My reading of the political argument is a bit different. Recent elections testify to a strengthening antipathy to expert authority. In an argument about nuclear power, the authoritarian experts are all going to be on one side. If the authoritarian experts happen to win, and then within a decade or two something awful happens as it inevitably will, that will just undermine those authoritarian experts even more. Then how will they convince the public to stop eating meat or whatever?
Some people believe that vaccines cause autism. Experts assure us that they do not. If we vaccinate children some of them will be autistic and vaccines will be blamed, which will reduce confidence in experts. Therefore we should stop vaccinating children.
Yet clearly the answer is not to stop vaccinating children. That's letting the terrorists win. The answer is to do the right thing even if loud people are wrong about it, and answer them with facts and evidence when they object.
If the opposition is reasonable then the truth will out. If they're unreasonable then you have to fight them because you always have to fight unreasonable people. You can't get out of it by giving them what they want because in five minutes they'll find some other irrational thing to want and if you keep giving in, by the end of the day the world will be on fire.
