America’s top ten anti-energy NGOs

According to the last reports filed with the IRS, just 10 of the richest members of the American climate movement had combined annual revenue of nearly $1.8 billion. But while these nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) profess their commitment to a cleaner environment, their shared opposition to low- and zero-emissions fuels exposes them as more “anti-energy” than pro-nature.   

Most oppose nuclear energy, the world’s only reliable, limitlessly scalable, energy that does not emit greenhouse gases. (Hydroelectric dams also do not emit greenhouse gases, but their scalability is severely limited.) Nuclear is such a no-brainer that The Nature Conservancy wants to quadruple world nuclear power output.  

“Uranium,” according to the U.S. Department of Energy, “is a common metal found in rocks all over the world.” And a 2009 Scientific American estimate projected that just the known uranium fuel reserves would last centuries, while future discoveries and use of other radioactive fuels should stretch our nuclear energy future out to more than 50,000 years.  

Comparing fatalities per unit of energy output, Our World in Data has judged nuclear power is one the safest, reliable sources of energy we have, comparable to nonreliable, weather-restricted wind and solar power.  

Despite these benefits, hundreds of left-leaning nonprofits oppose nuclear power.  

Most also oppose the expansion of natural gas energy. According to a Department of Energy report, natural gas emits far less CO2 to produce a BTU of energy than any of our other hydrocarbon-based fuels: 30.5 percent less than gasoline and 45 percent less than coal.  

The United States is also the decisive world leader in natural gas production. According to the Department of Energy, we cranked out 25.8 percent of total world natural gas production in 2023, more than the combined output of second place Russia (14.8 percent) and third place Iran (6.4 percent.)  

From 2007 to 2023, the shift from coal to cleaner natural gas in American electricity production resulted in a net decline of 893 million metric tons of annual CO2 emissions.  

In practical terms, the net reduction of 893 million metric tons (mt) was enough to offset the total 2023 annual CO2 emissions of Germany (596 mt) and France (272 mt) combined. That’s not merely their combined electricity emissions, but all emissions. And those are two of the world’s 10 largest economies.  

In order of their most recent reported revenue, here are brief profiles of America’s 10 largest anti-energy NGOs. 

1. World Wildlife Fund ($372.8 million in 2023 revenue)

Measured by revenue, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is arguably the Earth’s largest anti-energy NGO. In 2020, it opposed a European Union decision to permit natural gas and nuclear power to count as a clean energy option for EU economies. In an April 2021 WWF news release, the chief economist of the group’s European affiliate blasted both natural gas and nuclear as “unsustainable.”  

According to USASpending.gov, WWF was awarded a cumulative total of $178 million in federal grants for the four fiscal years through 2024. Most of this ($120.7 million) was awarded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

2. World Resources Institute ($357.8 million) 

In an April 2018 news release, the World Resources Institute (WRI) praised a pair of South African activists for blocking nuclear power in their country. According to the release, the activists won “a landmark legal victory that protected South Africa from an unprecedented expansion of the nuclear industry.”  

As of 2022, according to Our World in Data, 8.4 million South Africans did not have access to basic electricity for more than 4 hours per day. That’s 13.5 percent of the population. For comparison, 99.2 percent of Indians had basic electricity access.  

This anti-energy attitude toward the world’s impoverished people was rewarded by the American taxpayer. According to USASpending.gov, WRI was awarded a cumulative total of $65.8 million in grants from the federal government for the four fiscal years through 2024. Nearly all of the awards were approved by either USAID or the Department of State.  

3. Environmental Defense Fund ($247 million) 

In 2016, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) supported the closure of California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, boasting in the headline of a news release that the lost power output—9 percent of the electricity used in America’s largest state economy—would be “replaced with renewable energy.”  

Plot spoiler: This never works.  

In 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) decided to keep Diablo Canyon open well into the 2030s or longer. (Nuclear plants could theoretically operate for a century and one-fifth of the existing American nuclear fleet has already received license extensions that will take the plants beyond 80 years in service.) 

Also in 2017, EDF promoted the premature closure (14 years ahead of schedule) of the Indian Point nuclear facility in New York. EDF predicted a “clean energy future” in the news release.   

The zero-carbon plant was closed for good in 2021. Its electricity was replaced by power plants running on natural gas or oil, and CO2 emissions increased. Citing “an increase in greenhouse gas emissions in excess of 40 percent in the New York City metro region” in September 2024, a New York state lawmaker introduced legislation to reopen Indian Point. 

USASpending.gov reports $6.6 million in federal grants approved for EDF for the four fiscal years through 2024. Most of this ($6 million) was approved by the Department of Energy in 2024 to be used to park solar energy systems in low-income communities. (More on that below.) 

4. Natural Resources Defense Council ($193.1 million) 

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) also supported closure of Diablo Canyon and Indian Point. In 2022, when Gov. Newsom decided to save Diablo Canyon, NRDC signed a group letter blasting the move as a “dangerous and costly distraction.” 

NRDC has also boasted of blocking both natural gas pipelines and rail transportation.  

The page explaining the group’s position on “fossil fuels” promotes the use of wind and solar energy instead, and the NDRC website hosts an unintentionally ironic photo of dozens of wind turbines blocking the view of a beautiful mountain. The caption for the photo reads: “Limiting dirty fossil fuel production and transitioning to clean energy, like wind and solar, are critical in building a livable future.” 

The same page also makes this observation: “Did You Know? Just 22 train tank cars filled with LNG [liquified natural gas] hold the same amount of energy as the Hiroshima bomb.” 

Well, yes, that’s the point. It’s called “energy density,” and because LNG is very energy dense, we don’t need to scatter thousands of train cars full of it in front of all of our beautiful mountain vistas.  

Remember when the “environmental” movement cared about preserving … the environment?  

No power source is more densely packed than the nuclear fuel NRDC opposes. A 12-oz Coca-Cola container could hold all the uranium needed to satisfy a lifetime of a typical American’s energy consumption. 

And logically, this also means that if you ran your life strictly with nuclear power, that little Coke can could hold all of the energy waste you’ll ever produce. According to the Department of Energy: “All of the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear energy industry over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards!” 

Even 340 million Coke cans (representing a full lifetime of energy for the entire population of the United States) couldn’t clutter mountain scenery as horribly as those wind turbines.    

5. Sierra Club ($173.4 million) 

Founded in 1892, the Sierra Club is the oldest of the largest climate NGOs, although it is no longer the richest.  

According to their “Nuclear Free Future” page, the “Sierra Club remains unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy.” The position is historically ironic as the Sierra Club initially supported nuclear as a clean alternative.  

Legendary nature photographer and one-time Sierra Club board member Ansel Adams was a supporter of nuclear power. Adams once told an interviewer that “the danger of nuclear power is conjectural and the pollution potential, compared with the known pollution potential of burning coal and oil, is minute.” 

The Sierra Club has also had a hot and cold attitude toward natural gas.  

During a three-year stretch through 2010, according to Time magazine, “the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry . . . to help fund the Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.” 

But NOW the Sierra Club says they have a “Beyond Coal and Gas” campaign. The NGO’s website claims natural gas “is not a bridge fuel towards a better climate” and is “standing in the way of real clean energy and a safer future.”  

With this background, it is not unreasonable to imagine an alternative history. The Sierra Club had it in itself to spend the last century promoting low-carbon natural gas and zero-carbon nuclear power as alternatives to coal and oil. In that happy dream, instead of leading a movement that has become a partisan, controversial impediment to prosperity, the Sierra Club might now enjoy overwhelming popular support.   

6. Rocky Mountain Institute ($139.4 million)  

As defined by its recent influence and revenue, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) might be the fastest-growing anti-energy nonprofit in America. In 2001, RMI reported total revenue of $2.8 million—just 2 percent of what the group reported for 2023.  

During the Biden administration, RMI became the tip of the spear in a federal government war against American natural gas.  

According to public records obtained by Americans for Public Trust, former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm met with the CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute in June 2021. By December 2022, RMI had produced a dubious and fiercely criticized report claiming that more than 12 percent of childhood asthma cases are caused by natural gas stoves. That some month, Granholm and Biden announced a plan to phase out gas use in federal buildings and switch to electricity by 2030. A few weeks after that, the commissioner of the Consumer Product Safety Commission advocated banning gas stoves.  

RMI was subsequently awarded $6.8 million from Granholm’s Department of Energy to swap out gas appliances in apartment buildings and build out electric vehicle charging infrastructure. But these grants were clawed back by Trump administration Energy Secretary Chris Wright in April 2025, and RMI announced layoffs soon thereafter.  

According to RMI’s official mythology, co-founder Amory Lovins is the “Einstein of energy efficiency.” In a 1976 essay for Foreign Affairs (still promoted on the RMI website) Lovins advocated for ditching the use of coal, oil, natural gas . . . and especially nuclear power. That’s more than 80 percent of all current world energy use. Wind and solar, the options Emory and RMI have promoted for half a century, provide a practically meaningless 6 percent.  

Nuclear hostility remains a feature of the RMI agenda. A February 22, 2022, RMI report concluded Europe should not be “looking backward to domestic fossil or large-scale nuclear” and should instead invest in “renewables” to “cut both emissions and energy dependencies.” 

Germany took this advice before it was cool, abandoned its nuclear fleet, and began building out wind and solar power.  

Plot spoiler: This never works. 

Two days after RMI’s energy recommendation to Europe, the Russians invaded Ukraine. Germany was plunged into an energy crisis because . . . it had become dangerously reliant on Russian natural gas.  

Awful as that seems, an end to abundant energy is arguably a feature of RMI’s work, not a bug. Don’t take my word for it. Just ask the “Einstein of energy efficiency.” In 1977, Amory Lovins said, “It’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean, and abundant energy because of what we would do with it,”  

7. EarthJustice ($126 million) 

Formerly the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, EarthJustice is a public interest law firm that claims to be the “legal backbone of the environmental movement.”  

EarthJustice has provided legal assistance for more than 1000 clients, including hundreds of strident anti-energy and anti-nuclear NGOs. A partial list includes WWF, EDF, NRDC, the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), and Greenpeace.  

8. League of Conservation Voters ($67.5 million) 

The League of Conservation Voters has ramped up its opposition to low-emissions natural gas in direct proportion to how much of it the United States can produce and use. The NGO is also opposed to oil, coal, and nuclear power.  

In November 2020, LCV’s legislative director co-signed a group letter to the U.S. Senate that claimed nuclear power “amplifies and expands the dangers of climate change” and is one of the “false solutions to the climate crisis that perpetuate our reliance on dirty energy industries.” 

9. GRID Alternatives  ($63.3 million)

In February 2025, Lee Zeldin, the Trump administration’s EPA director, announced he was freezing payment on $20 billion in weather-dependent power pork that the Biden administration EPA had approved for anti-energy NGOs.  

Zeldin’s decision followed an outgoing Biden official boasting in a hidden video that they were trying to spend the loot quickly so the Trump team couldn’t claw it back. The Biden bureaucrat analogized this behavior to “tossing gold bars off the Titanic.”  

GRID Alternatives was set up to collect a big pot of this gold. In May 2024, the NGO was awarded two EPA grants—for a grand total of $312.3 million—to provide solar energy systems in “low income and disadvantaged communities.” In FedSpeak, these are called “LIDACs,” and they were the subject of a January 2025 Capital Research Center report: “Low-Quality Energy for the LIDACs and $21.8 Billion in Waste from the EPA.”  

We’d all live in a LIDAC if GRID Alternatives were permitted to build their “alternative” grid.  

In January 2019, the NGO co-signed a “Group letter to Congress urging Green New Deal passage.” A socialist wish list for replacing the American economy, the Green New Deal was swiftly derided by even Nancy Pelosi as “the green dream or whatever.” An analysis from the American Action Forum estimated the 10-year price tag at $51 trillion to $93 trillion. On the high side, that’s more than three times the current annual output of the entire U.S. economy.  

In addition to asking Congress to oppose the development of all forms of hydrocarbon energy (“fossil fuels”) the group letter co-signed by GRID Alternatives also stipulated that “any definition of renewable energy must also exclude . . . nuclear, biomass energy, large scale hydro and waste-to-energy technologies.” 

That statement puts GRID Alternatives in opposition to 84.7 percent of what lights up the American electrical grid.  

Furthermore, neither nuclear nor hydro-electric dams emit any greenhouse gases. Put together those two zero-CO2  sources opposed by GRID Alternatives accounted for 24 percent of total American electricity grid production. 

It would be difficult to find an NGO more opposed to the American energy, but not impossible. 

10.  Greenpeace ($40.2 million) 

Greenpeace USA is also a signatory on the anti-energy, Green New Deal letter.  

But Greenpeace also plays dirty. In April, a jury in North Dakota awarded a $667 million judgement against Greenpeace USA, Greenpeace International, and the Greenpeace Fund over the NGO’s role in a destructive protest against the Dakota Access energy pipeline.  

Just before the verdict, the Doomberg energy newsletter profiled the situation confronted by Energy Partners, the company that sued Greenpeace:   

The tactics used during the months-long siege set a new standard for violence and wanton criminality. According to court filings submitted by the company, the protesters pursued a campaign of “militant direct action,” regularly trespassing on ET’s private property, destroying construction equipment, and assaulting employees and contractors. Improvised explosive devices were deployed to attack police, hacked information was used to threaten officers and their families, and weapons were used to kill the livestock of local farmers and ranchers. At certain points, local authorities were overwhelmed, barely able to control the riots. 

The $667 million award could bankrupt and terminate one of America’s most anti-energy NGOs. Greenpeace is appealing.