Dear Friends,

If you are considering attending tomorrow’s climate march, I’d like to respectfully ask you not to go.

If the march organizers get their way, they are going to destroy any chance of dealing with climate change. That’s because they are aggressively working to kill America’s nuclear power plants, which are our largest source of clean energy.

Last year, Environmental Progress and our allies played a critical role in saving nuclear plants in Illinois and New York. We did so by demanding that so-called environmental groups stop killing our largest source of clean energy.

But anti-nuclear “environmental” groups — Sierra Club, 350.org, and NRDC — are back at it again.

There can be no doubt about their intentions. “Anti-Nuclear” is right there on the march route — for the second year in a row.

And they are doing this at a moment when nuclear is grave peril. The US could lose half of its nuclear plants within a decade.

As such, the march organizers are increasing the threat of climate change, and hurting the people they claim to want to protect.

The total combined budget of the march organizers is well over $250 million per year. They are spending it in an effort to kill off the only technology that can lift all people out of poverty without destroying the natural environment.

It’s the ultimate act of privilege.

And the march is just the tip of the iceberg:

In 2011, Bill McKibben of march sponsor 350.org advocated closing Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. He got his way. It was replaced with fossil fuels and carbon emissions rose.

Rhea Suh of NRDC advocates replacing Diablo Canyon and Indian Point, both of which would be replaced by fossil fuels.

Mike Brune of Sierra Club claimed he opposed replacing nuclear with natural gas but in fact supports closing both Diablo Canyon and Indian Point.

March organizers are — bluntly — lying when they claim that Indian Point and Diablo Canyon can be replaced with solar and wind. They know perfectly well that those two sources of energy are too unreliable to replace baseload, 24-7 electricity provided by nuclear.

And all the groups support subsidizing solar and wind but not nuclear, which is why the former have boomed and the latter has suffered during a time of cheap natural gas.

It gets worse.

Nuclear plants generate a lot of power, and so there’s a lot of money to be made by the energy companies that replace them.

Natural gas interests hired New York Governor Cuomo’s aide, who is now under federal criminal prosecution for efforts to kill Indian Point. And California Governor Jerry Brown has manipulated state environmental laws in many, many, many ways for many decades to benefit personally and politically since the 1970s.

Should it surprise us, then, that climate march leaders have troubling connections to energy interests? NRDC has tens of millions invested in natural gas and renewable energy companies, while Sierra Club secretly took $26 million from natural gas and millions more from solar energy companies.

Real people’s lives are at stake. In Ohio, where Sierra Club and other anti-nuclear groups chose coal over nuclear in the 1970s, nuclear plants pay over ten times more in taxes per unit of energy than oil and gas producers, and are excluded from the state's renewable portfolio standard. As a result, two plants are at imminent risk of being replaced by coal and natural gas. And 1,400 good, high-tech jobs in a still-economically depressed state could be lost.

There’s much to be done to save the climate. A first good step would be to avoid tomorrow’s march.

Michael

Please don't climate march.