The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Greenpeace made a small error in a recent press release — exposing what really goes on behind the scenes of one of the world’s most fringe environmental organizations.

Before President Bush touched down in Pennsylvania Wednesday to promote his nuclear energy policy, the environmental group Greenpeace was mobilizing.

“This volatile and dangerous source of energy” is no answer to the country’s energy needs, shouted a Greenpeace fact sheet decrying the “threat” posed by the Limerick reactors Bush visited.

But a factoid or two later, the Greenpeace authors were stumped while searching for the ideal menacing metaphor.

We present it here exactly as it was written, capital letters and all: “In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world’s worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE].”

I’m a big fan of common sense steps to clean up the environment and protect animals from the growing footprint of man, but Greenpeace isn’t doing that effort any favors. Instead, the organization just alienates regular folks who might otherwise be more sympathetic to pro-green points of view.

HT: Jeff Harrell

Jim: Marshall, I’m very much on the same page, but I’d have to say I don’t see a huge difference between Greenpeace’s goofy gaffe and most of the rhetoric coming out of the “environmental” movement.

Those scare quotes are deliberate. Regular readers know I’m a right-of-center guy, but drop me on the beaches, woods, or marshes of Hilton Head Island and I turn into Nature Boy, rattling off endless facts about the tidal ecosystems to a usually bored-and-scared-of-horseshoe-crabs Mrs. TKS. I don’t want to see those beautiful spaces despoiled, so I ought to be an easy mark for environmental groups.

And yet it seems like any talking head designated to give the “environmentalist” message is utterly unwilling to recognize trade-offs or compromises, and the lawmakers most self-identifying as environmentalists are raging hypocrites (COUGHalgoreCOUGH).

I don’t want to re-hash the whole debate and preach to the converted, but you know what I’m talking about. For starters, the green crowd ought to shut up about the Kyoto Treaty; it was rejected 95-0 back in 1997. It put no limits on China and India.

“Sustainable growth” and “open spaces” initiatives always give off a whiff of, “I’ve built my home, now you can’t build yours,” or, “my desire for a pretty view outranks your need for a place to live.” I’m sure Cam could speak at length at how hunters are among those most concerned with preserving natural habitats of game animals, but hunters are endlessly demonized by the environmental movement.

We can’t have nuclear energy, because Jane Fonda made a scary movie about it in the 1970s.

Way too often, environmentalists’ messages have all the nuance of a Captain Planet episode. For that reason, I suspect a lot of voters/readers/viewers/listeners have tuned them out.