Clive Cookson, the Financial Times' science editor, reviewed five scientific breakthrough areas that he believes the 2020s will bring in a feature called "The shape of things to come." These include: cosmology and space exploration, artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, medical tools and treatments and advancements in nuclear power.

Mr. Cookson, though relegating nuclear to his final item, recognizes that responding to the climate emergency will be the top global challenge we face in the 2020s. He implies but does not come out and say that addressing this crisis will require support for nuclear power through a combination of both political willpower and what he calls economic and industrial action. Otherwise, there's no way to wean the world off of fossil fuels and we know what that means: increasingly rapid destruction of the planet's climate and the ecosystems as we have known them for tens of thousands of years.

While Cookson wistfully yearns for the long-delayed results of what has been 70 years of scientists working to "tame" fusion, he acknowledges that that Holy Grail of energy is not coming in the 2020s. Whereas advances in fission, an industry in the "economic doldrums for decades" will be needed so badly that "green politicians, who have tended to be automatically anti-nuclear" may find that they simply must change their minds, if we are to mount any kind of meaningful defense.

In this, Mr. Cookson, is totally correct: environmental leaders and most green-leaning politicians have refused to acknowledge or appreciate the powerful clean energy source that is nuclear fission. But, as a last resort to survive, they may be forced to reluctantly deploy it. Perhaps the British and French felt that way about being obliged to elicit the United States to come to their aide when the Nazis were proving military superiority and bombing their cities. You can imagine the logic: "Darn, those horrid Americans fought a war against us but, really, they are rather strong and if we don't get their help, we'll be wiped out."

America's Green leaders are having such a moment. Their fighting force in the global war against climate change includes solar power, wind power, conservation, energy efficiency, distributed smart grids and, wait for it, batteries . . . the vast majority of which is deployed in California. Yet they are losing terribly. Global CO2 emissions have only risen, relentlessly increasing the heat forcing effect of our atmosphere. Australia is burning up and fires have indiscriminately ravaged California, the Amazon and even Siberia. The earth's best climate moderators—glaciers, the Arctic, Greenland and Antartica—are all melting and the oceans are warming and expanding. Extreme weather and deadly destruction has blasted from hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts and temperature spikes, killing tens of thousands. Yet, demand for fossil fuels continues to grow around the world and corporate fossil fuel lawyers defend their clients' rights to kill humanity's future in court. Even staunchly progressive California has outperformed as one of the top oil and gas producing states, simply because without a price on fossil fuel's externalized CO2, the economics still tilt in fossil fuels' favor.

We environmentalists must face the music: France and Britain were as effective fighting Nazis as solar and wind are at closing fossil fuel plants. True, solar and wind are deeply popular and they have put up some resistance but . . . as the data piles up, we clearly see they are no match for this relentless, coordinated powerful enemy. The fossil fuel industry, along with its sovereign state allies, deploys big weapons like price manipulation, political corruption, securities fraud, bribery, lies, illicit lobbying, and even—in the case of state-owned fossil fuel-funded regimes like Putin's Russia—fake news, troll bots, repression, election interference and even murder to keep fossil fuels dominant and profits growing.

If Wind and Solar supporters acknowledge reality, however, and decide to call on Nuclear power to help them compete against their Fossil Foes, they'd have a powerful ally as a source of clean, reliable base load power. Next generation nuclear, which is emerging on the scene this decade with smaller, modular, advanced reactors, could, with some growth in orders and increasing economies of scale, wipe out the growing demand for cheap natural gas. Together with renewables where the sun shines and the wind blows, they would be more than a match for powering human energy demand cleanly and economically everywhere and, perhaps, the Clean Alliance would reverberate politically.

It took the Allied Forces—Great Britain, France, Russia, China and the US—united against the growth of fascism, to finally turn the tide against Nazi Germany. To fight climate change and the entrenched power of the fossil fuel industry, we need an alliance of all clean energy technologies, the "all-of-the-above" strategy, where all forms of clean energy generation—wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal—are allowed to compete on a level field, without the policy discrimination we have now. People need to demand that state climate policies and the Green New Deal give nuclear energy a chance to compete fairly, so we can mount the most powerful defense against climate change technologically possible—instead of letting the discriminatory Renewable Portfolio Standards penalize nuclear by failing to credit it for generating carbon-free clean energy, forcing utilities to shutter even fully-amortized nuclear capability.

There is little time left to act. We desperately need nuclear's big guns in this fight. Where are the wise environmental leaders willing and able to make the call and widen the big green tent? If fair Clean Energy Standards are deployed in 2020, not only will this save many of our largest and most reliable sources of clean energy from premature retirement and replacement by fossil fuels, it will send powerful signals around the world. Clean energy innovators and entrepreneurs everywhere can collaborate to specify reliable 100% clean energy grids, anchored where necessary by traditional nuclear or by next generation small modular reactors — so that, rather than building natural gas to back up intermittent renewables, that additional capital expenditure can go to badly needed "climate services" like water desalination, synthetic fuel production or carbon sequestration.

Fossil fuels remain a powerful and devious foe and they have worked effectively for decades to keep clean energy advocates divided—with wind and solar being convinced to ally with "less evil" natural gas, rather than cooperate with and support nuclear power. It is time for this wolf in sheep's clothing to be unmasked for the climate disaster it is. We need our utilities to meet our needs for abundant clean energy reliably and if we don't allow them to include nuclear, they will continue to deploy fossil fuels. Whereas, in allying with nuclear, we create a pathway for reliable, abundant clean energy in every geography of the world, we eliminate demand for fossil fuels and, potentially, we begin building capacity to power the reduction of CO2s heat forcing effect, through low-cost carbon sequestration, synthetic fuel production and other climate services. If we humans want a future in which we benefit from AI, advanced medicines and even space exploration, our first and highest priority should be supporting clean energy standards, a price on CO2 and support for smarter carbon management technologies, so we can stem the destruction of our own environment and begin to turn the corner on warming. Otherwise, all bets are off.