Outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel set a big green footprint yesterday, with her keynote speech delivered to the German branch of Greenpeace, celebrating its 50th birthday in Rostock yesterday. The organization has been since its creation “persistent, polemical, committed and convincing;” it has “exposed the vulnerability of the eco-systems,” Merkel said, recalling Greenpeace’s actions against the oil-drilling platform “Brent Spar” in 1995, when she was German Environment Minister. Merkel stressed that Greenpeace not only occupied that platform but also set “environmental activism standards” with its call for a national boycott of Shell gasoline stations, “which allowed every citizen to take part without suffering from too many restrictions.”