commented “I am bound to say The Great Global Warming Swindle does not represent the views of the ABC”).

Where is the statement that the Greenpeace report cited “does not represent the views of the ABC”? We must assume therefore that it does.

By such selective and unbalanced reporting, the ABC advances its own alarmist agenda, in clear and obvious contravention of its duty as a public broadcaster to be impartial (PDF):