In a sharp rebuke to the Jeffersonian-DSA model of 100% renewables under the BPRA, New York signals a return to the Hamiltonian-FDR vision of state-directed infrastructure for industrial growth and prosperity.
This week, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that the New York Power Authority will pursue at least one gigawatt of new nuclear power, marking the first major state-led nuclear development effort in a generation. It’s a small step, but a decisive one. And it confirms what the New York Energy Alliance and our allies have argued all along: true energy policy means production, not restriction. Growth, not rationing. Hamilton, not Jefferson.
For years, energy policy in New York has been dominated by a strain of neo-agrarian technocracy with the veneer of climate activism. It’s a dark mix of Andrew Cuomo’s political ambitions in the mid-2010s, combined with RFK Jr.’s anti-nuclear mysticism, Mark Jacobsen’s fuzzy climate math and Mark Ruffalo’s screams.
The Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), backed by the DSA and green NGOs constituted in the so-called Public Power Coalition was its latest expression. It claimed to follow in the footsteps of FDR, but it really was an act of eco-sabotage against the grid that he helped build. It is a plan to destroy firm power, starve nuclear energy of public investment, and tie New Yorkers’ public infrastructure to the whims of the weather.
This agenda would have used the power of the state to bully rural communities into trading farmland, forests, and viewsheds for seas of solar panels, while urban activists sneered about “bulldozing landowners.” But with Hochul’s nuclear directive, that premise has been rejected. By empowering NYPA to build nuclear, the state is reembracing what FDR called freedom from want, not through artificial scarcity, but through abundant, sovereign infrastructure.
“Translated into world terms,” FDR wrote, “that means economic understanding which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants, everywhere in the world.”
The order affirms that public investment should be directed toward projects of scale, permanence, and sovereignty, breaking the degrowth priesthood that treated baseload power as blasphemy. New Yorkers understand that you cannot run a civilization, let alone reindustrialize it, on intermittent power.
This pivot is not just a policy shift. It’s a philosophical one.
Jeffersonianism has always viewed man as a liability to be managed. It sees energy as a problem to be solved with behavioral nudges and shrinking footprints.
Hamiltonianism, by contrast, views man as a creative, transformative force made in the image of God. It believes in using science, credit, and statecraft to uplift humanity, not to manage its decline. It builds nuclear plants, hydro dams, and transmission lines. It powers productive industry. It sees energy not as something to be trimmed, but as the lifeblood of independence, culture and prosperity.
FDR was a Hamiltonian. He didn’t see state-directed infrastructure as a utilitarian project, but an American one: to electrify farms, power factories, and erase the line between town and country. He believed in projects that could “transcend mere power development,” “distribute and diversify industry,” and help lead “logically to national planning… involving many states and the future lives and welfare of millions.” He believed in projects that could “touch and give life to all forms of human concerns.”
That spirit didn’t end at the water’s edge. FDR saw the TVA and the St. Lawrence-FDR Power Project in Massena, NY not just as domestic triumphs, but as models for the world, using public credit and state planning to build lasting peace and productive international development. He knew the alternative to such planning was collapse.
In New York Energy Alliance’s public testimony, policy statements, and media appearances, we have called for a real energy agenda, which includes NYPA returning to its roots and leading the nation in building modern infrastructure that serves the general welfare.
Today’s announcement suggests the tide is turning. Hochul’s directive signals that the American System is alive: long-term public investment in high-productivity infrastructure, aimed not at managing decline but expanding the human horizon.
We know one reactor is not enough. The road ahead is long, and the resistance, from the same anti-nuclear mystics who sabotaged Indian Point, will be fierce. And as trendy as it might be, this moment does not call for blind “abundance” utilitarianism, but as FDR put it, an “enlightened administration” that can “adapt existing economic organizations”, like NYPA, to the service of the people.
So yes, this moment matters. Because it proves the dam is cracking. The ideology of managed decline is faltering. The anti-human energy consensus is losing its grip. And in its place, something older and nobler is beginning to stir: It’s time to build.