Maybe this is already widely understood on here, but I feel understanding how the anti-communist left was leveraged to fight nuclear energy.
As more people are reading this I wanted to share what I consider to be a superior analysis https://communistperspective.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-nuclear-debate-for-and-against.html
And to be clear, you can be pro-renewable without being anti-nuclear I am referring to many of the European Green parties that are anti-nuclear above all else. Nuclear has it’s drawbacks, but it is preferable to climate change, for now.
When I first learned about the history of the industrial revolution I was shocked to find out that the step between beasts of burden and hydro power was human power… People in giant hamster wheels in some cases. The thinking was that animals were too stupid or difficult to train to get them to speed up or slow down as needed, so humans that could follow instructions was an improvement. Keep in mind that humans can only produce about 1-2 kilowatt hours per day.
Hydro is the original “robots” taking our jobs. Coal/oil then made it so you didn’t have to be near water. You could extract resources and bring it elsewhere.
This interview lays out how the extraction of primary sector resources from the global south by the global north is what more or less produced the industrial revolution.
Primary sector : food, energy (at certain points those two are the same - human and animal power) and minerals.
Look up maps of these three things, Europe is poor as hell. Oil is just the latest iteration of this phenomenon, but it is central to empire. I don’t remember who it was, but an economist said that the advances in production are far less tied to technology than to energy. So the advent of the industrial revolution was due largely to the increased availability of fossil fuels/steam, than to “ingenuity”.