Critical Mass Publications
Confronting Fossil Killing. Ending Climate Delayism. Starting the Real Transition.
With Nuclear Fission as the Only Scalable Clean, Firm Replacement for Fossil Fuels Across Every Sector.
Fossil fuels are not just a climate problem. They are a mass-casualty energy regime. Year after year, the routine burning of coal, oil, and gas is associated with ~7–8 million premature deaths worldwide from air pollution, while energy poverty and extraction violence magnify the harm—keeping billions exposed to toxic air, unstable power, and coerced sacrifice.
This is not an unavoidable tragedy. It is a choice, sustained by disavowal. A scalable alternative has existed for decades: nuclear fission is the only clean, firm energy source currently deployable at the scale needed to replace fossil fuels across essentially every sector—electricity, industrial heat, high-temperature process energy, and the clean fuels required for heavy transport and aviation.
Wind and solar are crucial, but intermittent and low–energy-density—so at scale they guarantee gaps. And when you don’t build a clean, firm backbone alongside them, those gaps are filled—predictably—by coal, oil, and gas, as we’ve seen in places like California, New York, and especially Germany, where the renewables-only crusade has meant shuttering perfectly good reactors and handing reliability back to fossil combustion. The fossil industry understands this dynamic cold. That is why it has every incentive to sustain a 70+ year public war on nuclear—including, at key moments, by financing and amplifying legacy environmental organizations and campaigns whose anti-nuclear politics (whatever the intent) operate as an enforcement mechanism for continued fossil dependence, continued environmental harm, and continued mass death from combustion pollution.
The obstacle is not only technical—it is legal and institutional. Kafka’s “Before the Law” names a structure of authority that manufactures waiting: access is always promised, never granted. Fossil Law permits Climate Law largely as an alibi—an authorized substitute that preserves the underlying not yet by dressing it up as progress: COP theatrics, net-zero pledges, 2030/2050 targets, pathways, and perpetual plans that defer responsibility into the future while fossil sellers keep selling poison in the present. The result is a juridical normalization of ongoing harm: present deaths become background—regrettable, but administrable. Critical Mass Publications exists to end that normalization.
From Fossil Law to Climate Law: Ending the “Not Yet”
If the law’s default setting is delay, climate justice begins by breaking the legal permission structure that keeps fossil killing lawful.
Fossil Law does not merely coexist with Climate Law—it produces it. It permits a climate-law “response” on the condition that the response inherits law’s built-in delayism, amplifying Kafka’s gatekeeping not yet into modern governance: conferences, communiqués, targets, pathways, and “net-zero by 2050” promises that archive action while authorizing continued combustion in the present. The result is a legal culture that treats today’s deaths and dispossession as administrable background—while laundering fossil continuity through the aesthetics of responsibility.
Critical Mass Publications exists to end that normalization. We publish research, argument, and strategic analysis that insists on present-tense obligations—a Right to Breathe and a Right to Clean, Firm Energy now—and that names the energy reality without euphemism: nuclear fission is the only clean, firm energy source currently scalable to replace fossil fuels across essentially every sector, with wind and solar as indispensable complements, not substitutes for firmness.
Our flagship outlets—the Energy Justice Docket and the Atoms for Justice blog—track how “transition” becomes an alibi when intermittency and low energy density guarantee gaps that fossil fuels are invited to fill, especially where governments shutter functioning reactors in renewables-only zeal. We also develop case-based accountability arguments against nuclear-capable petrostates that brand themselves as climate leaders while entrenching fossil dominance through anti-nuclear taboo—Norway is paradigmatic: clean domestic self-presentation paired with fossil export and procedural climate theater.
This is where the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has changed the terrain. In its 23 July 2025 Advisory Opinion on states’ obligations regarding climate change, the Court framed climate change as an existential problem and clarified that states have binding duties of due diligence, including regulating emissions-causing activity within their jurisdiction or control; breach can constitute an internationally wrongful act, triggering the law of state responsibility and the possibility of legal consequences, including reparation where causation is established.
CMP’s wager is simple: once climate obligation is understood as present-tense duty, solution denial—the legal and political suppression of clean, firm energy while fossil expansion continues—cannot remain a respectable position. The “not yet” is no longer neutral procedure. It is a decision, with bodies attached.
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.