Jeff Garzik serves as the founder and chairman of the policy institute Washington Power and Light. Before co-founding Bloq, he spent five years as a Bitcoin core developer and ten years at Red Hat. His work with the Linux kernel is now found in every Android phone and data center running Linux today.
Ralph Benko serves as co-founder and general counsel to Washington Power and Light. He is the co-founder and general counsel for F1R3FLY.io and has worked in or with 3 White Houses, two executive branch agencies, and the Congress as well as many political and policy institutes. He is an award winning columnist.
Determined to cut greenhouse gasses as the climate change culprit? Committed to equitable prosperity as a staple of global justice?
Want both? The gold standard of any technology is years of field testing.
To paraphrase Linus Torvalds, the real world is the best test lab in the world. There are two types of technologies:
1. Tech such as nuclear that survived real world field testing.
2. High risk, unproven “hopium” tech.
It is a bad idea to pin the well-being of humanity – based on delivering cheap, reliable, non-greenhouse gas emitting electricity at scale -- on magical thinking about unproven technology. What is needed is good hearted hard-nosed pragmatism… after squandering decades in political hopium-smoking.
Dispelling myths will inhibit Uncle Sam from misallocating tax dollars to pie-in-the-sky energy projects unsupported by engineering data. Congress recently authorized, per the White House, hundreds of billions of dollars on unproven technologies (cue the deep sigh).
This money could be used, instead, to build gigawatts of real, cheap, zero-emission generating capacity. Yes, nuclear.
We are not representatives of or shills for nuclear power companies. Our mission, at the newly founded policy institute Washington Power and Light, is to eliminate the obstacles that cause nuclear power construction to go far over budget, behind schedule ( bankrupting Westinghouse, for example), becoming unaffordable. We are all for replacing the nuclear energy dinosaurs, corporate and government.
It would be politically suicidal for an elected official to say she was intentionally choking off cheap, reliable energy. Do you believe C02-induced climate change is an existential threat? Well, breaking the political logjam may depend on a role-reversal: the left taking the lead on nuclear energy.
The growing consensus on the non-magical thinking left is that nuclear energy is essential to our survival … and is safe, reliable and cheap. Solar and wind would double or triple (as in Europe and elsewhere) our electricity costs … for a non-solution. Solar and wind are appropriate in some sunny and windy locales, but renewables do not offer a comprehensive solution.
Praise to California Governor Gavin Newsom, a charismatic center-left leader who could ride nuclear energy all the way to the White House. Per “ Doomberg:”
“To Newsom’s credit, he worked behind the scenes to extend Diablo Canyon’s license to operate, spending significant political capital to do so. He won overwhelming support in the California State Legislature, collaborated with the Biden administration to help offset the costs, and faced down opposition from the most extreme elements of the state’s notoriously radical environmental movement.
…
“‘ Have no doubt, President Biden is serious about doing everything possible to get the U.S. to be powered by clean energy,’ Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Kathryn Huff told attendees at a nuclear energy assembly in Washington, D.C., earlier this summer. ‘ Nuclear energy is really essential to this,’ she said.
With near-unanimous bipartisan support and backed by the full weight of the Presidency, surely this was a done deal, right? Wrong.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission initially denied the application to extend Diablo Canyon’s license. Yikes! Yet take heart. The Commission then reversed course and offered a path to keep it operating through the end of the decade.
Elected officials trump bureaucrats. And a nonpartisan consensus is emerging, even on the left, that it is safe to generate nuclear power with waste recycled into new fuel or reliably contained for a million years.
Is such pragmatism politically practical? Indeed yes. The arc of history is often bent toward justice… by the deft use of political judo.
Saul Alinsky subtitled his magnum opus, Rules for Radicals, “ a pragmatic primer for realistic radicals.” Pragmatism and idealism are complementary, not contradictory, values.
It was the Democrats (Rostenkowski, O’Neill, Bradley, Gephardt, including the young Senator Joe Biden) who led cutting the top marginal income tax rates back in the 80s from 70% to 50% to 28%, the latter by a 97-3 majority in the US Senate. Not Reagan.
Deregulation’s most successful champion was President Jimmy Carter. Not Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Bush or Trump. Consider the craft beer renaissance that Carter unleashed!
So kudos to Governor Newsom and other pragmatic center-left thought leaders.
Ezra Klein: “Smaller, modular nuclear reactors could make new miracles possible, like cars and planes that don’t need to be refueled or recharged. This is a world progressives, in particular, should want to hasten into existence. Clean, abundant energy is the foundation on which a more equal, just and humane world can be built.”
Bill Gates’s advisor Ken Caldeira. Per Reuters, “A former anti-nuclear activist, he has aligned with scientists who believe nuclear power – which doesn’t emit greenhouse gasses – could help wean ourselves off fossil fuels.”
NASA’s James Hansen: “’It’s very hard to see a pathway out of this without a significant role for nuclear power,’ said the pioneering American climatologist James Hansen….”
The politically ambidextrous Jonathan Rauch in The Real Obstacle to Nuclear Power: “Nuclear power is in a strange position today. Those who worry about climate change have come to see that it is essential. … To be sure, environmentalists do not love nuclear power. They much prefer solar and wind. But as Babbitt told me, ‘They’re all coming around. The attitudes in the environmental community are perceptibly changing.’ Although only a handful of the mainline environmental organizations are openly ‘nuclear inclusive’ … many quietly accept that nuclear power can be part of the climate solution, and perhaps a necessary part.”
The consensus, as summed up by Rauch and the scientists whose work he reports, and as exemplified by Caldeira and Gates and Hansen is settling on field-tested nuclear technologies.
Let the Democrats fall in love, Republicans in line, with nuclear power: friend to working people and the environment.
The future is a pragmatic energy policy connected to molecular reality.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.