Leadership Quote by Judy Biggert

Biggert frames nuclear power less as a technological bet than as a political permission slip: if Americans want more electricity without more guilt, they have to accept an energy source that still makes many people uneasy. The sentence is engineered to sound like reluctant pragmatism. “If we are to meet” positions the claim as a necessary response to an external force (demand), not an ideological preference. The villain is anonymous and structural: “growing electricity demand,” a phrase that implies inevitability and quietly sidesteps questions about conservation, efficiency standards, or the politics of consumption.

“Without significantly increasing emissions” does careful work. It concedes the climate premise, but with the hedge “significantly,” leaving room for incremental emissions increases or for framing some tradeoffs as acceptable. The rhetorical centerpiece is “diverse supply,” a consensus-friendly term that smuggles in a specific conclusion: “nuclear power must be part of that mix.” Diversity reads like moderation, but “must” turns the policy menu into a requirement.

The subtext is coalition management. This is a Republican lawmaker (Biggert served in Congress during the 2000s) speaking into a moment when climate language was becoming harder to ignore, while nuclear was being rebranded as “clean” and domestically reliable. By emphasizing “mix,” she lowers the temperature: no one is being asked to go all-in on reactors, only to stop treating nuclear as taboo. It’s an argument built to neutralize fear with arithmetic, and to shift the debate from “Should we build nuclear?” to “How could we possibly not?”