On October 2nd, while hundreds of thousands of people were preparing to march to demand an end to the war in Gaza and to support the Global Sumud Flotilla, the Italian government quietly pushed through a bill asking the Parliament to authorize it to finalize the so-called “sustainable nuclear energy law”.
The move went almost completely unnoticed — lost amid headlines about war and crisis — yet it marks a serious step backwards in Italy’s energy transition.

Between 2025 and 2026, the government plans to allocate €7.5 million to “promote” a return to nuclear power by 2035. It’s the only public money so far committed to Italy’s supposed “nuclear renaissance”: a campaign to convince people that going nuclear is good.
For comparison, just €3 million were allocated between 2021 and 2030 for information campaigns on energy efficiency, and none for renewables.

The hostility towards wind and solar energy that has taken root in parts of Italian public opinion is no accident. It’s the result of years of propaganda — full of false claims about the number of football fields needed for turbines or the impossibility of exceeding a “telephone-prefix percentage” of renewable generation.
Yet the data tell a different story: as of 2025, renewable electricity production in Italy has already surpassed that from fossil fuels.

The sudden rebirth of nuclear power in political discourse has been made possible by years of eco-scepticism among key political actors — scepticism not only about climate change itself, but about the potential of renewables and efficiency to replace oil and gas.
And this doubt has been carefully nurtured by fossil fuel giants like ENI and SNAM, whose profits depend directly on slowing the phase-out of gas.

It’s no coincidence that oil and gas majors speak about the “green transition” while owning less than 1.5% of global renewable capacity. A study from the Autonomous University of Barcelona analysed over 53,000 plants worldwide and found that the 250 biggest hydrocarbon producers — responsible for 88% of global output — generate just 0.13% of their energy from renewables, most of it through acquisitions rather than new projects.

In Italy, ENI invested over €15 in oil and gas for every euro channelled into its low-carbon “Plenitude” division in 2022 — and even that division includes gas retailing. For every euro in fossil fuels, less than seven cents went to truly sustainable energy.
No wonder ENI was fined €5 million in 2020 by Italy’s antitrust authority for falsely advertising a “green” diesel fuel. Those glossy “green” commercials flooding our screens hide a business model still overwhelmingly fossil and that intends to remain so.

The government’s newfound enthusiasm for “new” and “clean” nuclear power — technologies that, in reality, offer little innovation over existing plants — serves a clear purpose: to delay renewables, efficiency, and electrification, and to preserve gas dependency, now increasingly in the form of imported LNG, because we need to wait for new nuclear.

State-owned “national champions” like ENI and ENEL are driving this narrative, pushing for a nuclear turn while investing little of their own. ENI’s billion-dollar promise to purchase fusion energy from Commonwealth Fusion Systems will hardly materialize in a foreseeable future, and ENEL’s contribution to “advanced nuclear” research is not likely to deliver any time soon.

These companies have every interest in sustaining the government’s story that “renewables alone are not enough” and that we need to wait for “clean nuclear”as it is just around the corner. It’s a convenient narrative that protects the status quo.

But nuclear energy is extraordinarily expensive and slow. In France — often held up in Italy as a model of foresight — the Flamanville plant, completed in 2024 but still not fully operational, cost taxpayers €24 billion, roughly the size of France’s healthcare deficit. The French Audit Court has already warned that EDF’s planned €460 billion in new investments are financially unrealistic.

Given Italy’s strained public finances, the lack of private investors, and the unresolved issues of waste, water use, and safety, there is no credible path to “Made in Italy” nuclear power supplying 11–22% of national energy by 2050 — as the government claims — at supposedly lower cost than a non-nuclear scenario.
This is fantasy economics.

Meanwhile, Italy’s renewable sector is proving that the transition works — despite political inertia. In 2024, the country achieved energy savings equivalent to 4.5 million tons of oil, 90% of its national target. Renewables covered 42% of electricity demand in the first half of 2025, with solar up 23% and reaching a record 55% of monthly demand in May. Battery capacity rose 69%, and by September 2025, Italy had added 4.5 GW of new renewable power.

These are impressive results. Yet they receive far less attention than the mythical promise of “clean nuclear” and the endless insistence that gas remains “indispensable.” Progress comes not thanks to politics, but in spite of it — driven by citizens, operators, and innovators, often without coherent national strategy.

This situation is not without consequences; a recent report by the Agici Renewable Observatory, “How Much Does Doing Nothing Cost?”, calculated that missing Italy’s 2030 renewable target would cost €137 billion by 2050 — €5 billion a year — plus 585 million extra tons of CO₂ and over 340,000 lost jobs.

Instead of spending millions on nuclear promotion, Italy should fund instead a serious, transparent public debate on all energy alternatives — renewables, efficiency, nuclear, and gas — grounded in facts, not propaganda to help people to understand and choose.

We have seen, in recent months, the strength of millions mobilized for justice and peace.
Now we need that same determination to expose greenwashing, defend the climate, protect jobs, and amplify the voices of those already building a fossil-free future.

Because climate injustice is injustice.
And there will be no peace on a burning planet.