>>11080308“What was David Brower doing accepting money from an oilman?” his biographer wondered. The answer is that he was developing the environmental movement’s strategy of promoting renewables as a way to greenwash the killing of nuclear plants and the expanded use of fossil fuels.
At the exact same time, California’s former governor, Edmund “Pat” Brown, was raising $100 billion (in 2019 dollars) from U.S. banks for Indonesia’s state oil company. In exchange, he received exclusive rights to sell Indonesian oil in California and a $360,000 (in 2019 dollars) donation to his son Jerry’s campaign for governor.
After he won, Gov. Jerry Brown’s aides took actions to defend the family’s oil monopoly. One of them, acting as an air pollution regulator, killed a refinery being built by Chevron, which would have competed directly with the Brown oil business, while another worked to kill nuclear plants.
By 1976, activists who feared that cheap nuclear energy would fuel overpopulation had taken over the Sierra Club. The organization’s new executive director proposed a strategy to foment hysteria about nuclear in order to impose regulations to make nuclear expensive.
"Our campaign stressing the hazards of nuclear power will supply a rationale for increasing regulation,” he explained, “add to the cost of the industry, and render its economics less attractive.”
Along with groups like Union of Concerned Scientists and NRDC, Sierra Club claimed that the clean if slightly warmer water that comes out of nuclear plants was a kind of “thermal pollution,” and demanded unnecessary and expensive measures to mitigate the non-problem.
Working together, Brown and the Sierra Club killed so many nuclear power plants between 1976 and 1979 that, had they been built, California would today be generating all of its electricity from zero-emissions sources.
