The Biggest Fossil Fuel Lie: How Anti-Nuclear Misinformation Doomed the Climate
- Eric Anders
- May 12
- 17 min read
How Legacy Environmentalists Helped Fossil Fuels Survive the 1970s—and How the Renewables-Only Cult Helps Them Thrive Even Today
Introduction: Two Lies, One Crime
The climate crisis is not merely a threat looming in the distant future—it’s already devastating lives and economies worldwide. According to a comprehensive analysis by Deloitte, climate change could cost the global economy up to $178 trillion cumulatively by 2070, averaging an astonishing $38 trillion annually by the end of this century if emissions remain unchecked. To grasp the magnitude of this figure, consider that $38 trillion per year far exceeds the combined GDP of the United States and China—the world's two largest economies—which together totaled approximately $32 trillion in 2023.
Yet the damage caused by fossil fuels is not limited to economic devastation alone. Fossil fuel combustion exacts a staggering toll on human health, causing approximately 8 million premature deaths each year—nearly one in five deaths worldwide—according to research from Harvard University's School of Public Health. These deaths primarily result from exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and related respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses.
Fossil fuels are also the primary driver of climate change itself, which independently contributes to hundreds of thousands of additional deaths annually due to intensified heatwaves, severe weather events, food insecurity, and vector-borne diseases. Current estimates attribute around 400,000 annual deaths directly to climate change, and the World Health Organization projects that this number could rise significantly—by approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050—as climate-related impacts worsen, exacerbating malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress. Taken together, these sobering figures underline a reality often overlooked: our continued reliance on fossil fuels is profoundly and urgently harmful to human life.
Against this backdrop of economic devastation and a staggering annual loss of human life on a scale comparable to humanity’s worst historical tragedies, accountability has become not only necessary but morally imperative. In California v. Big Oil, one of the most symbolically significant climate lawsuits in U.S. history, the State of California alleges what many now accept as common knowledge: fossil fuel companies knew about climate change as early as the 1970s, yet instead of warning the public or changing course, they chose deception.
They funded climate change denial—specifically, denial that climate change was human-caused—distorted scientific evidence, concealed their own internal findings confirming the reality of global warming, and intentionally obstructed meaningful climate policy for decades. This misinformation campaign—the best-known and most overt "Big Lie"—strategically targeted the political right by exploiting libertarian mistrust of government intervention, scientific consensus, and collective responsibility.
They funded climate change denial—specifically, denial that climate change was human-caused—distorted scientific evidence, concealed their own internal findings confirming the reality of global warming, and intentionally obstructed meaningful climate policy for decades. Their success in embedding fossil fuels deep into the economy rendered the industry effectively "too big to fail," ensuring continued governmental support even from administrations publicly committed to decarbonization. Both the Obama and Biden administrations liberally granted leasing and drilling rights to Big Oil, despite their stated commitments to climate action and adherence to the Paris Climate Accord. Under President Biden, U.S. fossil fuel extraction surged to record levels, enabling the country to become the world's largest producer and exporter of oil and natural gas—even as the administration publicly championed climate leadership and renewable energy.

But there is another Big Lie—arguably just as destructive, even more effective in shaping policy during the critical years following the 1970s oil embargo, far longer-lasting, and yet still largely unrecognized and unacknowledged today.
While the first and more widely recognized campaign explicitly denied human-caused climate change and strategically targeted the political right, a second, subtler—and initially far more effective—campaign quietly targeted the political center and left. Rather than outright denial, this campaign leveraged the moral authority, credibility, and trust of environmentalism itself. By promoting exaggerated fears, misinformation, and stigma around nuclear power—the only scalable, zero-carbon energy source capable of rapidly displacing fossil fuels—it convinced precisely those communities most deeply dedicated to climate action to reject nuclear energy.
Its ultimate effect was clear: fossil fuel interests deliberately funded and amplified anti-nuclear misinformation to safeguard their market dominance. Notably, Robert O. Anderson, then CEO of Atlantic Richfield (ARCO), provided a $200,000 grant to environmentalist David Brower to establish Friends of the Earth (FOE). Adjusted for inflation, this amount is equivalent to approximately $1.65 million in 2025. While many environmentalists sincerely believed they were advocating for the planet, some influential organizations, including Friends of the Earth, were shaped by fossil fuel interests from their inception—raising troubling questions about the complicity of legacy environmental groups in fossil fuel misinformation (discussed further below).
This funding enabled FOE to become a leading voice against nuclear energy, promoting narratives that aligned with the fossil fuel industry's objectives. Thus, while most environmental advocates were unwitting participants, groups like FOE operated with direct backing from fossil fuel stakeholders, systematically undermining nuclear power—the only scalable, zero-carbon energy source capable of rapidly displacing fossil fuels. (See Indeed+5Atomic Insights+5Atomic Insights+5.)
In the wake of the 1973 oil embargo, France notably resisted this misinformation campaign, decisively committing to nuclear energy and rapidly building an extensive nuclear fleet. Today, nuclear power provides roughly 70% of France’s electricity, dramatically reducing its reliance on fossil fuels and significantly cutting carbon emissions. France's nuclear program has maintained an impeccable safety record and established a highly effective waste-management system, widely recognized as one of the best-run nuclear operations in the world. Elsewhere, however, anti-nuclear propaganda largely prevailed, fostering widespread fear and skepticism toward nuclear technology. As a result, nuclear energy was effectively excluded from serious policy discussions, ensuring continued fossil fuel dominance in most other countries.
The core messages of this lesser-known Big Oil misinformation campaign portrayed nuclear power as inherently dangerous, excessively costly, too slow to build, unnecessary for achieving climate goals, burdened by unsolvable waste management problems, and fundamentally unacceptable. Yet these claims were never grounded in rigorous scientific analysis or factual evidence; instead, they were carefully crafted talking points, often directly or indirectly funded and amplified by fossil fuel interests. These narratives were strategically laundered through legacy environmental organizations, activist networks, and sympathetic media platforms.
Contrary to these deceptive claims, France’s experience demonstrates nuclear energy's substantial long-term economic benefits. As energy economist Jacques Percebois has shown, France’s significant upfront investments in nuclear power plants—often portrayed as prohibitively expensive by fossil fuel advocates—have yielded considerable savings over decades. By securing stable electricity prices far below the European average, nuclear power has provided France sustained economic advantages. Unlike fossil fuels, whose true infrastructure costs and environmental externalities are routinely concealed or ignored, France’s nuclear investment transparently paid for itself many times over, delivering affordable, reliable, and clean electricity while preventing billions of metric tons of carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere.
The Anatomy of Fear: How Anti-Nuclear Propaganda Became Orthodoxy
Unlike overt science denial, the subtler anti-nuclear misinformation campaign operated through emotional and psychological manipulation rather than empirical evidence. It successfully implanted visceral fears and stigmatized nuclear energy as unnatural, inherently suspect, and ideologically incompatible with environmental values. Rather than engaging the public through rational dialogue and factual debate, fossil-fuel-backed interests strategically manufactured fears, embedding anxiety and distrust into the collective psyche.
As I previously explored in my essay "Phantom Fallout," these carefully constructed anxieties gradually embedded themselves deep within our cultural unconscious. Over generations, anti-nuclear sentiment became detached entirely from historical facts and scientific realities. Emotional phobia evolved into cultural orthodoxy, making anti-nuclear positions feel intuitively right—even among highly educated and well-intentioned environmentalists who otherwise prided themselves on their scientific literacy.
Today, many educated liberals readily recognize Exxon-style climate denial as deceptive, sensing its manipulative character and understanding its destructive legacy. However, we have yet to fully grasp or acknowledge that the anti-nuclear campaign was equally deceptive, ideologically driven, carefully orchestrated, and equally devastating in its long-term consequences. Both misinformation campaigns—climate denial on the right, and anti-nuclear fearmongering on the left—were rooted in fossil-fuel interests and relied on systematic deception.
The catastrophic consequences of this subtler misinformation campaign—the "Second Big Lie"—are evident globally today.
In Germany, decades of anti-nuclear propaganda have culminated in the closure of the nation's last remaining nuclear power plants. Far from advancing meaningful climate action, Germany's abandonment of nuclear energy directly resulted in a dramatic resurgence of coal-fired power, producing tens of millions of additional tons of carbon emissions each year. Even more troubling, Germany's shift away from nuclear energy forced an increased dependence on Russian natural gas, inadvertently funneling billions of euros into Vladimir Putin’s war chest and thereby indirectly financing the regime's ongoing atrocities and war crimes in Ukraine. German families now face soaring energy prices, the climate suffers from unnecessary emissions, and democratic values have been compromised—all consequences of an illusory anti-nuclear purity crafted through decades of misinformation.
In California, the effects have been equally damaging. The premature closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in 2013, driven by misinformation and exaggerated safety fears, significantly increased fossil fuel dependency. Emissions surged, air quality deteriorated, and ambitious climate targets grew increasingly unattainable. Diablo Canyon, California’s last remaining nuclear plant—which reliably supplies nearly 10% of the state’s clean electricity—narrowly escaped the same fate. It was saved only at the last possible moment by a coalition of scientists, environmentalists, and even former anti-nuclear activists who recognized, perhaps too late, the enormous harm done by decades of entrenched anti-nuclear dogma. This narrow rescue required extraordinary political efforts to reverse decades of fossil-backed fearmongering.
These are not mere policy missteps or isolated errors. They are direct outcomes of a deliberate, long-term misinformation campaign, strategically funded and carefully repeated until nuclear energy became culturally and politically stigmatized. Fossil fuel interests, aided by legacy environmental groups acting as ideological proxies, succeeded in turning humanity's most scalable and reliable zero-carbon technology into an untouchable pariah.
This is precisely how disinformation kills—not through direct scientific denial alone, but by poisoning the public sphere, creating a cultural climate in which rational, evidence-based decision-making becomes politically impossible. Even well-meaning environmentalists unwittingly became complicit, perpetuating ecological harm through misinformation disguised as moral urgency.
We must now face the true cost of the Second Big Lie and hold accountable both the architects who funded and designed this misinformation and the legacy environmental leaders and groups who became its accomplices. Their actions were not simply misguided—they constitute crimes against the climate and humanity itself.
In the following sections, I will demonstrate how this war on nuclear power clearly meets the criteria of criminal environmental misconduct established by David Uhlmann, one of America's foremost environmental law scholars. It’s time to name this lie, expose its origins, and ensure accountability—not only legally, but also historically and morally.
The reckoning for this betrayal is long overdue. It starts here.
My Father’s Disillusionment
My father, William Anders, stood at the center of this historical betrayal. From 1957 to 1980, he devoted much of his professional life to the advancement of nuclear energy—as a radiation physicist, nuclear safety engineer, the first Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) from 1975 to 1976, and subsequently as head of General Electric's Nuclear Energy Division from 1977 to 1980. These leadership roles placed him at the forefront of America's civilian nuclear sector during its most critical and formative years. His selection as an Apollo astronaut in the late 1960s was influenced in part by his deep expertise in radiation safety—an essential consideration during early human space exploration, especially for the pioneering Apollo missions.

At the NRC, my father played a pivotal role in creating and implementing one of the world's most rigorous civilian nuclear safety regulatory frameworks. His work was underpinned by a firm belief that nuclear energy was not only manageable and safe but absolutely essential for realizing a cleaner, more sustainable energy future free of fossil-fuel dependence. Yet despite the strength of the scientific evidence and the practical robustness of the safety standards he helped to establish, his efforts were continually impeded by powerful forces beyond his control. Politically motivated regulatory interference, sensationalized media coverage, and ideological hostility—strategically amplified by fossil-fuel-funded misinformation campaigns and legacy environmental groups—began increasingly to distort public perceptions, fueling widespread fears disconnected from technical realities.
Even prior to the Three Mile Island incident in 1979, the nuclear industry had already begun experiencing heightened regulatory scrutiny and expanding procedural requirements. According to a 1979 Congressional Budget Office report, between the early and late 1970s, the average timeline required to plan, license, and construct a commercial nuclear power plant nearly doubled, rising from about 6–7 years to approximately 10–11 years. These delays were primarily driven by increasingly complex, redundant, and overlapping regulatory demands that, despite being well-intentioned, rarely translated into tangible safety improvements. Instead, these unnecessary complexities significantly inflated initial construction costs, delayed project completion, and ultimately discouraged utility companies from investing in nuclear power, effectively serving the strategic interests of Big Oil and other fossil fuel producers, who benefited immensely from suppressing their only scalable zero-carbon competitor.
The 1979 Three Mile Island incident served as the tipping point. Although this event resulted in no deaths, no injuries, and left behind no measurable long-term environmental damage, it was aggressively branded as a nuclear "disaster" by sensationalist media coverage and opportunistic anti-nuclear advocates. Fossil-funded misinformation campaigns seized on this event to inflame existing public anxieties, while legacy environmental groups—some knowingly complicit, others genuinely misled—further amplified the climate of fear. The press eagerly propagated apocalyptic narratives rather than objectively examining the scientifically demonstrated facts and safety outcomes.

The ensuing damage was profound and irreversible. Permitting timelines escalated from challenging to practically impossible, stretching out into decades-long bureaucratic ordeals. Multiple reactor projects were abandoned mid-construction, resulting in billions of dollars wasted, stranded community investments, and widespread economic loss. Costs spiraled out of control—not due to actual construction issues, materials, or labor, but because of endless litigation, politically driven interference, and continually shifting regulatory requirements driven by manufactured public fears rather than legitimate technical necessity. Consequently, the NRC—an agency my father had helped establish to promote responsible safety oversight and technological innovation—became a regulatory bottleneck. Rather than facilitating progress, it obstructed nearly every nuclear initiative, transforming into a tool inadvertently aligned with fossil fuel interests.
By 1980, profoundly disillusioned with a system he felt had abandoned scientific integrity, rational policymaking, and genuine public benefit, my father left the civilian nuclear energy sector entirely. He transitioned into leadership roles within the defense industry, eventually becoming the CEO of General Dynamics, a major defense contractor whose operations included Electric Boat, the builder of the U.S. Navy's nuclear-powered submarines. In this new capacity, he oversaw nuclear technologies that continued to operate safely, reliably, and effectively—powering submarines, aircraft carriers, and specialized deep-sea vessels without the public anxiety, political interference, or regulatory sabotage that had plagued civilian nuclear power. Although he stepped away from civilian nuclear energy, my father retained an unwavering belief in nuclear power’s inherent safety, economic viability, and crucial role in a sustainable global energy future. His disillusionment never reflected doubts about nuclear technology itself; rather, it was directed squarely toward a broken political and regulatory system that deliberately obstructed the innovation and environmental progress it was originally intended to facilitate.
How Fossil Fuel Giants and Legacy Environmentalists Colluded to Strangle Nuclear Power—And Why It Meets the Standard for Criminal Prosecution
The coordinated campaign against nuclear power did not simply emerge spontaneously out of genuine environmental concerns; it was deliberately orchestrated and systematically executed. Fossil fuel giants, recognizing nuclear power as an existential threat in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, strategically invested in cultivating anti-nuclear sentiment. They understood clearly that a thriving nuclear sector would directly undercut their market dominance by offering clean, scalable, and reliable competition. Rather than directly challenging nuclear’s technical merits, they chose to wage a subtle campaign of emotional and ideological manipulation—a campaign that continues to this day.
To achieve their objectives, fossil fuel interests required credible allies—environmental groups that could serve as trusted messengers. They found willing collaborators, often unknowingly complicit, among legacy environmental organizations that had already earned public trust and moral authority. Groups like Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and even the venerable Sierra Club became instrumental in fossil fuel’s proxy war against nuclear power, whether through deliberate complicity, ideological rigidity, or sheer blindness to fossil-funded influence.
Friends of the Earth, founded in 1969 by oil industry insider Robert O. Anderson, serves as one of the earliest and clearest examples. Anderson, Chairman and CEO of the oil company Atlantic Richfield, had an obvious interest in ensuring oil’s ongoing market dominance. By funding Friends of the Earth, Anderson effectively steered environmental discourse away from fossil fuels toward anti-nuclear advocacy. Under his influence, the organization vigorously opposed nuclear power, spreading fear-based messaging about waste, safety, and radiation dangers—narratives that would benefit oil producers directly by undermining nuclear alternatives.
Greenpeace, too, is no stranger to anti-nuclear misinformation. While publicly celebrated for opposing whaling and other environmental harms, Greenpeace's record on nuclear energy has been marked by troubling dishonesty. The organization's leadership has frequently promoted misleading claims, such as vastly inflating casualties and environmental harm from nuclear incidents. Most infamously, Greenpeace has consistently portrayed the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters as nuclear apocalypses, despite scientific consensus confirming limited fatalities and environmental impacts far smaller than widely reported. Their strategic refusal to acknowledge nuclear energy’s essential role in rapid decarbonization has significantly hindered meaningful climate action.
The Sierra Club, one of the oldest environmental advocacy groups in America, also played a role. In the early 2000s, the Sierra Club accepted substantial donations from fossil fuel–aligned entities, including $26 million from Chesapeake Energy—one of the largest natural gas companies in America at the time. Not coincidentally, the Sierra Club began to adopt a more rigidly anti-nuclear stance while promoting "natural gas as a bridge fuel," a narrative that directly benefitted fossil interests. By accepting and amplifying fossil fuel narratives, the Sierra Club indirectly perpetuated carbon dependence and weakened nuclear power's potential role in climate action.
These legacy environmental groups lent their moral credibility to a campaign whose ultimate beneficiaries were fossil fuel interests, and whose ultimate victims were climate stability and global public health.
The Cult of “100% Renewables”: Fossil Fuels’ Trojan Horse
Today, the anti-nuclear misinformation campaign continues under a newer, subtler guise: the cult of "100% renewables." This alluring narrative insists—against extensive empirical evidence—that solar, wind, and hydropower alone can rapidly replace fossil fuels. Fossil fuel companies have quietly supported this narrative precisely because they understand its technical impossibility: intermittent renewables always require fossil-based backup generation, typically natural gas. The absence of nuclear ensures this reliance remains permanent.
Recent examples illustrate the dangerous consequences of this deliberate deception:
California’s "renewables-only" delusion: In 2013, the closure of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was celebrated by many environmentalists as a "renewable victory." Instead, California rapidly expanded fossil gas capacity to replace lost nuclear output, causing emissions to surge by approximately nine million metric tons of CO₂ annually. Air quality worsened, electricity prices rose, and the state found itself increasingly reliant on imported gas, directly contradicting climate goals.
New York’s Indian Point shutdown (2021): Another victory for legacy anti-nuclear activists, this closure immediately increased fossil gas usage to fill the gap. According to state data, carbon emissions in New York rose significantly in the months following Indian Point’s closure, erasing years of climate progress.
Germany’s catastrophic "Energiewende": After shutting down nuclear reactors due to anti-nuclear advocacy, Germany increased coal and natural gas usage, raising annual emissions substantially. More alarmingly, this policy increased dependency on Russian gas imports, directly financing Putin’s regime and its war crimes in Ukraine—an outcome clearly enabled by anti-nuclear misinformation.
These are not isolated policy mistakes. They represent consistent, predictable results of a misinformation strategy deliberately designed and persistently executed by fossil-fuel-funded interests and their unwitting ideological allies.
Why the Anti-Nuclear Campaign Meets David Uhlmann’s Standard for Criminal Prosecution
David Uhlmann, former Chief of the Environmental Crimes Section at the U.S. Department of Justice, has established clear criteria for criminal prosecution in environmental cases:
Significant environmental harm or public health effects:The anti-nuclear misinformation campaign has directly resulted in billions of tons of avoidable carbon emissions. It has contributed to millions of premature deaths from fossil fuel pollution, worsened climate disasters globally, and prolonged dependency on environmentally destructive fossil fuels.
Deceptive or misleading conduct:Deliberate falsifications about nuclear risks—radiation safety, waste disposal, accident severity—were systematically funded and propagated. Greenpeace’s exaggeration of radiation deaths, Friends of the Earth’s intentional omission of fossil backing, and Sierra Club’s concealment of fossil funding exemplify misleading conduct.
Operating outside the regulatory system:Fossil-funded groups and anti-nuclear activists routinely exploited regulatory procedures, artificially inflating nuclear project costs and timelines through frivolous litigation and obstruction, thus preventing fair regulatory processes.
Repetitive violations:For over half a century, misinformation campaigns have consistently targeted nuclear projects globally. San Onofre, Diablo Canyon, Indian Point, and Germany’s reactors illustrate repetitive, deliberate sabotage of nuclear development.
By every measure Uhlmann establishes, the anti-nuclear misinformation campaign constitutes prosecutable criminal misconduct. It is not merely flawed advocacy—it is deliberate sabotage of global climate stability and public health, perpetuated for fossil profit.
A Reckoning for the Great Climate Betrayal
Today, we face the catastrophic outcomes of decisions shaped by decades of misinformation. Fossil fuels continue thriving precisely because nuclear energy—once humanity’s best hope for rapid, large-scale decarbonization—remains culturally stigmatized and politically crippled.
It’s time for an overdue reckoning—not merely historical or ideological, but legal and moral. It’s time to expose and dismantle the misinformation structures that have condemned us to decades of unnecessary climate harm. And it’s time to hold accountable not only the fossil giants who funded these lies, but also the environmental institutions who legitimized them.
Only by clearly understanding and confronting the second Big Lie—the great climate betrayal—can we correct course. The evidence is clear, the harm undeniable, and the legal grounds strong.
It’s time to act.
⚖️ Uhlmann’s Prosecutorial Criteria: A Legal Lens on the Lie
In his landmark scholarship, Professor David Uhlmann—former Chief of the DOJ’s Environmental Crimes Section—laid out four criteria for when prosecutors should pursue environmental criminal charges:
Significant environmental harm or public health effects
Deceptive or misleading conduct
Operating outside the regulatory system
Repetitive violations
The anti-nuclear disinformation campaign meets all four.
The harm is staggering: billions of tons of carbon, countless climate refugees, megafires, floods, and premature deaths.The deception was calculated: anti-nuclear propaganda masked fossil fuel interests.The regulatory sabotage was strategic: ballooning permitting costs, manipulated licensing rules.The pattern is ongoing: 50 years of repetition, culminating in today’s most insidious version of the campaign—“100% renewables.”
⚠️ The Renewables-Only Fantasy: A Legacy of Misinformation
Today, the disinformation continues under a greener guise.
The “100% renewables” movement insists we can meet all of our energy needs with wind, solar, batteries, and hydro—no nuclear needed, ever. This vision is technically incoherent, politically dangerous, and strategically convenient—for fossil fuel companies.
Why? Because intermittent renewables always leave a gap—a gap that must be filled by natural gas.
Fossil fuel actors know this. That’s why they now support renewables-only policies in Europe, California, and beyond. It’s not because they believe in wind and solar. It’s because they know those sources can’t replace them.
As long as nuclear is off the table, fossils remain essential.
The renewables-only agenda is thus the perfect controlled opposition:
It sounds progressive.
It feels green.
But it functions as a guarantee of fossil fuel dominance.
And yet the NGOs pushing this line—some funded directly or indirectly by fossil-linked philanthropies—refuse to engage honestly with the limits of renewables.
They never talk about:
Energy density, or why you can’t decarbonize steel with rooftop panels.
Land use, or why solar requires up to 100 times more land per terawatt-hour than nuclear.
Materials bottlenecks, or the geopolitical and environmental consequences of scaling batteries and rare earths.
Hydropower’s ecological devastation: mass deforestation, salmon collapse, methane from rotting reservoirs. Hydro is treated as “clean” simply because it doesn’t emit at the point of generation—but its ecological cost is massive.
These aren’t oversights. They are strategic omissions, built into a script designed to keep nuclear power forever in the penalty box.
🤥 Lies Told Loud Enough Become Orthodoxy
The same talking points appear again and again:
“Nuclear is too dangerous.”“Too expensive.”“Too slow.”“What about the waste?”
All lies.
Dangerous? Nuclear is the safest form of large-scale energy by deaths per unit produced.
Expensive? Costs were inflated by regulatory sabotage, not physics.
Too slow? France built 56 reactors in under 20 years. The U.S. Navy runs a nuclear fleet with an impeccable safety record.
Waste? Fully contained, well-managed, and far smaller in volume than fossil waste, which we just dump into the sky.
Yet legacy environmental groups still repeat these slogans—zombie arguments from a fossil-funded past.
🔁 From Legacy Environmentalism to Climate Complicity
Let’s be clear: today’s “climate movement” is infected by the very disinformation it claims to oppose.
A movement that:
Rejects nuclear energy,
Embraces 100% renewables without caveats,
And ignores the ecological cost of hydro, batteries, and endless mining—
—is a movement in ideological captivity. It is not leading the climate fight. It is functioning as a buffer for fossil capital.
Whether it knows it or not, it is prolonging the very system it claims to dismantle.
And that, too, must be accounted for.
⚖️ The Case for Prosecution—Not Just Critique
This isn’t about bad policy. It’s about criminally negligent delay.
The fossil industry and its ideological agents in legacy environmentalism suppressed viable, clean, scalable technology—and they did so knowing that the result would be more emissions, more damage, more death.
By Uhlmann’s standard, that’s a prosecutable environmental crime.
And that is what Earthrise Accord was founded to confront.
🌍 Earthrise Accord: From Misinformation to Justice
We are not here to relitigate technical debates. We are here to litigate the harms, to trace the deceptions, and to bring the truth into courtrooms and climate forums worldwide.
We are building:
The Earthrise Environmental Law Clinic, to file and support climate accountability cases at the ICC, ICJ, and national courts.
The Earthrise Journal of Nuclear Realism and Climate Justice, to publish the evidence, the theory, and the analysis to underpin a global legal and historical reckoning.
The William Anders Earthrise Chair, to train new leaders in climate truth-telling, clean energy policy, and international law.
This is not a policy shop. It is a moral and legal response to the greatest misinformation campaign in human history.
It is a reckoning—for Exxon, for Shell, for the petrostate regimes that funded delay.But also for the “green” actors who helped kill the only tool that could have changed the outcome.
We are Earthrise.
And we will not let the planet burn to protect old lies.
Would you like this adapted into a lead article for your new website or broken into a multi-part blog series?
Sources:
Harvard School of Public Health, "Fossil fuel air pollution responsible for 1 in 5 deaths worldwide"
World Health Organization, "Climate change and health"
American Security Project, "Climate change causing 400,000 deaths per year"
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