HOW THE CLEANEST & GREENEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY — NUCLEAR — BECAME VIEWED AS BAD FOR ENVIRONMENT: “While California & others embraced nuclear, faction in Sierra Club saw cheap power as opening door to more people & more development.”

Even the Sierra Club, try as they might, couldn’t prevent California’s growth. The 1970s was a period when California had about half its current population, as Victor Davis Hanson wrote earlier this year. While the Sierra Club and others were busy stopping nuclear development, Jerry Brown and other Democrats in the 1970s also opposed “the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people,” VDH writes, leading to he dubbed as California’s current “Engineered Drought.”

Brown’s reactionary efforts also set the tone for a state whose attitude has gone from NIMBY — “Not In My Back Yard” to BANANAs — “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.”

To be fair though, some then had other motives for not speaking up to move technology forward. As Pete Townshend confessed back in 1980, “I’m for nuclear power, but I haven’t told anyone because I am still hoping to f*** Jane Fonda, like everybody dreams of doing who’s involved in the No Nuke movement.”

(Via Power Line.)