How to Beat Goliath

“Pandora,” like Greenpeace’s misinformation campaign, is nothing more than a string of lies.

The filmmaker insisted "Pandora" cost just $500,000 to make — a preposterous claim. The film, which earned over $32 million, more likely cost well over ten million, considering its roster of A-list Korean actors, and frighteningly realistic scenes of explosions, helicopters dumping water on fires, and thousands of extras scurrying into subway stations.

Of course, such an amount is peanuts to an organization like Greenpeace International and natural gas interests who spend tens of millions annually on television advertisements around the world.

Even my most jaded friends are shocked when I tell them that Greenpeace International’s annual budget is nearly $400 million, that EDF’s is $140 million, and that NRDC’s and Sierra Club’s are well over $100 million, and that the organizations have hundreds of millions of dollars in their bank and stock accounts.

Where is their money coming from? Ostensibly from the same “ordinary citizens” Morgan claims are driving South Korea’s “energy breakthrough.”

Out of curiosity, I asked one of the EP Summer Fellows Daphne Wilson to do some cursory googling of these “ordinary citizens” starting with the board members and donors of NRDC, EDF and Sierra Club.

She discovered that somewhere between one-third to one-half of them are employed by, invested in, or somehow directly connected to oil and gas or renewable energy companies.

While this may not be a total surprise — Sierra Club famously took $26 million from natural gas interests for many years and only repudiated it after a few of its members took the story to the media — Wilson also discovered clear conflicts of interests: many board members of NRDC and EDF stand to benefit directly from closing nuclear plants and replacing them with fossil fuels and, perhaps, some solar and wind.

And deception is by no means unique to Morgan and Greenpeace.

Even as they write blog posts claiming to oppose replacing nuclear plants with fossil fuels, the Sierra Club, NRDC and EDF are all supporting the replacement of Indian Point in New York, Diablo Canyon in California, and nuclear plants in Ohio, with natural gas.

Behind the veil of using renewables to harmonize with nature lies something darker, namely the anti-nuclear movement’s long history of Malthusian anti-humanism aimed at preventing “overpopulation” and “overconsumption” by keeping poor countries poor.

And there is the reality that — in the name of protecting the environment — closing nuclear plants in every case, from Germany and Vermont to California and Japan, directly and instantly harms the environment by drastically increasing air pollution and promoting the expansion of mining and development for energy production.

Since I started Environmental Progress a year and a half ago, friends ask me how — with a budget of under $1.5 million — we can possibly succeed against the anti-nuclear Goliath with 500 times the resources.

The question answers itself. Anti-nuclear groups are corrupt, lumbering and flagrantly dishonest — and the truth is the stone in our slingshot.

In two trips to South Korea over the last four months, I have interviewed over two dozen ordinary citizens. Most admitted they knew little about energy, and were worried that their fellow citizens would make big decisions about their country’s future without expert help. All were eager to learn more.

No fancy economic or environmental modeling is required to show that phasing out nuclear will increase electricity costs, unemployment rates, pollution and premature deaths.

Replacing nuclear with natural gas will cost a minimum of $11 billion per year — more, if South Korea attempts a significant deployment of renewables — and a large body of economic scholarship finds that any increase in electricity prices in South Korea will result in slower economic growth.[1][2]

Those kinds of facts matter to young Korean job-seekers, 80 percent of whom admitted they have to skip meals for budgetary reasons.

In the end, what’s needed is atomic humanism — a reaffirmation of nuclear energy’s transcendent moral purpose — and a grassroots, civil society effort to rescue humankind’s most important environmental technology from the anti-humanists.