>>12223382In response, Brower quit and started a new group, Friends of the Earth (FOE). “There’s no more important issue in my life,” said Brower, than to “see that Friends of the Earth does everything it can, here and abroad, to stop the nuclear experiment.”
Would you be shocked to learn that the founding donor of FOE was oilman Robert Anderson, owner of Atlantic Richfield? He gave FOE the equivalent of $500,000 in 2019 dollars. “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.”
