Earthrise Accord:
Confronting Fossil Killing, Ending Climate Delayism, Starting the Real Transition
For decades, fossil fuels have been killing 7–8 million people every year, while energy poverty and extraction violence have killed millions more and kept billions in the dark, breathing toxic air—even though a safer, zero-carbon alternative has existed since at least the 1973 fossil-fuel crisis. In the early 1970s, anti-nuclear activists told the world that nuclear power would bring mass death; they were wrong, dead wrong. By demonizing reactors, blocking new build, and cheering the closure of safe plants, they helped lock coal, oil, and gas in as the world’s firm baseload, enabling the very mass death they projected onto nuclear. Today’s “renewables-only” dogma is the latest form of that campaign: it claims moral purity while giving political cover to fossil-fuel criminals, accelerating climate change, and keeping coal, oil, and gas in charge behind a façade of intermittent “green” power.
As Kafka showed in “Before the Law,” law contains delay at its core; climate law has turned that delay into an operating system. Endless 2030/2050 targets, “pathways,” and transition plans stretch responsibility into the future so fossil fuels can keep selling poison in the present, treating today’s deaths as acceptable collateral for tomorrow’s promises. Earthrise Accord exists to confront that delayism as a form of violence and to replace it with present-tense obligations grounded in a Right to Breathe and a Right to Clean, Firm Energy now, while holding climate-change criminals to account. Through research, advocacy, and strategic legal work, we press the case—already recognized in MIT’s 2018 report—that zero-carbon nuclear must be the backbone of any serious decarbonization plan. Our work is about stopping the next hundreds of millions of preventable deaths, sounding the alarm on the millions already dying each year from energy poverty and insecurity, and driving a real, meaningful transition against a tsunami of resistance from fossil-fuel producers, financiers, and users who would rather keep burning—and keep killing—than change.
Climate Justice and Nuclear Realism
Climate justice demands more than promises—it requires accountability for the historical and ongoing harms caused by fossil fuel corporations and the governments that have enabled them.
Earthrise Accord connects climate justice to nuclear realism, recognizing nuclear power as the only carbon-free technology capable of replacing fossil fuels at the scale necessary for effective global decarbonization.
For over fifty years, the fossil fuel industry has conducted a dual disinformation campaign: one denying climate science, the other attacking nuclear energy. These efforts, often backed by fossil-funded environmental groups, suppressed the development of nuclear power even as climate risks escalated. While California v. Big Oil targets denialism, Earthrise Accord extends that accountability to include the decades-long sabotage of nuclear power—an omission that has cost the planet immeasurably.
The consequences of these disinformation campaigns have fallen disproportionately on Indigenous, frontline, and Global South communities—those least responsible for emissions yet most vulnerable to their effects. For Earthrise Accord, climate justice means confronting this layered harm and delivering reparations not through vague financial mechanisms but through clean, sovereign energy infrastructure.
This is the foundation of our Clean Energy Reparations initiative: replacing fossil-fueled dependency with nuclear-supported sovereignty. We ask: how do you repair the Niger Delta without incentivizing more oil extraction? What reparations are owed to the Maldives before rising seas erase it from the map? And why aren’t the perpetrators already funding AI-assisted geoengineering, like cloud seeding, to slow or even stop the rising seas?
True climate justice means forcing those most responsible—Big Oil, petrostates, and criminal emitters—to stop, pay, and repair. But it also means being honest about the solutions already available to us. We cannot afford the magical thinking of “renewables only” ideologies that ignore physical and geopolitical realities, nor can we allow narrow national interests or sovereignty claims to override the survival of the planet. Justice without realism is rhetoric. Justice without action is complicity.
Critical is a groundbreaking climate documentary that boldly challenges the green movement’s longstanding anti-nuclear stance from within. Following activist Mark Yelland and his "Greens For Nuclear Energy" campaign, the film rejects the magical thinking that renewables alone can achieve timely decarbonization, foregrounding nuclear power as essential—one of the safest, cleanest, and most reliable energy sources available.
Thoughtfully highlighting how fossil fuel interests have shaped anti-nuclear attitudes by funding legacy environmental groups—such as the Environmental Defense Fund, which actively opposed nuclear initiatives while receiving significant oil and gas donations, and Friends of the Earth, initially founded with substantial backing from oil billionaire Robert O. Anderson—the film aligns closely with Earthrise Accord’s progressive, evidence-based politics of nuclear realism.
Critical compellingly argues that achieving a net-zero transition depends fundamentally on nuclear energy, emphasizing that effective climate action must prioritize scientifically credible solutions over ideological purity or outdated misconceptions.