Eleven highly-credentialed Sierra Club members, led by high-profile environmentalist Dr. Alex Cannara, recently wrote an open letter to Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune criticizing the organization’s radical deference to wind energy.

They take issue with Brune’s recent Sierra Club magazine editorial “All In” that calls for the an immediate move toward “a 100 percent clean energy economy” with wind energy, whose capacity is now equivalent to 60 large nuclear reactors, as its backbone.

In response to this demand, Cannara and the scholars write, “Our club cannot continue to express unscientific, un-environmental policies without making itself irrelevant to combating the very challenging future we all now present to our descendants… Our members deserve better than this.”

They present Brune and the Sierra Club with a back-of-the-envelope calculation that illustrates the absurdity of its wind energy capacity claims: If the 104 nuclear reactors in the US generate 19 percent of U.S. electricity, then – based on Brune’s analysis – we should conservatively expect wind energy to produce 11 percent. But the U.S. Energy Information Agency numbers reveal that wind only generates 3.5 percent.

The letter openly asks, “Why do Sierra editors not know the facts and not prevent such oddly incorrect statements being promulgated to publicly embarrass our club?”

This open letter is just part of a recent trend of prominent environmentalists taking the movement to account for its unscientific and radical position on wind energy. Special advisor to President Obama and former chair of the hard left think tank Center for American Progress John Podesta recently claimed that such a position is “completely impractical” and not the “way to achieve a clean energy economy.”