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EDF won the Pinocchio Climate Awards!

Every year Friends of the Earth France, with several other organisations, award a prize to the three worst companies who excel in greenwashing and dirty lobbying tactics at a policy level, or directly at a community level. The winners are chosen by online public voting. In 2015, as Paris hosted the international climate talks (COP21), they joined forces with the Worst Lobby Awards bring a special edition: the Pinocchio Climate Awards. Not surprisingly EDF won the award in the category ‘Greenwashing’

French energy company EDF used its controversial sponsorship of the international climate talks in Paris to launch a large-scale public relations campaign to brand nuclear power as a ‘carbon-free’ and ‘clean’ energy source. In fact, nuclear is everything but clean, and escalating costs and subsidies are better spent on genuine solutions.

Voting has ended, and - of course- EDF won!

French energy company EDF is stepping up its greenwashing efforts with newfound zeal ahead of this year’s international climate talks in Paris. As an official sponsor of COP21, EDF presents itself as ‘the official partner of a low-carbon world’. In the run-up to the conference, the company is planning a series of conferences and symposia to promote the ‘role of electricity in decarbonising the world’. It is also funding a “call for projects” for non-profit organisations with green projects with a positive impact for the climate [1]. EDF has also hired an important communication agency, Havas, to launch a new advertising offensive: “Discover the true face of low-carbon energy”, staging workers from one of its nuclear power plant, published in plain page of national newspapers…

But beyond the spin, EDF is not in fact planning to shed any of its considerable global investments in coal and other fossil fuels, nor is it preparing any significant strategic shift towards energy efficiency or renewables. Its main concern is propping up its increasingly compromised nuclear business.

Nuclear: neither clean, nor carbon-free

In reality, nuclear power itself is far from carbon-free. It has a dark, dirty secret: uranium mining. Like mining in general, uranium mining requires enormous amounts of energy and thus contributes to significant greenhouse gas emissions, in addition to huge local environmental and health impacts for surrounding communities.
Most emissions from nuclear power are therefore outsourced to the countries where uranium is mined – mostly Niger, Kazakhstan and Canada in the case of EDF’s supplier Areva. Transport and processing of both uranium fuel and of the resulting nuclear waste also create significant greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, the carbon footprint of nuclear in some cases can even be higher than some fossil fuels, and well above wind and solar [2]. Nuclear energy also entails a whole host of other environmental impacts and hazards: radiation, waste management and disposal, nuclear proliferation, escalating production costs, and the huge consequences associated with potential nuclear accidents.

After a complaint made one of our campaign launching partners Réseau “Sortir du nucléaire” and some local groups, these arguments were recognised by an official advertisement ethics body: it recently issued a damning opinion on a public advertising campaign launched by EDF in Alsace, the French region where the company is fighting against the planned closure of its 37 years old Fessenheim nuclear plant, the oldest running in France. The adverts said that the electricity provided by EDF in Alsace was ‘100% without CO2 emissions’ – which the ethics body found was deliberately misleading consumers about the true nature of nuclear energy and its environmental impacts. [3] Réseau "Sortir du nucléaire" and its partners have now lodged a second complaint, taking aim at EDF’s claim that it is providing 98% carbon-free electricity in France. The hearing will take place on December 11th 2015, and then the ethics body will have two weeks to state on the complaint.

So what does EDF really want? In France, its current agenda is to extend the lifetime of its existing plants – most of them approaching 40 years old and plagued with recurring safety issues. This could cost up to a hundred billion euro. That money should be invested in building the long-term sustainable energy system that France needs, which would be both cheaper and better for the climate, people and the environment – both in France and in the countries where uranium is mined. Between its huge stakes in fossil fuels and its investment in false solutions such as nuclear, EDF can hardly claim to be an official partner of a “low-carbon world”. If it had its way, France and the world would remain stuck in a future of climate chaos, nuclear risk and escalating energy costs.

Need more information? Please read the entire case on the website of the Pinocchio awards and vote for EDF. 

During the COP21 the Don't Nuke the Climate campaign paid a visit to a local EDF office to present the Pinocchio Award. 
 
 

References:
[1] http://10projets-climat.edf.fr/
[2] Two different studies have estimated this footprint to between 10 and 130 g eq. CO2/KWh and between 1,4 and 288 g eq. CO2/KWh respectively, depending on the parameters and conditions, with a median value of 66 g eq. CO2/KWh – well above the corresponding figures for wind and solar (34 g eq. CO2/KWh for wind and 50 for solar according to a 2014 meta-analysis).
– Lenzen, M.; Frank Barnaby; James Kemp; et al. (2008). “Life cycle energy and greenhouse gas emissions of nuclear energy: A review. Energy Conversion and Management 49, 2178-2199”
– Valuing the greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear power : a critical survey, publiée par Benjamin K. Sovacool en 2008 dans la revue Energy Policies. On renewables energies, see: Assessing the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions from solar PV and wind energy: A critical meta-survey”. Energy Policy 65: 229–244.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513010719 https://www.nirs.org/climate/background/sovacool_nuclear_ghg.pd
[3] http://sortirdunucleaire.org/article43882

 
A few weeks ago Réseau "Sortir du nucléaire" launched a petition telling EDF to stop lying! Sign it here.