Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger

Author:Michael Shellenberger
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780063001701
Publisher: HarperCollins

4. Fracking Nukes

In spring 2016, Elizabeth Warren, senator from Massachusetts and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, traveled to Chicago to speak at a gala fundraising dinner hosted by Illinois’s leading environmental group, the Environmental Law and Policy Center (ELPC). Its founder, Howard Learner, was well-connected in Democratic Party circles. Learner had served as senior advisor for energy and environmental issues for President Obama from 2007 to 2008.40 In addition to Warren, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) also spoke at the event.

At the time, ELPC was seeking to halt legislation in the Illinois legislature that would have extended to nuclear plants a small fraction of the subsidy the state already gave to wind and solar developers. Learner was a longtime antinuclear crusader, having helped to kill new nuclear plants and shut down existing ones for at least thirty years, going back to the 1980s.

“Everybody looks with excitement when a new natural gas plant is built,” he said, referring to the alleged increase in jobs.41 But even that was misleading. Where an average-size nuclear plant tends to employ one thousand people, a similarly sized natural gas plant tends to employ fewer than fifty.

Anything that shuts down nuclear plants is good business for natural gas and renewables companies and investors. And so it is little wonder that when ELPC asked those business interests that would benefit directly from killing nuclear plants to cosponsor its gala dinner, many of them were more than happy to make donations.

The most important name on the list was Invenergy, a combined natural gas and industrial wind developer. For Invenergy, funding ELPC may have been part of its effort to close Illinois’s nuclear plants. During the same period, Invenergy was aggressively lobbying in the state legislature, making campaign contributions, and promoting renewables.

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