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Each year Greenpeace puts out a ranking of various grocery retailers, listed according to how much the retailers comply with the multinational activist group’s demands on seafood sourcing.  It’s easy to mistake the yearly ranking as a publicity stunt.  After all, the ranking is trumpeted with a press release from Greenpeace headquarters, presumably sent to news outlets far and wide, and it is touted on social media by Greenpeace’s senior personnel.

Indeed the threat of negative publicity is the leverage that Greenpeace uses in order to strong-arm the retailers into filling out Greenpeace’s survey.  The implied warning, “Cooperate with us or we will hurt your company and brand by denouncing you in the press.”

It’s a clever if crude sort of shakedown but on closer inspection it’s missing a crucial element: the ranking doesn’t actually get any significant press attention at all.  In the two weeks since this year’s ranking was released, it has been covered by zero newspapers (regional or national), zero broadcast channels (regional, national, or cable), zero columnists, zero magazines, and zero radio outlets (national, regional, or even basement podcast).  Even Greenpeace’s own social media — that is, it’s own actual membership — have shared or retweeted the big news only a couple dozen times in the first day or two and then stopped.  Much the same thing happened with last year’s report.

It isn’t hard to understand why.  For one thing, the ranking report is completely arbitrary.  Greenpeace doesn’t disclose its analytics (which is made up to begin with) and so there’s no way to verify or validate how or why any retailer goes up or down on the list.  Second, the underlying survey that Greenpeace claims is the basis for the ranking is also arbitrary — mostly ginned up with unscientific questions that have more to do with Greenpeace’s own agenda rather than widely accepted standards and norms of international seafood sustainability.  It’s worth noting that Greenpeace has refused to collaborate with  any of the governing bodies that oversee and regulate global seafood sustainability policy — and they have open contempt for the standards that are not their own, established by those concerted efforts by governments, scientists, researchers, and industry.

Even at first glance, the report is cartoonish — literally.  The logos of the various grocers are rendered in charts as caricatured illustrations racing through an imaginary ocean world of talking and smiling sea creatures.  No wonder serious journalists ignore it.

But it’s critical to understand that the report’s main function really isn’t to inform the press.  It’s actually more of an annual report that Greenpeace uses to show its major donors that it is trying to get a stranglehold on seafood retailers and their business decisions.  The most prominent features of the report describe detailed examples of how Greenpeace has been able to interact and sometimes manipulate companies into various conciliations.

But even those sorts of concessions don’t shield grocers from Greenpeace’s attacks.  Just ask the companies that gave in to Greenpeace demands this year and were nevertheless ridiculed for decisions they made about seafood offerings, sourcing methods, store signage, even about executive personnel shifts.

So here’s what we know.  Any hope of positive publicity from cooperating with Greenpeace or filling out their survey is an illusion.  They will continue to attack retailers regardless of past concessions to achieve their ever changing agenda fluctuating like a roller coaster.   Similarly, the fear of negative publicity is also unfounded.  The report gets virtually no public attention and is apparently read only by a handful of Greenpeace staffers and, of course, their foundation donors.

The only practical and tangible result of the survey and ranking is for Greenpeace to justify its budget in front of the foundations that give it huge grants.  By filling out the survey, retailers are in effect helping Greenpeace create the information needed  to garner more funding to attack those same retailers.

An obvious question arises: why take part in the Greenpeace survey in the first place?

Those of us in the U.S. are not the only ones fed up with Greenpeace’s shenanigans.

All over the world, Greenpeace activists have trespassed and vandalized property — hanging banners, spray-painting graffiti, chaining themselves to buildings and equipment — to grab publicity and harass businesses and governments. Of course, these antics have done nothing to advance real solutions to the world’s problems. They’re just the same tired pranks repeated over and over.

And people around the globe are growing weary.

Last month, the Spanish Fisheries Federation (Cepesca) blasted Greenpeace activists for chaining themselves to a fake fishing boat and hanging a banner outside the entrance of the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment (Magrama).

The association said it regretted that Greenpeace “has not been able to express its goals and arguments in the discussion channels where the other agents in the fishing industry, ship owners, crew, industry, NGOs, consumers, women’s networks and other interested parties provide ideas and arguments.”

Cepesca also made clear that while the Spanish fishing industry is taking action to ensure that seafood is plentiful for generations to come, Greenpeace is doing nothing productive — even blowing off panels advising the European Commission on fisheries policies.

As one publication noted: “Given the recent incidents, Cepesca finds it regrettable that Greenpeace does not provide solutions and chooses the performance of vandalistic and illegal acts that only provide ‘media covers but no contributions to help improve the sustainability of the fishing activity.’”

How familiar that all sounds to us.

On this side of the ocean, we’ve also seen our fair share of Greenpeace blimps and protests that are meant to intimidate tuna companies and raise money from Greenpeace supporters.  All the while refusing to sit at the table with legitimate sustainability organizations like International Seafood Sustainability Initiative, WWF and MSC to name a few.

Backlash is growing around the world for Greenpeace’s brand of ecoterrorism that is increasingly becoming stale and irrelevant.

The precocious activist group Greenpeace is often fond of touting sharp statistics and alarming mathematical models to back up its habitual threats against seafood companies and retailers. A hundred million sharks are caught each year in “bycatch” they insisted recently. Global tuna fisheries will go extinct, they declare, if current fishing methods continue. Some formula, known only to them, enables Greenpeace to assemble a ranking of seafood retailers and their sourcing methods. Do things our way, Greenpeace demands, because the numbers we are parading are unassailable.

“Trust us,” Greenpeace is effectively saying to the press and public, and never mind that our sweeping assertions aren’t backed up by any measurable data or peer review. But just take a look at a press release that the group put out a few days ago, one that’s actually based on hard data, to see how far they are willing to go to deceive people with statistics.

“Greenpeace’s Video Game Shark vs. Mermaid Death Squad reaches millions,” the release, which was distributed nationally, announces. If you haven’t heard about their game, don’t feel bad — few did. It was a simplistic knock-off of the Pac-Man game that cast sea creatures as the good guys and tuna companies as the bad guys.

The game “was shared with two million viewers,” Greenpeace declared in the lead of the release. But this is almost certainly an outright falsehood. Greenpeace promoted the game mostly on Twitter but, as the chart right below from the Twitter analytics service Topsy shows, very few people cared to talk about it. As you can see, in the month following the game’s release, the game’s name was mentioned less than 30 times, while the Huffington Post article link wasn’t shared at all. So, two million viewers? Not even close.

CHART: In month after release, minimal Twitter chatter of Greenpeace game and coverage 

Greenpeace appears to be adding up the followers from the few individuals that did tweet about the game, along with the circulation of the few blogs that mentioned it, and then pretending that is the actual, total number of people that “viewed, played, and shared” the game. But as any advertising or social media professional would well understand, the number of potential people exposed to a particular item — which is called “impressions” — is a far different thing from the number of people that actually engage with the item, say by reading it or clicking on it. The average click-through rate in online advertising is about two percent at best and the rate at which people re-tweet an item is less than one-tenth of one percent.  Greenpeace is actually assuming an even further step — that people saw the item, clicked through, and then actually took time to play their game.

But don’t take our word for it! There’s an easy way for Greenpeace to show whether they are telling the truth in their press release. They can make public the raw data from the webpage where the game resides.

It’s doubtful that Greenpeace will have the integrity to come clean. But here’s a more important question for the rest of us — members of the seafood industry, retailers, journalists, and consumers. If Greenpeace can’t even be trusted to tell the truth about something as straightforward and measurable as their website traffic, then why would anyone believe what they have to say about the science and data around sustainability?

For years, Greenpeace activists have relied on a complicit press to parrot their half-baked sustainability rhetoric and cover their harebrained publicity stunts targeting tuna brands all over the globe and the retail customers who carry them.

But after bombarding retailers and the larger public with too many empty gimmicks — meaningless petitions, disturbing videos, nitwitted protests — and unsupported accounts of environmental “carnage” and “destruction,” Greenpeace has created a major problem for itself. Reporters, no longer willing to accept Greenpeace’s claims at face value, are starting to question the eco-activists’ motives, data and failure to contribute meaningful solutions.

Seafood News’ Editor and Publisher John Sackton is just the latest to criticize Greenpeace for promoting gross distortions about seafood sustainability. He writes:

“The statements from Greenpeace … show just how divorced from scientific reality they are. The people they are reaching are being deliberately misinformed. … More reputable sources, including the FAO and the scientific assessments of the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation, show that tuna is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring, except within the big-eye complex, where too many juvenile fish are being caught.”

But that’s not the only reason why Mr. Sackton disapproves of Greenpeace:

“Greenpeace is silent on the steps industry is taking to address the problem – such as eliminating nets from FADs which reduces shark bycatch by 90%. If they admitted things can change, their audience would lose interest. In the same way, few conservation groups can acknowledge the tremendous success that U.S. fisheries management has had, because to do so diminishes their role as outside critics.”

Mr. Sackton also notes that Greenpeace’s annual retailer rankings report is pointless:

“The report evaluates retailers mostly on how they interact with Greenpeace, including removing fish Greenpeace asks them not to sell.”

In short, Mr. Sackton has dug a little deeper and sees the true Greenpeace: fringe, unserious and desperate. It’s just a matter of time before other reporters hold Greenpeace accountable for using them to spread sustainability tall tales.

Sailing the Indian Ocean equipped with Google Earth, binoculars, helicopters and a penchant for falsified data, Greenpeace activists aboard their personal cruise ship are desperately searching for a crisis. They’re not trying to “help end overfishing and create sustainable fisheries” as they claim, but rather pass off exaggerated and false information as the truth to get more donations.

Greenpeace campaigner Aaron Gray-Block writes that “all tuna species in the Indian Ocean region are showing signs of decline” and that “destructive fishing techniques such as purse seines with Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs)” are wreaking havoc.

But the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), a science-based organization that partners with the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), conservationists and regional fisheries management organization (RFMOs), shows otherwise. According to ISSF’s data-driven analysis, there is no overfishing crisis. Scientists have found that Indian Ocean “stocks of bigeye, yellowfin and skipjack are not overfished and are not experiencing overfishing, and therefore no immediate management measures are needed for these stocks.” In addition, “bycatch rates for FAD fishing” in the Indian Ocean are “relatively low.”

Still, albacore stocks in the Indian Ocean are being overfished, and small amounts of bycatch are being caught. That’s where ISSF’s scientific research, advanced monitoring technology, fruitful collaboration with fisherman and innovative methods come in. Consider that ISSF scientists are tagging different fish species to collect detailed data, or that they’re studying ways to limit bycatch using an underwater census. ISSF has also proposed strong recommendations for the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), such as “reducing catches by at least 20% from the current level” and “adopt[ing] comprehensive catch retention measures for all purse seine-caught tuna.”

ISSF has proven that Greenpeace’s “solutions” come with very serious consequences. If Indian Ocean fisheries switch from purse seining to pole-and-line — Greenpeace’s be-all and end-all fishing method — it “would actually result in a six fold increase in catch of non-target species and double the fuel used in the fishery. It also costs more to catch a ton of tuna by pole-line than by purse seine.” Of course, Greenpeace failed to consider these costs because they do not conduct economic impact studies.

Obvious to everyone but Greenpeace campaigners, canvassing tuna fisheries requires more than random yacht patrolling, helicopter flybys and haphazard “analysis.” And since Greenpeace has long-since established that it prefers hosting dance parties, protesting in costumes and programming rigged video games, it’s best it stops making exaggerated claims and leaves the high seas altogether. The real experts are working.

As its annual retailer harassment campaign begins again perhaps it’s time Greenpeace answer a few questions rather than ask them  

Reporters tempted to turn a quick story out of an impending Greenpeace press release about American retailers’ seafood sustainability practices are challenged to actually report, rather than regurgitate, by asking Greenpeace a few questions. The unscientific survey and report has become the embodiment of media groundhog day and white noise for those involved in real sustainability efforts.

NFI is urging reporters that if a release about this does make it to your desk, consider asking Greenpeace a few questions before putting it in the circular file:

1. One of Greenpeace’s reports urged Americans to “eat less fish. Reducing seafood consumption now can help lessen the pressure on our oceans.” Yet researchers at Harvard University found that low seafood consumption is the second-biggest dietary contributor to preventable deaths in the U.S., taking 84,000 lives each year. Does Greenpeace know that it’s jeopardizing the health of Americans? Does it care?
2. Greenpeace refuses to reveal the methodology used in its grocers survey. Yet academic and research organizations routinely open their methodologies to scrutiny. What are Greenpeace activists hiding?
3. Greenpeace has called on retailers to only stock canned tuna caught with poles and lines. Yet only 2 percent of canned tuna sold is currently harvested this way. How would Greenpeace ensure there is enough affordable tuna to meet consumer demand?
4. What kind of environmental impact studies has Greenpeace done on its recommended sourcing methods? What kind of economic impact studies has Greenpeace done on how it would raise the cost of, for instance, canned tuna for customers?
5. Are Greenpeace’s efforts to frighten the public by falsely distorting the true health of tuna stocks in any way related to fundraising?
6. Sources have put Greenpeace’s budget at $700,000 a day. How much of that goes for peer-reviewed research? How much is spent on publicity?
7. Greenpeace spent an incredible $32 million of donor money on the Rainbow Warrior III, a party boat used to make fundraising videos. Wouldn’t those millions have been better used for scientific research and serious sustainability efforts?
8. The largest U.S. canned tuna brands are working with WWF, the world’s leading conservation group, and marine scientists through the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation to ensure the continued health of tuna for generations to come. Why has Greenpeace repeatedly declined an open invitation to participate in these collaborative efforts?
9. Retailers and the seafood community routinely work with seafood-certification programs like the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and participate in fishery improvement projects to provide consumers with sustainably caught fish. Why does Greenpeace not recognize the work of these reputable certification programs but then take credit for their success?
10. Rather than take active part in discussions with governmental leaders, industry representatives and conservation groups, Greenpeace representatives instead demonstrate outside these meetings, often dressed up as cartoonish sea creatures. Does Greenpeace expect that experts in sustainability or the public itself should take seriously any points raised by activists dancing in plushy costumes?

Before you fill out Greenpeace’s seafood sustainability survey, it’s important to remember what this activist group is really all about.

While you’re working hard to buy seafood certified by third-party auditors, participate in fishery improvement projects and incorporate best practices into your policies, Greenpeace activists are dressing up in silly costumes to garner publicity and more donations.

Of course, their commitment to organizing meaningless stunts and harassing tuna companies leaves them no time to master the science behind sustainability and collaborate with true conservationists.

But Greenpeace campaigners don’t care. They’d rather make a spectacle than work behind the scenes with serious-minded organizations and companies.

Watch this short video to see more on what Greenpeace is really up to while you’re doing the hard work:

Last week, we introduced you to Greenpeace co-founder, Dr. Patrick Moore, who candidly explained why Greenpeace cannot afford to participate in science-based dialogue and activities to ensure the health of tuna stocks.

In this 60-second clip, Dr. Moore reveals how the Greenpeace fundraising model works: propaganda, misinformation, and fear.