A state Superior Court Judge, Ernest Goldsmith, made a strongly worded call for CPUC to disclose Picker’s SONGS correspondence.

"This is a big deal. This is not a trivial issue to the taxpayers of California. And just like the San Bruno events [natural gas explosion that killed eight people] were not a trivial deal, and when something is big enough, it’s just got to come out. It’s going to come out, and it’s either going to be horribly painful, or you can just do the right thing."

8.

Today, over 90 percent of California residents live in counties with air the classified as “unhealthy”.[19]

California has seven of the 10 most polluted metropolitan areas in that state and 11 of the worst 25.[19] Los Angeles-Long Beach, Bakersfield, and Fresno-Madera were the regions with the worst smog levels in the country in 2017.[19]

Between 2011 and 2016, Gov. Brown’s time in office, electricity prices rose nearly four times more (16.7 percent) in California than they did nationally (3.7 percent).

Anything that increases the cost of things like energy and food is regressive, disproportionately impacting the poor, who must spend more of their income on these necessities. California’s mild climate doesn’t remove the energy insecurity of poor families.[20]

Expensive energy harms the poor in another way: by driving manufacturers out of California. From 2012 to 2016, California’s industrial electricity prices rose 14%, while national average prices rose one percent.[21]

Gov. Brown claims, audaciously, to be a climate leader. In truth, carbon emissions rose 3.2 percent in California between 2011 and 2015, even as they declined 3.7 percent in the average over the remaining 49 states.[21]

One of the areas California policymakers have greatest influence is in-state electricity generation. Here too we see that California’s in-state emissions from electricity generation rose from 33 to 44 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions between 2011 and 2015.[21]

In 2016, emissions from electricity produced within California decreased by 19 percent, but two-thirds of that decline came from increased production from the state’s hydro-electric dams, due to it being a rainier year, and thus had nothing to do with the state’s energy policies, while approximately a third of the decline came from increased solar and wind.[22]

9.

Has Gov. Brown’s war on nuclear been driven by ideology, financial self-interest, or an interest in maintaining fossil fuel contributions for his political machine? We will never know for certain, but the answer is probably “all of the above.”

What’s notable however is that the behavior of Gov. Brown and his allies was inconsistent with the Malthusian small-is-beautiful ideology they promoted. Not only did Brown and his allies live high-energy lives characterized by extensive jet travel, they constantly promoted energy projects — principally oil and natural gas, but also renewables — at increasingly large scales.

And even if anti-nuclear ideology (Malthusian or not) were a main driver of Gov. Brown’s anti-nuclear actions, it’s notable that anti-nuclear ideology supports the promotion of non-nuclear energy sources. Had anti-nuclear ideology contradicted Gov. Brown’s financial interests, his actions might have been different.

What’s also clear from the evidence is that Brown and his allies have long traded energy project permitting, regulation, and subsidies for campaign contributions. These exchanges have been well-documented by Consumer Watchdog, a Santa Monica-based organization that is vociferously anti-nuclear.

In the 1970s, when Brown was governor for the first time, he was criticized for using federal solar grants to support his political operation. “It’s just a big solar pork barrel,” a Friends of the Earth lobbyist told a reporter for the Berkeley Barb in the mid-seventies. Brown ally “Tom [Hayden] would scream if some right-wing Republican put his cronies on the payroll and then used them to do precinct work for his own re-election campaign.”

Ideology has no doubt been as important for Brown to justify his actions to himself and others. It is notable that at the time Brown’s family went into business with the Indonesian military generals they were in the thick of killing somewhere between 500,000 and three million people in one of the bloodiest anti-communist purges of the 20th Century.

“To this day, Jerry’s very sensitive about it,” said the Sacramento Bee reporter, Dan Walters, who discovered the ties. “He just hates the idea that people will bring it up because what it is, is the Brown family is in partnership with these corrupt, murderous dictators. It’s not something that a Jerry Brown wants to be associated with.”[23]

Nor does Brown want to be associated with killing nuclear, despite the overwhelming evidence from the historical record. At various moments Gov. Brown has portrayed himself as ambivalent about nuclear, including Diablo Canyon. “Nuclear’s got issues,”Brown said at a 2012 conference, “but it’s good for greenhouse gases. It’s pretty reliable. So I’m open to it.”

However, it is simply impossible to reconcile such a statement with the actions by Brown and his allies to close San Onofre and Diablo Canyon, making it difficult to avoid the conclusion that Brown was deliberately trying to deceive audiences about what was really happening behind the scenes.

Readers who have followed the San Onofre scandal will note that our interpretation of the events at SONGS is different from the mainstream interpretation by journalists and other anti-corruption researchers, principally Consumer Watchdog.

For most journalists and the Consumer Watchdog authors, SONGS had to be closed in response to a mechanical failure of the steam generator. Southern California Edison, its owner, then used its influence to get a sweetheart deal out of the CPUC Commissioners. In this story, CPUC was “captured” by SoCalEdison.

But the evidence does not support the story of regulatory capture. In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that it was the Brown Administration, through CPUC, that captured Southern California Edison and, now, Pacific Gas & Electric. It was CPUC’s president that raised the issue of permanently closing SONGS — something Edison executives were not contemplating. In fact, they were working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to restart the plant.

Further, CPUC’s president dictated the exact terms of the deal that were eventually accepted by all parties, including the anti-nuclear groups that were in on the secret meetings. It wasn’t Edison who laid out the terms. The terms CPUC’s president Peevey laid out were so specific that the Edison executive famously grabbed the Polish hotel stationary so he could write it down.[24]

The terms of the deal the CPUC president offered Edison were so specific, and involved such a large sum of money from California’s citizens — $4.7 billion — that it is inconceivable for this researcher to believe Gov. Brown lacked foreknowledge.

There is now 40 years of evidence of Gov. Brown interfering at even the smallest levels with CPUC and other energy business.

Above we gave three specific examples, just in his recent time as governor: his lobbying a Commissioner to win a PG&E natural gas project; his firing of two state environmental regulators at the behest of Occidental Petroleum; and Brown’s request that the state map his ranch for possible oil and gas deposits.

And in the 1970s we saw even more significant activity by Brown’s closest allies including: changing pollution regulations to benefit his family’s Indonesian oil monopoly; killing Sundesert; and lobbying Mexico’s President to approve a natural gas project.

I will close with a reflection on the legacy of Diablo Canyon and its 1960s champion Will Siri. With nuclear energy, Siri understood, we can lift all humans out of poverty while reversing humankind’s negative environmental impact. We can, in short, have nature and prosperity for all.

The great man and mountaineer’s vision of vibrant California cities powered with abundant and cheap clean nuclear energy remains alive through the writings of ecomodenists and atomic humanists around the world — including those of us who have been fighting to save Diablo Canyon.

But, as we watch a corrupt political establishment vote to close our largest source of clean energy, what we must also take away from Siri’s life is that having a humanistic vision isn’t enough: one also must have fortitude and courage.

[1] "California," Environmental Progress, accessed on January 11, 2018.

[2] Will Siri, Sierra Club Oral History Project, 1977.

[3] Wellock, T.R., Critical Masses: Opposition to Nuclear Power in California, 1998.

[4] William Vogt, "Road to Survival," 1948.

[5] Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (1977), pp 3–35

[6] Robert Wyss, The Man Who Built the Sierra Club (2016)

[7] Dan Walters, “The Brown Link to Indonesian Firm,” Lodi News Sentinel, October 17, 1990.

[8] Liza Tucker, “Brown’s Dirty Hands,” Consumer Watchdog, August 2016.

[9] Alvin Weinberg, "Global Effects of Man's Production of Energy," Science, October 18, 1974.

[10] "Challenging year ahead for PG&E Company," Ukiah Daily Journal, October 11, 1974.

[11] "Rally spurs Brown to oppose Diablo," San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune, July 1, 1979.

[12] Paul Ehrlich, "An Ecologist's Perspective on Nuclear Power," Federation of American Science Public Interest Report Vol. 28, No. 5-6, 1975.

[13] Jeff Gerth, “Gov. Brown Supporting Projects that Aid a Mexican Contributor,” The New York Times, March 11, 1979.

[14] Mark A. Stein, "Utility to Ask Voters for 18-Month Rancho Seco Reprieve," Los Angeles Times, March 11, 1988.

[15] Associated Press, "Gov. Jerry Brown had state workers research oil on family ranch," Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2015.

[16] Jeff McDonald, "San Onofre plan details under scrutiny," San Diego Union-Tribune, March 14, 2015.

A sworn statement (Declaration of Stephen Pickett, April 28, 2015) indicates A4NR’s attorney, Geesman, had been singled out by then President Peevey as important to the potential success of a SONGS settlement:

“President Peevey made it clear, however, that in the event of a permanent shutdown of SONGS he thought it would be best for SCE to engage in settlement negotiations with appropriate consumer groups and other interested parties, and bring a settlement proposal to the CPUC for consideration. President Peevey specifically mentioned John Geesman, who represents the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, as one possible party.”

[17] Jeff McDonald, "Aguirre pushing from Brown's emails," San Diego Union-Tribune, November 13, 2015.

[18] Tony Kovaleski, Liz Wagner and Felipe Escamilla, "Attorneys Suggest Evidence Isn't Safe at CPUC Amid Federal Investigation," NBC Bay Area, October 16, 2014.

[19] “State of the Air 2017: People at Risk In 25 Most Ozone-Polluted Cities," American Lung Association.

[20] "One in three U.S. households faced challenges in paying energy bills in 2015," U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2015.

[21] U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2017.

[22] Per data from the Energy Information Agency, in-state electricity production from natural gas declined by 19 TWh in 2016, while Hydro increased by 15.1 TWh, Solar by 6.2 TWh, and Wind by 1.3 TWh. These four fuels represent the vast majority of changes in electricity generation for 2016.

[23] Laer Pearce, "Jerry Brown, oil baron," The Washington Post, April 16, 2010.

[24] Jeff McDonald, "Hotel notes show San Onofre deal hatched early," The San Diego Union-Tribune, April 10, 2015.