Some times you just have to call it out as a lie

Yesterday I ended up spending a fair amount of time in the car, running from one meeting to another.  The journeys were relatively short so I did not do what I usually do with NPR, turning off if it is ideological reporting.  

And it was rather a sobering experience.  In five to fifteen minute segments, time and again, I heard think asserted as fact which at best were debatable and at worse were clearly only opinion.  It really has become a joke "news" organization.  

This morning I see Why even environmentalists are supporting nuclear power today by Uri Berliner.  I have spent nearly forty years working domestically and internationally in the energy sector in general and the power production sector in particular.

There is nowhere of which I am aware where mainstream environmental groups are strongly and obviously in support of nuclear power.  All the mainstream environmental groups have been firmly opposed to nuclear power for decades.

It has been one of the terrific ironies in the past five years of ESG that all the environmental groups who have supported government subsidized renewables projects have also vociferously and reflexively opposed nuclear power.  

Even when renewables have been demonstrated to be much more expensive than anticipated, cannot provide the base load needed by grids, and have made power grids far more fragile and vulnerable to massive outages.  

In the past six months, with the disruption of Russian gas supplies owing to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been a crisis in energy planning in western Europe.  US warnings from the past decade have been realized.  Europe is too vulnerable to Russian energy supplies.  Everyone is looking at doing everything they can to scrounge up some reliable base load electrical energy.

Everything except consider keeping, extending, or reactivating shuttered nuclear power plants or coal plants.  Amidst a great gritting of teeth, European authorities are scrambling to find liquified natural gas supplies to replace Russian supplies.  Even with these efforts, everyone is anticipating an expensive energy winter and much lower energy supplies.  People will be going cold and paying a lot for it.

Even in the midst of this crisis, Germany has swung back and forth about their current plan to close nuclear plants.

And in all instances, environmental groups have been pushing for zero carbon and zero nuclear.

Berliner would have us believe that is not the case.  I was fascinated by the headline.  It is so obviously untrue, what is the argument he is actually making?  What terms are being redefined?  What environmental groups are now supporting nuclear energy?

As click-bait, the headline works.  I clicked through.  

Resistance to nuclear power is starting to ebb around the world with support from a surprising group: environmentalists.

This change of heart spans the globe, and is being prompted by climate change, unreliable electrical grids and fears about national security in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

In California, the state's last remaining power plant — Diablo Canyon, situated on the Pacific Coast between San Francisco and Los Angeles — long scheduled to be scrapped, may now remain open. Governor Gavin Newsom, a longtime opponent of the plant, is seeking to extend its lifespan through at least 2029.

It's a remarkable turnaround in a state where anti-nuclear activists and progressive Democratic lawmakers have fought with great success to rid the state of nuclear power.

Last week, Japan's prime minister said the country is restarting idled nuclear plants and considering building new ones. This is a sharp reversal for the country that largely abandoned nuclear after the tsunami-led disaster at the Fukushima plant in 2011.

Germany pulled the plug on nuclear after Fukushima, too. But this summer there's been an intense debate in Germany over whether to restart three plants in response to the country's severe energy crisis prompted by the Russia-Ukraine war.

All true as far it goes but where are the mainstream environmental groups supporting nuclear power?

Backers of nuclear power note that it is a source of emissions-free reliable power. And they believe their case has been strengthened due to the threat of climate change and the need to stabilize unreliable electrical grids.

In California the moment of truth came in 2020 when residents had to endure a series of rolling power outages, said Michael Shellenberger, an environmentalist and author who supports nuclear.

"The state is constantly on the verge of blackouts," Shellenberger said.

Michael Shellenberger you say?  He's the mainstream environmentalist who is supporting nuclear power?  Shellenberger, the free-market supporting libertarian?  That environmentalist?  From Wikipedia.

Michael D. Shellenberger (born June 16, 1971) is an American author and former public relations professional whose writing has focused on the intersection of climate change, the environment, nuclear power, and politics, and more recently on how he believes progressivism is linked to homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness. He is a co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, co-founder of the California Peace Coalition, and the founder of Environmental Progress.

A self-described ecomodernist, Shellenberger believes that economic growth can continue without negative environmental impacts through technological research and development, usually through a combination of nuclear power and urbanization. A controversial figure, Shellenberger disagrees with most environmentalists over the impacts of environmental threats and policies for addressing them. Shellenberger's positions and writings on climate change and environmentalism have received criticism from environmental scientists and academics, who have called his arguments “bad science" and "inaccurate". In contrast, his positions and writings have received praise from writers and journalists in the popular press, including conservative and libertarian news outlets and organizations. In a similar manner, many academics criticized Shellenberger's positions and writings on homelessness, while receiving mixed reception from writers and journalists in the popular press.

I am not dissing Shellenberger.  I think he is right on many issues.  The point is that Berliner is using Shellenberger who does support nuclear power but is an individual widely repudiated and rejected by the environmental community as evidence that the environmental community now supports nuclear power.

That is nonsense verging on outright misrepresentation.  So much for NPR's "Stand with the facts" tag line.  

Berliner even acknowledges that Shellenberger is not representative of the environmental community.

So it is striking that the most vehement arguments to keep Diablo Canyon running haven't come the nuclear industry. Instead, they have been put forward by a most unlikely collection of pro-nuclear advocates.

It seemed quixotic, even hopeless, in 2016, when Shellenberger along with the pioneering climate scientist James Hansen and Stewart Brand, founder of the crunchy Whole Earth Catalog, began advocating to save Diablo Canyon.

"We were basically excluded from polite conversation for even talking about keeping the plant open," recalled Shellenberger. Promoting nuclear as an important tool in fighting climate change would get him dismissed by fellow environmentalists as a conspiracy theorist or, falsely, as a corporate shill, he added.

Berliner has made an argument that US environmentalists are supporting nuclear power.  His only evidence is an environmentalist widely rejected by the environmental advocacy and policy community.  Does Berliner have any other evidence for environmentalist support for nuclear, internationally or domestically?

Well there is the recent environmental group founded by two employees of a nuclear power plant.  

At the same time, Kristin Zaitz and Heather Hoff were forming an advocacy group called Mothers for Nuclear, a local grassroots effort to keep Diablo Canyon operating. To say their views were not widely embraced would be a serious understatement.

"We felt like we were on an island all by ourselves," said Zaitz. "We had people wishing that we would die, wishing we would get cancer...making weird videos about us that made me feel like, am I unsafe, is my family unsafe?"

In many ways Zaitz and Hoff are also the most unlikely of nuclear advocates. They both describe themselves as eco-friendly liberals, moms concerned about preserving wild spaces, recycling and climate change.

At Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, not far from Diablo Canyon, they both studied engineering and both took jobs at the plant – Hoff is a materials scientist and Zaitz is a civil engineer – despite misgivings about nuclear energy.

"I was nervous about nuclear before I started working there," said Hoff. "And it took a lot of years to change my mind...and eventually realize that nuclear really aligned with my environmental and humanitarian goals."

I must admit the accompanying photo of this particular environmental group was charming.  Sunny, cheery, and mostly peaceful.

In his article, Uri Berliner makes the argument that environmental groups globally are now supporting nuclear power.

His evidence is 1) a single capitalist libertarian environmentalist in California who supports nuclear but is roundly condemned by environmentalists, and 2) a couple of moms in California who work at a nuclear power plant.

These are not the environmental advocacy community.  These are at best fringe individuals at the distant margin of the environmental community.

Berliner does not support his argument with evidence and I suspect he cannot support it with evidence.  Greenpeace, Earth Day, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, Rainforest Alliance, Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club, etc. - where do they stand on nuclear power?  Are they advocates for nuclear?  

I know they have long been opposed and my impression is that their position has not changed.  Berliner offers nothing to revise that impression.

What he offers is something so empirically emaciated and rationally irrelevant that his whole article comes across as a lie.