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Meet Mr. Nuke Bailout: Why John Bryson is Unfit for Energy Secretary
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Race
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Dec 08, 2008 10:44am |
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| Category | Opinion |
| News Date | Monday, December 8, 2008 04:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Among the names on the apparent short list for Barack Obama’s all-important choice as Secretary of Energy is that of John Bryson, former head of Southern California Edison.
As the embodiment of greenwashed corporate piracy and radioactive public bailouts, Bryson’s appointment would send a terrible message.
Bryson is now being hyped as “an advocate of hybrid cars.” No doubt he is reinventing his image. On a personal basis, he may be the finest of individuals.
But John Bryson will forever epitomize the bailout of the nuke power industry and the horrific catastrophe of electric utility deregulation, including the contrived energy crisis that cost Californians tens of billions of dollars and allowed them to be robbed by the disgraced Enron.
Early in his career, Bryson helped found the Natural Resources Defense Council. Under Jerry Brown he headed the California Public Utilities Commission, where he played a role in the installation of some 17,000 windmills. He also sold his soul---and much of California’s---to the nuke power industry.
When Bryson left the CPUC to head the huge Southern California Edison utility company, many heralded the switch as an eco-triumph. But in the early 1990s, California’s green community proposed a pioneer renewable construction project that would have provided the state with some 600 megawatts of Solartopian power free from fossil and nuclear fuels.
Bryson attacked, falsely charging that the power was unnecessary and expensive. In defense of the state’s four reactors, all sited near earthquake faults, he used Edison’s huge legal and political resources to kill the proposed renewable energy bank.
With all those windmills and solar panels safely buried, Bryson drafted AB1890, the catastrophic deregulation law that opened the door for Enron. |
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