Who pays?

The charge is false. No utility can pass on such contributions to the rate payer; they are paid by the shareholders.

Apart from being false, it is also revealing. It's OK for the Sierra Club to shell out $500,000 in California, and for the sham foundations to throw in further millions for propaganda designed to protect the lifestyle of an affluent elite of pseudo-intellectuals, all on top of the free media publicity (worth, on network TV, $60,000 a minute); but a utility or other corporation has no right to spend money as it sees fit.

But it goes deeper than that. What the crusaders are implying (when they attribute their defeat in California to money, for example) is that people's minds can be bought for dollars.

Can they? How many dollars per widow and orphan does a scientist get for documenting that nuclear power saves lives by replacing less safe power generation? How were 200,000 scientists and engineers bribed into endorsing nuclear power last year? And for that matter, how many pieces of silver do you have to pay a physician to condemn smoking or to endorse vaccination of children against small-pox?

What consumers will have to pay if the superstition mongers have their way is higher rates for electricity and the costs of an economy crippled by the lack of energy; but that is not all. They will also pay a toll in health, and some of them will pay with their lives for the political ambitions of those who think small is beautiful when it is available to a privileged few and the rest get nothing.