Natural Resources Defense Council

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is a United States–based 501(c)(3) non-profit international environmental advocacy group, with its headquarters in New York City and offices in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Bozeman, India, and Beijing. The group was founded in 1970 in opposition to a hydroelectric power plant in New York.

As of 2019, the NRDC had over three million members, with online activities nationwide, and a staff of about 700 lawyers, scientists and other policy experts.

NRDC was founded in 1970. Its establishment was partially an outgrowth of the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference v. Federal Power Commission, the Storm King case. The case centered on Con Ed's plan to build the world's largest hydroelectric facility at Storm King Mountain in New York's Hudson Valley. The proposed facility would have pumped vast amounts of water from the Hudson River to a reservoir and released it through turbines to generate electricity at peak demand.

A dozen concerned citizens organized the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference in opposition to the project, citing its environmental impact, and the group, represented by Whitney North Seymour Jr., his law partner Stephen Duggan, and David Sive, sued the Federal Power Commission and successfully achieved a ruling that groups such as Scenic Hudson and other environmentalist groups had the standing to challenge the FPC's administrative rulings. Realizing that continued environmentalist litigation would require a nationally organized, professionalized group of lawyers and scientists, Duggan, Seymour, and Sive obtained funding from the Ford Foundation and joined forces with Gus Speth and three other recent Yale Law School graduates of the class of 1969: Richard Ayres, Edward Strohbehn Jr., and John Bryson.

John H. Adams was the group's first staff member and Duggan its founding chairman; Seymour, Laurance Rockefeller, and others served as members of the board.

In September 1979 The Ford Foundation pulled funding for the NRDC alongside the Environmental Defense Fund after Henry Ford II said groups receiving foundation money were "antibusiness" and "biting the hand that feeds them." The NRDC had recently challenged the FDA's interim approval for Coca-Cola's first plastic bottle made of acrylonitrile/styrene. The FDA reported that test animals exposed to acrylonitrile had "significantly lowered body weight and other adverse effects, including lesions in the central nervous system and growths in the ear ducts." and suspended its approval.

In the 1970s, NRDC sought to block expansion of the Indian Point nuclear power plant in New York. It had advocated for the closure of the plant until it ceased operations in 2021. NRDC has also sought to close the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California. In 2018, the NRDC took no position on legislative proposals in New Jersey to subsidize three of its nuclear reactors. NRDC has argued that nuclear power is not a viable energy source to mitigate climate change, arguing that it poses public health and safety risks through nuclear waste and nuclear proliferation. In 2014, NRDC president Frances Beinecke said that the NRDC could not support nuclear power because it would lose donations.

According to NRDC, rooftop solar power plays an "essential role... in our shared mission to confront the climate crisis." However, its activism on rooftop solar has sparked controversy. In 2022, NRDC called for reductions in subsidies for rooftop solar power in California, prompting criticism of NRDC by other environmental groups.