The environmental advocacy group, Greenpeace, is facing harsh criticism over its failure to embrace nuclear energy as a fossil fuel alternative.
A new generation of younger, green activists began a campaign to challenge the NGO’s legal decision to fight the European Commission’s decision to subsidise nuclear energy as a form of green fuel in April.
The world’s most formidable green campaigning group, Greenpeace, has taken a decades-long stance against nuclear energy on the grounds that it constitutes a risk to public safety. It has 15 EU-focused lobbyists active in Brussels which secured 135 high-level meetings with Commission officials last year alone.
Now, with the onset of an energy crisis and supposed climate breakdown, this dogma is being finally questioned. Teenage Swedish activist Ia Aanstoot, along with other European environmentalists, began a social media campaign to get Greenpeace to reverse its anti-nuclear position.
“Dear Greenpeace,” a website called replanet, aims to shift the activist network away from its traditional anti-nuclear stance which Aanstoot and others say is behind the times. They perceive that an anti-nuclear stance directly contributes to a dependency on fossil fuels by not embracing scientifically endorsed nuclear alternatives that are already providing a third of Europe’s energy needs.
“Simply enough, we are trying to protect nuclear power in the EU taxonomy and simultaneously urging Greenpeace to stop this old-fashioned fight against nuclear power” Aanstoot outlined in correspondence with The European Conservative. The campaign targets Greenpeace’s attacks on the EU, which classifies nuclear energy as a form of green energy—a designation Greenpeace dismisses as ‘greenwashing.’
Aanstoot, who hopes to become a registered “interested party” in Greenpeace’s legal case against the EU, praises the pragmatism of pro-nuclear environmentalists. She feels that nuclear is one of the only alternative energy sources that can mitigate the negative effects of climate change while maintaining Western economic living standards.
Currently, 13 out of 27 EU nations use nuclear energy. Germany is not one of them, since it infamously shuttered its nuclear power facilities earlier this year despite a lingering energy crisis caused by sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons.
Led by its green-left coalition government, Germany is increasingly seen as an outlier for its anti-nuclear positioning, which many say is motivated by the prejudices of a generation of older green activists who influence government policy.
Greenpeace campaigner Ariadna Rodrigo responded to calls to update their nuclear policy by pointing to construction issues around recent nuclear power plants in Britain and France. He emphasised that the only way to stop climate change was by cutting carbon emissions directly and focusing energies on solar and wind.
Speaking to The European Conservative, Rodrigo also added that Greenpeace’s European Court of Justice’s legal case against the Commission around the classification of nuclear energy as ‘green’ will be heard over the next few weeks.
Active in 55 countries worldwide, Greenpeace sets its international policy from its Dutch headquarters from where it coordinates a unified response through multiple NGOs. The group has participated in several direct actions against nuclear power throughout its history, with one of its founders, Patrick More, criticising Greenpeace’s continued aversion to nuclear energy.
