Starting in 1970s America, Democrats began to wage total war on nuclear energy. The risks were exaggerated but emotion sells, especially when it was promoted by their allies in media.
In 1994, they got their wish. Senator John Kerry and Bill Clinton congratulated each other on finally strangling U.S. nuclear science, and therefore nuclear energy, into a coma.
What happened next is well-known. The war on nuclear had meant an increase in coal. Environmentalists who hated nuclear more than coal had touted biofuels and natural gas. Then natural gas took off and they hated that. Then they hated the biofuels they had lobbied to turn into law.
Politicization of science did not start with COVID-19, it has been happening for as long as science has been public policy. But no travesty of partisan anti-science beliefs was greater than during the Clinton years, where the White House gutted funding for NASA, reduced funding for the NIH, used the force of government to undermine medicine, and set climate change back decades.
Energy is one of the few times we should have been more like France.
If the rest of the world, including France, was more like the United States when it comes to agriculture, farmland equal to the entire country of India could have been sent back to nature without losing a calorie of food. When it comes to biology, France is near the bottom of science acceptance. Yet when it comes to energy, they are way ahead. So far ahead that when the 1999 Kyoto climate change "treaty" was proposed, they smartly picked a date before domestic nuclear output had increased, so they would easily meet their emissions target. They did not feel like they should be penalized because America had abandoned nuclear energy and used so much more coal.
If Senator John Kerry, ironically now President Biden's "U.S. special presidential envoy for climate" - a climate problem he helped create with his distrust of science - and President Bill Clinton had stayed out of the way we'd have done for nuclear plants what we did for cell phones, computers and everything else; revolutionized them. We'd have fourth generation nuclear plants with no possibility of meltdown. As impossible as cell phones causing cancer, which loons like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. promote, when he isn't ranting about vaccines.
Instead of revolutions like cell phones, we were handed tired old retreads like solar panels from 50 years ago and batteries from when those two politicians were in elected office. They crushed progress to satisfy their dislike of science, all while claiming they love science.
