Here we will be presenting some elements of those criticisms and showing how they have been tailored into a classic 'strawman attack.'. The attack has been and remains a concerted effort to influence world media, governments, some few scientists, and a fearful public largely organized and orchestrated by a small cadre of cynical anti-science dogmatists.

There is a brief history to this work beginning with John Martin's unraveling of the Gordian Knot that is the complex ecology of ocean plants and the micro-nutrients that comre from earth they depend upon. His invention of the means by which accurate measurement of iron in seawater could be made revolutionized our understanding of ocean plant ecology. With that revolution sides were chosen and a war of words begun.

Join the battle for the planet. 

In 2007 one of the most radical of all environmental splinter groups, which carries on business in Canada under the name ETC, targeted the work of Planktos.  They produced an utterly misleading briefing document that they circulated far and wide and dedicated their not unsubstantial resources to promote. 

It was a crude but effective spin doctoring of science, which some in the environmental community seemed all too willing to be spoon fed, rendering a complex ecological scientific issue into a simple "Them versus Us" manifesto.  In its snare were caught all manner of people both lay and professional with concerns regarding the environment. This included high officials at the US Environmental Protection Agency who chose to use the ETC manifesto as the basis for their opposition to this research on new technology in the climate change arena, an arena the EPA was determined to dominate and disallow in the USA. We discovered ETC and the EPA's strange bedfellow relationship only upon being telephoned by the Ottawa Newspaper on the day of a London Dumping Convention Science meeting in Spain. The reporter was calling to confirm details in the exclusive story provided to it by ETC who somehow was in possession of the US EPA documents before they were to be tabled at the meeting in Spain that very same day. 

Here is the ETC manifesto and our short tutorial on ecological crisis and cynical disinformation.

Planktos is dedicated to restoring critical marine and terrestrial ecosystems, which are in steep decline but still being dangerously neglected by policymakers and the public as a whole. While almost everyone is concerned about the state of decline of the world’s rainforests few are aware that ocean plant life, the phytoplankton, which once flourished in the 72% of this planet earth that is actually ocean. The phytoplankton are declining at the same deadly rate of about 1% per year that the rainforest suffers. In other words over each 3-4 year time frame more ocean plants are being lost than are contained in all of the rainforests. In our trees and seas ecorestoration work we use state of the art ecological applied science learned over a lifetime of practice, natural materials, natural processes and knowledge-intensive techniques to regenerate lost forests and ocean plant life upon which the health of the biosphere depends. We do this in an international environment rigorously controlled, regulated, and ultimately transparent process that is absolutely required by the UN controlled Kyoto Protocol climate marketplace.

Besides restoring crucial habitat, biodiversity, water quality, food chains and oxygen, this work also removes vast amounts of surplus CO2 from the atmosphere thus helping to significantly reduce the greenhouse effect and slow global warming. Thanks to the new climate markets created by the Kyoto Protocol and other emerging climate legislation, the latter effect can now be monetized and traded as so-called "carbon credits," or CO2 offsets, to finance this enterprise and make injured ecosystem rehabilitation a viable self-sustaining activity for the first time in history.  Despite the vital climatic and ecological benefits of this work, it has attracted a small band of noisy critics who oppose offsets on ideological grounds and maintain that the only permissible answer to climate ills is immediate worldwide withdrawal from the use of fossil fuels.

Known as source reduction fundamentalists, these zealous activists often seem more concerned with causing maximum pain to fossil fuel producers and users than holistically solving the global warming problem or saving endangered life on our small blue planet. Like their ultraconservative religious counterparts who insist the only acceptable answer to teen pregnancy or the population explosion is abstinence pure and simple (because technologies like birth control may prolong abhorred acts), source reduction fundamentalists demand that only their preferred solution be allowed no matter the practical impossibility or consequent suffering involved.

While Planktos also supports energy conservation and source reductions, we have studied the speed and scale of the CO2 crisis and realize that this is already an all-hands-on-deck emergency and every possible benign technology must also be deployed if we and our life-sustaining ecosystems are going to survive. The harsh truth is that total global cold turkey withdrawal from fossil fuel heating, transport and power generation tomorrow would still leave the current CO2 surplus in the atmosphere that is thawing permafrost, melting glaciers & polar ice, starving and acidifying the oceans right here and now for decades to come.  Only carbon fixation and sequestration can address that lethal fraction of the problem, and if done biologically it can also help revive our endangered seas and forests and the countless life forms they support.

We therefore do not waste much time responding to these critics because they seem either willfully ignorant of the scale of the problems we face or too ideologically blinded to care. We would like to make an exception to this rule, however, for the following ETC Group attack partly because it is so unexpectedly blatantly dishonest and partly because it is so cleverly done.

Deconstructing this single press release can teach one volumes about the crafts of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and spin, which is an important education in its own right now given the era in which we live.

Before getting to specifics, however, we might generically point out that the main tools of spin are artfully deceptive framing and the cunning use of loaded words. Karl Rove's legendary wordsmith Frank Lutz candidly admits to promoting tax-funded free-fire woodland liquidation by calling it a "Healthy Forests Initiative," as well as naming air pollution control rollbacks a "Clear Skies Initiative." Conversely, he turned people against elite estate taxation by relabeling it the "Death Tax" and is undermining pro-choice laws with zingers like "Partial Birth Abortion." The recent "tell all book" by former White House press secretary Scott McClellen confirms the potency of this propensity to spin and the effect of the lack of truthfulness.

Such twisted semantic antics are not lost on the ETC Group, which repeatedly reframes our ecorestoration of plummeting iron-starved plankton populations with deft deceptive terms designed to provoke fear and loathing like "geo-engineering," "pollute," "foul," "dump," and "engineered nanoparticle release." Spice these toxic misrepresentations with fallacious news reports along with outright lies, and you have a rather nifty new fear-mongering campaign that should keep ETC’s traditional anti-tech audience anxiously confused and contributing for another year or two.

In any event, we present the ETC press release below and after a relatively detailed riff on their extraordinary title, we simply point out the most egregious distortions in the subsequent text. We conclude with a number of important scientific references and links that address many of the sincere non-ideological questions and misunderstandings surrounding this field. We sincerely hope that readers take some time to study this material and if necessary skip over the whole frivolous press release to do so. Phytoplankton restoration work is now so critical to the climate, ocean health and our common future that an informed public may be our last hope against ideologues, inaction and catastrophe.   read more specifics in this linked pdf ...