I don't know about activists, vut the US green party was influenced by russia for years. There is evidence of influence with Jill Stein for instance. But if you pick a political organization anywhere in the world that doesn't show signs of Russian influence, that would almost be more suspicious.
To pretend that the US "green party" has anything to do whatsoever with the environment is beyond naive, it's completely disconnected from reality.
Neither their policies nor their electorate support the idea that people like Jill Stein are in any way looked at as authorities in any "green" subject.
I don't think that someone that had national relevance for roughly half an election cycle, and who got less than half of one percent of the vote (at the peak of her popularity) has had any influence shaping nuclear opinions.
She's not even on record stating her position, that's how utterly unimportant this issue to Putin / Russia.
I'm not even sure how you think Russia would benefit from less nuclear power plants an entire continent away
> I don't think that someone that had national relevance for roughly half an election cycle, and who got less than half of one percent of the vote (at the peak of her popularity) has had any influence shaping nuclear opinions.
It's not about any one person. You still see this now, where people suggest regulatory reform for the process of building new nuclear plants in the US to lower construction costs, people appear to tell you that nuclear costs too much and should be abandoned, i.e. they use circular logic to present the existence of the problem you're trying to solve as a reason not to try to address it.
The current line of reasoning is something like "solar plus storage is cheaper than nuclear so nuclear must never be attempted", which ignores both any possibility of improving the cost efficiency of nuclear and that the cost comparison they're using is for intra-day storage whereas nuclear also reduces the need for multi-day storage which is significantly more expensive.
> I'm not even sure how you think Russia would benefit from less nuclear power plants an entire continent away
Russia is a petroleum exporting country and petroleum is a global commodity. If the US (or anyone else) uses nuclear instead of fossil fuels then global demand for fossil fuels declines, US natural gas or coal producers instead sell to foreign customers who might have bought gas from Russia, etc.
Notice that the US oil industry has the same incentive. Exxon is very much aligned with Putin on this one and they have lobbyists too.
one of the current approaches is to turn communities against solar and wind projects on the grounds that it's racist or disturbs plant life etc. This has advocates of environmental justice, which is an important concern on its own, weaponized against building renewable energy.
NIMBY homeowners mostly. For instance, these days the Sierra Club mostly exists to preserve property values by blocking all new green energy construction.
China is eating everyone’s lunch on new(ish) sources of energy because it seems to have basically run out of old(er) ones. The insane amount of coal burning aside, there are e.g. basically as many hydroelectric plants in China as its enormous rivers can support, accompanied by the huge amounts of ecological and societal destruction that those always cause, and that’s still not enough. The buildup of both solar and nuclear energy infrastructure is not motivated by compassion for the environment or (pace George Carlin) the humans that have to live in it, it’s motivated by the cold, hard necessity of powering the industrial base. And if the project can partly fund itself by selling some of the production capacity to others, all the better.
None of this detracts from the quality of the engineering, but it’s important to keep the motivation in view (whether to filter out the propaganda or to try and reproduce something like this at home).
I don’t really care what the motivation is. If it means we get green energy over more coal-fired plants/fossil fuel sources than whatever. Call it Super Awesome MEGA PATRIOT Fuel for all I care. Right now we have an administration touting the virtues of “beautiful clean coal” on its official government website - https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...
Who are the current generation of climate activists backed and propagandized by?