The European Union just took a major step toward accepting and promoting nuclear energy as a form of “green energy.” Naturally, climate change activists celebrated the move to normalize a form of energy production that produces zero carbon emissions.
Just kidding. Many on the green Left actually criticized the EU’s move.
“No amount of lobbyism and greenwashing will ever make [nuclear] ‘green,’” activist Greta Thunberg tweeted in advance of the decision. “We desperately need real renewable energy, not false solutions.”
Thunberg is not the only supposed climate activist who has shunned nuclear power. Here in the United States, far-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) took major flack because her so-called “Green New Deal” did not mention the word “nuclear.” Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) actually campaigned for president in 2020 on the stance that we should not build new nuclear plants and should “phase out” nuclear energy.
So Thunberg’s viral stance is just the latest in a long history of the green Left opposing nuclear power. But this blind spot is utterly unsupported by the actual evidence and reveals that these activists’ true priority is not protecting the climate from carbon emissions. If that was really their priority, they’d be pushing nuclear power like crazy.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, nuclear energy is a “zero emissions clean energy source” that also “keeps the air clean by removing thousands of tons of harmful air pollutants each year that contribute to acid rain, smog, lung cancer and cardiovascular disease.”
Indeed, as of 2017, nuclear energy produced 57% of America’s clean energy, per DOE.
Of course, left-wing activists cite the waste produced by nuclear power generation as what makes it supposed not really “green.” But this isn’t a legitimate argument. As the DOE explains, “All of the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear energy industry over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.”
Surely, we can manage to store that amount of waste safely, and it’s undoubtedly worth the trade-offs in terms of the enormous reduction in other pollutants. Indeed, DOE says that nuclear energy in the U.S. since 1995 has had the carbon dioxide emissions prevention equivalent of taking 3 billion cars off the road!
So why do so many left-wing activists still oppose nuclear energy and support the status quo, under which many countries’ governments make nuclear energy development incredibly difficult?
Some are undoubtedly well-intentioned and just misinformed about the facts regarding nuclear. Others may remain understandably but unduly scared by the word “nuclear” and one-off tragedies such as the Fukushima, Japan, meltdown, which happened using long-outdated nuclear technology.
But the truth is that many left-wing activists, such as Ocasio-Cortez, oppose nuclear energy because their real climate agenda is a backdoor for radical socialist economic overhaul and the destruction of capitalism. You don’t have to take my word for it. Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff openly said that the “Green New Deal” actually “wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” adding, “We really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
So, the real antipathy against nuclear stems from the fact that nuclear energy is an efficient, zero-emissions, safe form of energy production that can address climate change through deregulation rather than a sweeping socialist overhaul of the economy.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a co-founder of Based-Politics.com, a co-host of the BasedPolitics podcast, and a Washington Examiner contributor.
