On a hot Monday morning last June, standing in front of the Niagara hydroelectric station in Upstate New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul spoke of the future. Once the industrial home of titans like General Electric, IBM, and Kodak, the bustling manufacturing basin of Upstate fell into decline in the 1970s when those titans chased lower wages offshore. “Hard-working families across Upstate,” Hochul said, “were left wondering, what is our future?”
Now Gov. Hochul wants to deliver exactly that — a future for Upstate New York — in the form of reindustrialization: advanced manufacturing for products like semiconductors. Such manufacturing facilities, though, “don’t run on dreams — they need to be powered, they need a lot of electricity,” she explained. Indeed, new manufacturing planned in the wake of Biden-era policies is increasing electricity demand across the country.
“So to power New York’s future, we need three things: reliability, affordability, and sustainability,” Hochul said. She had a specific solution in mind, one that blue-state liberals like her have all but consigned to the past: nuclear energy. The state would be returning to the power of the atom, thirty-seven years after its last nuclear unit was built, and four years after her predecessor in Albany closed one of the state’s four plants. It’s a seismic shift in New York State energy policy.
In choosing nuclear, Hochul wants “to show this nation that blue states like New York can dream big and build big because we believe in the philosophy of abundance.” The bestselling book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson clearly made an impression.
But if Abundance reminds liberals of the importance of state capacity, Hochul’s announcement should remind the book’s…
Auteur: Fred Stafford
