Nuclear power is by far America’s biggest source of zero-carbon energy, providing 19.5 percent of the nation’s electricity. So why are environmental groups who profess to care about climate change working overtime to get rid of nukes?

The mystery deepens with today’s announcement by Pacific Gas & Electric that it intends to shutter California’s Diablo Canyon facility, the West’s last zero-carbon nuclear plant. The decision reflects a deal PG&E has struck with labor and environmental groups to invest more in energy efficiency, renewables and storage as it phases out Diablo Canyon.

The news comes amid a recent wave of nuclear plant closures in the Midwest, where deregulated markets flush with wind and natural gas simply make the plants uncompetitive. But Diablo’s costs are carried by rates, not competitive markets, so something else was clearly at work. And that something was extreme green politics.

Behind the Faustian bargain were big environmental groups like Friends of the Earth, National Resources Defense Council and Environment California. Together with their allies in state government (Mary Nichols, chair of California’s powerful Air Resources Board, founded the state’s NRDC chapter), the groups have advocated successfully for policies that privilege renewables as the only “clean” route to a low-carbon economy. Governor Brown’s former girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt, recently joined celebrities who have made a second career off opposing Diablo in sending a letter of opposition to relicensing. Not surprisingly the state’s 50 percent renewable standard—enshrined on Governor Brown’s watch–excludes nuclear.

The bargain would let Diablo’s duel reactors run until 2024 and 2025 but retire them 20 years before their useful life is up, in 2044, 2045. The groups claim Diablo’s power would be replaced by renewables and by energy efficiency, but as Rod Adams, blogging for Forbes noted:

“That’s a deceptive fig leaf; it is physically impossible for wind, solar and energy efficiency to replace the steady production of a nuclear power plant. Producing the same total number of kilowatt-hours each year is not the same as producing the same kilowatt-hours on a minute by minute, hour by hour or day by day basis.”

The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t shine at night but a nuclear reactor generates zero emission electricity 24/7. In a state where industry continues to flee (Toyota ran to Texas and Tesla opted for Reno) there just isn’t sufficient demand to manage over-generation. And for a company such as PG&E, beleaguered over the current criminal trial for a natural gas explosion, it was politics rather than economics that trumped the West’s last nuclear plant standing.

The timing could not be worse as parts of California are reeling from one of the worst heat waves to hit the Golden State at a time of year when it typically is blanketed by fog or “June Gloom.” In Southern California, grid operators are straining to meet demand in a system that both lost the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station but also placed a moratorium on natural gas from Aliso Canyon. As a result of the Aliso Canyon moratorium, the state’s grid operator for this summer has forecast at least 14 rolling blackouts.

Renewables need fast-ramp natural gas to back off generation at midday, when solar generates a surplus, and then to ramp back up at night when the sun sets. California’s grid operator throws away or curtails as much as 13,000 megawatts of excess electricity per day. For the green extreme shuttering Diablo is the path to tossing away less solar.

Reliability is an issue but the green extreme’s well-kept dirty secret is that wind and solar have severe environmental downsides. Diablo’s closure will eliminate in 10 years the state’s last, steady reliable, pollution-free electricity source. Replacing Diablo with solar will require vast tracts of land. Siting those facilities pits NRDC against staunch conservationists dead set against displacing the desert tortoise. And wind kills hundreds of thousands of birds and bats annually. But the environmental downside is that renewables need to team with fossil to keep the lights on.

California has for years been banking on an unholy alliance between renewables and load-following natural gas. Moreover, California has already blown its climate change targets because 100,000 tons of potent climate-changing methane leaked unabated into the atmosphere from the Aliso Canyon natural gas field. In a world of unreliable renewables, electricity systems require something to keep the lights on. But unlike nuclear, natural gas is a fossil fuel. California’s apparent model — Germany — has watched climate pollution increase there as decommissioning nuclear plants has led Berlin to rely more on carbon-intensive coal to backup to wind and solar.

But the green extreme is mute on rising emissions. “It makes your skin tingle,” said Damon Moglen, senior advisor with Friends of the Earth, regarding Diablo’s closure. Probably the highly-skilled and decently-paid nuclear plant workers at Diablo are feeling that way too.

Although the price of electricity in the Eastern United States fell by half over the last decade, residential customers saw their monthly bills increase by 26 percent, according to government data. What accounts for this anti-market discrepancy?

Consumer advocates claim that power companies are using tumbling electricity costs as camouflage to increase other charges. Utilities push back, saying price hikes are necessary to pay for billions of dollars of government-mandated improvements to long-neglected infrastructure. Last year PPI held a “future grid” summit which posed this key question to the assembled experts: Who will pay for the modern grid we need? Now we may have an answer: consumers.

Electricity charges make up about a third of the average utility bill, down from around half just a few years ago. This decrease is due to a flood of cheap natural gas extracted by hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as “fracking.” The rest of your utility bill consist of retail charges associated with delivering supplies—for example getting the electricity to the end user and adding enough capacity to handle demand surges.

Bernie Sanders may want to ban fracking, but the resulting glut of cheap gas is driving down the wholesale cost of electricity across his native Northeast. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these low prices are attributable to warmer than normal temperatures, additional pipeline infrastructure, and “the generally well-supplied and low-priced natural gas environment.” Northeast regional prices for electricity are just a fraction of what they were two years ago. For example, in January peak prices for the month in New England reached only $66/MWh down from $438/MWh January two years ago. New York has similar numbers peaking at $71/MWh this year as opposed to $518/MWh two years ago.

Thanks to these low, low prices, utilities have room to pass along the costs of modernizing our outdated electricity grid to residential consumers without their bills exhibiting dramatic spikes. The rapid deployment of intermittent renewable energy resources on the U.S. power grid is partly responsible for rising delivery costs. This evolution away from large, centralized power plants toward smaller, more widely distributed generation sources means utilities must install digital sensors, meters, and more power lines, the costs of which are passed along to consumers.

According to the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association for investor-owned utilities, their member companies spend $20 billion annually on upgrades to the distribution grid alone. Without cheap natural gas electricity consumers would certainly bear a heavier share of these costs. In other words, without fracking, U.S. consumers won’t be reaping the benefits of more renewable energy and a smarter and more reliable grid. And when their electricity bills start to soar, they will really be feeling the burn.

The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, has slammed the brakes on President Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP). It’s a major setback for the administration, which held up the CPP at last December’s Paris climate summit as proof of America’s commitment to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The White House believes the plan helped to persuade China and India to promise large reductions of their own.

The ruling bars the Environmental Protection Agency from putting into effect regulations that would cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. That’s to give the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit time to consider challenges to the CPP from 26 states and energy companies that have opposed the regulations on several grounds, including whether the EPA has the legal authority to impose such comprehensive regulatory requirements on existing power plants under the Clean Air Act.

After Congress failed to pass carbon cap and trade legislation in 2010, President Obama decided to use his executive powers to direct EPA to regulate carbon as a pollutant. It now appears that the White House erred in putting all of its carbon reduction eggs in the basket of an executive order. Top-down rulemaking by the EPA was always the fallback or second-best choice, after a carbon tax or cap and trade system. Now, depending on what happens in the courts, Obama may leave office without having a clear proposal for curbing U.S. emissions.

PPI supported the CPP on the basis that something is better than nothing. But we have always believed that a market-based solution that puts a price on carbon is more efficient and more comprehensive than command and control regulation from Washington.

In fact, the EPA has a history of making rules that trail behind market developments. It imposed Acid Rain rules after electric utilities had begun to comply with air quality controls. Similarly, the CPP rules come amidst a dramatic transformation of the electricity sector brought about mainly by cheap natural gas and distribution wind and solar generation. These factors already are cutting greenhouse gas emissions and are likely to go on doing so.

The Clean Power Plan was envisioned as a “worst case” scenario that the electric utility sector could avoid by pressing Congress instead to pass cap and trade or a carbon tax. But the utilities recognized that, because the CPP wasn’t sanctioned by Congress, it would always be vulnerable to legal challenge. And that’s where we are today.

Even if the CPP survives in the courts, it will not enable the United States to meet its Paris commitments because it only covers emissions in the utility sector, as the CPP alone is only expected to account for a quarter of the carbon reductions outlined in those commitments. In the end, there’s really no substitute for putting a price on carbon, which will both discourage the use of fossil fuels across the entire economy and drive investment to renewable energy and clean tech.

The U.S. commercial nuclear fleet will shrink by one more plant, as Entergy Corp. recently announced its plans to close the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth, Mass. While some environmental and anti-nuclear activists are no doubt popping corks, it’s bad news from a climate perspective.

And it’s part of a trend. Pilgrim is the fifth nuclear power station slated for shuttering over the past two years. Entergy, which announced it would shut down Vermont Yankee in 2013, cites falling revenues and rising operational costs for its decision to close Pilgrim. What’s happening in energy markets that’s tilting the playing field against nuclear power?

For the last few years, nuclear industry leaders have warned that decreasing electricity demand, low natural gas prices, and price regulation are making it uneconomical to keep small nuclear plants (600 megawatts or less) up and running. Specifically, they complain that regulators don’t allow them to reap the full value of the services nuclear energy brings to consumers — reliability, efficiency and grid stability which permits the smoother integration of renewable energy. That makes it difficult to defray operations and maintenance costs, which have risen because of new regulations imposed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after Japan’s Fukushima crisis.

The economic viability of nuclear power plants is also threatened by state energy policies that subsidize renewable energy projects. For example, Entergy cited a Massachusetts proposal that would require utilities to buy hydro-electric power from Canada at above-market prices. The amount of electricity they would be required to buy would amount to about one-third of the state’s electricity demand.

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