Ten Across Conversations

"The foundation of the immigration system and the battles... all of that had been built brick by brick in El Paso, through both Republican and Democratic administrations." —Jazmine Ulloa

Episode Description:

To much of the country, Interstate 10 reaches El Paso on its way to somewhere else, the city seen as little more than a name on a sign between San Antonio and Phoenix, or as a backdrop for whatever border story dominates the news. Yet its position at a key gap in the mountains, El Paso del Norte, has anchored a pivotal crossroads for as long as people have traversed the continent. The city shares a binational life and generations of family ties with Ciudad Juárez, the older settlement on the southern bank of the Rio Grande. The two have been bound together since long before the U.S.-Mexico War placed an international boundary between them, a boundary whose precise course remained contested for decades.

In El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, New York Times national reporter Jazmine Ulloa returns to her hometown to tell its story through the lives of five families across a century. In that time, El Paso has been a testbed and proving ground for U.S. border and immigration policy, and the lives of its residents chart the complicated motives, successes and failures, from the establishment of the Border Patrol in the 1920s to today's Department of Homeland Security. It is a history worth understanding now, as the biggest shifts in national immigration policy play out most pointedly along the I-10 corridor.

The book was inspired by a tragedy. On August 3, 2019, a gunman drove to El Paso from the Dallas area and killed 23 people at a Walmart, and later admitted choosing a border city to dissuade Hispanic immigration. Ulloa, then covering national politics for The Boston Globe, was on a plane home within a day. From the memorial that had sprung up in the Walmart parking lot, she could hear the traffic on the nearby Interstate 10. The sound that had once called her to leave became a reason to return, to understand the place she came from.

In this episode, she joins Duke Reiter to discuss what she found, why she considers the comparison between El Paso and Ellis Island imperfect yet useful, and why the Ten Across region is such a revealing lens on immigration. This is where migration, enforcement and the question of who belongs are felt first and most intensely. What takes shape here tends to reach the rest of the country. As Ulloa argues, every city is now El Paso.

Relevant Articles and Resources

• El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory
• REPORT: "Border Control: Revised Strategy Is Showing Some Positive Results"
• "Jazmine Ulloa on 'El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory'"

Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts

• Kyle Paoletta on American Oasis and the Southwest's Claim on the American Story
• Two Texas Cities Reexamining Data Center Deals, with Robert Moore of El Paso Matters
• Alternative Visions of the Southern U.S. Border Yesterday, Tomorrow and Today

Credits
Host: Duke Reiter
Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano
Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler

Guest Bio:

Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter for The New York Times. She previously reported for the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, where she was part of a team that won the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting. A native of El Paso, she started out as a journalist in Texas, where she worked for newspapers in Brownsville, San Antonio and Austin. She has made appearances on MSNBC, CNN and CBS, as well as in Al Jazeera's documentary television program Fault Lines.

Tags: Governance, Equity, Commerce, Border, El Paso, Mexico, Texas, Arizona, California

Links to Apple Music, Spotify and Google Play:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ten-across-conversations/id1582715331?uo=4
https://open.spotify.com/show/2NPKV4nAArPPknNEIGx0Zx

"This is really a story about... the people who are causing the pollution, harming the people who basically did nothing and are suffering the damages. And do those people who cause the harm owe the people who suffer the damages anything?" —Jeff Goodell, contributing writer at Rolling Stone and author of The Heat Will Kill You First 

July 2026 was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous United States, and Europe came through its hottest June-to-July period on record. At least 35,000 excess deaths have been counted across the continent's summer heatwaves — a figure produced by statistical modeling rather than by death certificates, and one that is still incomplete. Here in the Ten Across region, where extreme heat is not new, Maricopa County confirmed 645 heat deaths in 2023 and counts them one by one.

A September 2025 report from the Government Accountability Office describes extreme heat as the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States. Nonetheless, extreme heat has never met the criteria for a federal disaster declaration. Federal assistance is largely built around damage to physical infrastructure, while extreme heat mainly damages people. Mayors from this corridor, who have been managing heat longer than anyone, have been pressing to change that. Meanwhile there is still no federal heat standard protecting outdoor workers, and Texas and Florida — among the hottest states in the country — have passed laws barring their own cities from requiring employers to provide water breaks and shade.

The heat is also moving. In June 2021 a heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest, a region built for nothing like it. Among the hundreds who died was Sebastian Perez, a 38-year-old farmworker from Guatemala, two months into a job at an Oregon nursery. Within two weeks, scientists at World Weather Attribution announced the event would have been "virtually impossible" without human-caused climate change. In the five years since, the field has advanced to counting the deaths a heat wave would not otherwise have caused, and to tracing heat damage to the emissions of individual companies. That science now underpins lawsuits against fossil fuel producers, new laws in Vermont and New York, and a fight over the climate chapter in the reference manual federal judges consult.

In this episode, climate journalist Jeff Goodell returns to the podcast to discuss the summer behind us, the divide he has described between "the cooled and the cooked," and his current project on the rise of attribution science.

Relevant Articles and Resources

 "Framework for a Heat-Ready Nation" (Federation of American Scientists & Ten Across, July 2025) "The New American Inequality: The Cooled vs. the Cooked" (The New York Times, August 2025)
Copernicus Climate Change Service monthly climate bulletins (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, 2026)
Maricopa County Heat Surveillance (Maricopa County Department of Public Health)

Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts

Finding Optimism Amid the Climate Crisis with Jeff Goodell
Covering Climate Change as It Unfolds with Jeff Goodell
Building Heat Resilience with Kathy Baughman McLeod & David Hondula

Credits 

Host: Duke Reiter
Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano
Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler

Guest Bio

Jeff Goodell Jeff Goodell's latest book is the New York Times bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. He is the author of six previous books, including The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, which was a New York Times Critics Top Book of 2017. He has covered climate change for more than two decades at Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. As a commentator on climate and energy issues, he has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News and The Oprah Winfrey Show. He is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.

"There's maybe a more practical way to look at it, which is just understanding water as a communal resource, as something that is necessary to share rather than this thing that we divide up and profit on." — Kyle Paoletta

Kyle Paoletta opens his recent book, American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest with a claim similar to the one on which Ten Across is based: the Southwest "already looks like what the rest of America is becoming." Every year the country at large grows hotter, drier, more urban, more diverse. The desert cities got there first. His view of what lies ahead for the Southwest--and by extension, for the rest of the nation-- first required a deeper understanding of the fundamental nature of the place.

That is the case for treating this region as a preview rather than an exception, and it is why the Interstate 10 corridor is worth watching closely. What arrives here arrives everywhere, eventually.

Kyle is a journalist who grew up outside Albuquerque and left for the East Coast, where he found that almost no one knew the place he came from. Years later, his book takes the five largest desert cities, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tucson, and El Paso, and weaves them into a single story of people who learned to live where water is becoming more scarce.

In this conversation with Duke Reiter, he explains how a magazine called Arizona Highways and a relentless chamber of commerce sold the Arizona desert to the rest of the country, a playbook similarly run in Texas and Florida. He points to Las Vegas, which added hundreds of thousands of people without increasing its water use, and to El Paso, where the country’s first direct-to-distribution water recycling plant opens in 2028. He discusses Tucson's heritage of architecture designed for heat—knowledge the rest of the country is beginning to need—and argues that the short renegotiation cycles for Colorado River water may be a feature rather than a failure.

Ultimately, Kyle’s reflections on where the story of the Southwest is headed next may not be what you expect.

American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest is available from Pantheon.

https://www.kylepaoletta.com/

Relevant Articles and Resources

• Native American Tribes Came Together to Secure Their Rights to Colorado River Water. Four States Are Stalling the Deal (ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix, June 2026)
• TSMC Announces Additional $100 Billion Investment in Arizona (Arizona Commerce Authority, July 2026)
• Judge blocks Arizona water rule that halted new housing developments across the Valley (Arizona Mirror, April 2026)
• El Paso Water breaks ground on the nation's first direct-to-distribution water reuse facility (February 2025)

Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts

• Understanding Groundwater Risks in the Southwest with Jay Famiglietti
• Latest Deadpool Projections Inject New Urgency into Colorado River Negotiations
• Debunking the Water Myths of Western Cities with Grady Gammage Jr.
• Checking in on Tense Colorado River Negotiations with Anne Castle and John Fleck

Credits

Host: Duke Reiter
Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano
Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler

Guest Bio

Kyle Paoletta is a journalist, essayist, and cultural critic whose reporting and criticism have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and the Columbia Journalism Review, where he is a contributing writer. He earned a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Columbia University and worked for several years as a fact-checker at GQ, Harper's Magazine, and New York Magazine before becoming a full-time writer in 2020.

He grew up in New Mexico and now lives in Maine, where he is at work on a new book about the nation's relationship to the natural world, Out to Pasture: How Reviving the Wilderness Can Save America From Itself. American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest, is his first book.

"A large portion of an emergency manager's time is not doing active response. The administrative burden of writing grants, developing plans, reviewing plans, all of those tasks are what takes up a significant portion of time... So where we would say, hey, these smaller jurisdictions don't have time to go do this [adopt AI tools], the return on investment is almost higher in some of these places."
— Jeremy Greenberg

Emergency managers at the local level are being asked to do more with less, and artificial intelligence is arriving faster than the guidance for using it. That tension is especially pressing along the Interstate 10 corridor, one of the most disaster-prone regions in the country, where hurricanes, wildfire, flooding and extreme heat arrive as a matter of routine.

The Markle Foundation and Aspen Digital, a program of the Aspen Institute, have formed the AI for Disasters and Emergencies Initiative, or AIDE, a multi-sector, nonpartisan collaboration working with the RAND Corporation. Its first year of findings, published this month, points to real potential for human-centered AI to help small agencies stretch thin resources, and to the leadership, training and procurement conditions that make adoption work. An adoption playbook, capacity-building pilots and a summit in Austin this September are all ahead.

Jeremy Greenberg, who leads the effort for Aspen Digital, spent twenty-three years in federal emergency management and more than twenty as a volunteer firefighter. He argues the return on AI may be highest in the smallest offices, where one or two people carry grant writing, planning and response on the same desk. He is also candid about the field's harder problem: nobody, he says, has ever held a press conference to celebrate a disaster that didn't happen.In this episode, Greenberg discusses what those findings mean in practice, what the federal shift toward state and local responsibility means for the agencies absorbing it, and where a two-person office should start.

Follow the AIDE Initiative's playbook, research and September summit at https://www.aideinitiative.org/ 

Relevant Articles and Resources

• AIDE Summit 2026 (Austin, Texas, September 2026)
• REPORT: "AI for Disasters + Emergencies: A Way Forward" (The Markle Foundation, August 2026)
• REPORT: "Final Report of the President's Council to Assess the Federal Emergency Management Agency" (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, May 2026)
• "FEMA review signals shift to state-led disaster management" (StateScoop, May 2026)
• "Markle Foundation initiative aims to bring practical AI tools to emergency management" (StateScoop, June 2026)
• The AIDE Initiative — jurisdictions can submit input directly through the site

Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts

• AI Series: 10X Cities Are Using Digital Twins to Solve Complex Problems
• Why the Ten Across Geography Needs FEMA with Dr. Samantha Montano
• AI Series: Balancing Data Infrastructure Resource Demands
• 10X Convergence: The Region's Experts Convene to Address the Insurability Crisis

Credits

Host: Duke Reiter
Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano
Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler


About our Guest:

Jeremy Greenberg is Senior Advisor to Aspen Digital, where he leads the AI for Disasters and Emergencies Initiative, and President of Provincial Strategies LLC, an emergency and risk management consulting firm. He also serves as an Adjunct Instructor in the University of Chicago's Threat and Risk Management Program. He brings more than 23 years of federal service, including five years in the Senior Executive Service, with extensive experience leading national emergency preparedness, response, and risk management efforts.

Most recently, Jeremy led FEMA's Response Operations Division, overseeing national capabilities for identifying, alerting, and stabilizing threats and hazards, including the National Watch Center, FEMA Operations Center, National Response Coordination Center, and National Urban Search and Rescue program. He previously served as Chief of the National Response Coordination Center and FEMA Team Leader for the Domestic Emergency Support Team, responding to hundreds of presidentially declared disasters spanning hurricanes, wildfires, cyber incidents, and terrorist attacks.

Earlier in his career, Jeremy served in senior policy, performance, external affairs, and emergency management roles at FEMA and the U.S. Department of Transportation. His experience also includes the Department of Homeland Security, Booz Allen Hamilton, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Department of Justice. He holds degrees from American University and the National Defense University's College of International Security Affairs and is a graduate of the National Emergency Management Executive Academy and Harvard's National Preparedness Leadership Initiative.

Jeremy has dedicated over 20 years to serving his community as a volunteer firefighter, emergency medical technician, and instructor.

"If you use low-cost capital, you don't need tax credits to make the economics work. That's what excites me the most about how to scale this thing up. [...] How do I help every other community bank get in the game of building their green lending muscle and thinking about resilience? And if we can do that, then we don't need all of the tax credits and all the incentives that everybody has thought we needed in this industry." 
— Chris Castro, founding director and chief sustainability officer, Climate First Bank

Federal support for climate and clean energy programs is being dismantled, and the question of who will finance resilience has turned urgent for communities throughout the Ten Across geography. The money that flowed from Washington is thinning; the need is not.

Few people have approached that question from as many sides as Chris Castro. He built Orlando's sustainability and resilience office under Mayor Buddy Dyer, then moved to Washington as a presidential appointee, helping stand up the Department of Energy arm created to move historic infrastructure and climate funding to states, cities, and school districts — until the change in administration halted the work.

Now Castro is pursuing the same goal from inside the private sector. As founding director and chief sustainability officer of Climate First Bank, he is testing whether a community bank can finance resilience at a scale federal programs no longer will.

In this episode, Ten Across founder Duke Reiter and Chris Castro trace that arc from city hall to federal government to mission-driven banking, and land on a question 10X is now taking up with its own networks: what resilience officers need to know about finance.

Among the diverse professional perspectives featured over the years, few have resonated as consistently with Ten Across participants as those from the field of insurance and reinsurance. Insurance is often underappreciated as a knowledge industry in everyday life—yet serves a powerful translational role, converting detailed observations about the physical world into applied economic signals that shape investment, development, governance, and the choices available to individuals.

In this episode of Ten Across Conversations, host Duke Reiter welcomes Steve Bowen, chief science officer at Gallagher Re, for a discussion about how the business of risk is evolving in an era of more frequent and costly natural catastrophes. Steve's career has been defined not only by studying risk, but by helping others understand it. Combining experience in meteorology, broadcasting, and catastrophe analytics, he demonstrates how scientific evidence can become practical guidance for navigating the future.

Their conversation explores why extreme heat, hurricanes, severe storms, and other natural hazards are becoming increasingly consequential across the Ten Across geography—not only because of a changing climate, but because of where and how communities choose to grow. Along the way, Steve offers insight into the roles of artificial intelligence and federal data in risk analysis, how insurers evaluate the emerging risks associated with land use, large-scale development, and aging infrastructure, and why insurability has become an increasingly important lens through which to understand resilience.

As communities across the Ten Across geography face an accelerating need to anticipate and adapt to risks, often at challenging scales, the reinsurance industry's ability to quantify changing circumstances has the potential to do more than improve understanding—it can help build the case for action while there is still time to shape better outcomes.


Episode Credits

Host: Duke Reiter
Audio Production: Louie Duran
Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler 

As water scarcity intensifies across the Colorado River Basin, public attention has increasingly focused on data centers, AI, and the growing demand for resources in the Sun Belt. But are these technologies really driving the region's water challenges—or is the story more complicated?

In this episode of Ten Across Conversations, host Duke Reiter speaks with water policy expert Sarah Porter about the realities behind water use in the American West. Porter explains why shortages on the Colorado River are rooted as much in decades of over-allocation and management decisions as in climate change, and why common assumptions about population growth, urban development, and industrial water consumption often miss the mark.

The conversation explores the rise of data centers, the public concerns surrounding their water and energy demands, and the challenges communities face in balancing economic development with long-term resilience. Porter also offers a candid assessment of Arizona's water future, the difficult choices ahead, and why protecting groundwater, improving efficiency, and developing new water supplies will be critical for sustaining growth in an increasingly arid region.

A thoughtful and timely discussion about water, technology, public perception, and the decisions that will shape the future of the Ten Across geography.

Relevant Articles and Resources 
The Kyl Center for Water Policy at the Morrison Institute
Arizona Water Blueprint
Report: From Copper Cattle and Cotton to Chips and Cloud Computing: Large Water Uses in Central Arizona. (Kyl Center for Water Policy. February 2026)
Arizona Becomes Bellwether In Debate Over Data Centers’ Growing Demand Of Power And Water. (International Business Times. June 18 2026)
Arizona Data Center Tax Incentive Pause Signed by Governor Hobbs. (Bloomberg Tax. June 15 2026)
Tensions Are Rising Among States That Rely on the Colorado River. (New York Times. June 15, 2026)
Groundwater supplies in the Colorado River basin are falling fast. Is there a solution? (WBUR. June 15, 2026)
What's more important, Arizona, building houses or water? (Rhett Larson for The Arizona Republic, May 2026)

Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts 
Why 2026 Will Decide the Future of Water in the West, with Rhett Larson (June 4, 2026)
The Hard Decisions Ahead for Lower Basin Colorado River States with guest Terry Goddard (December 5, 2025)
Latest Deadpool Projections Inject New Urgency into Colorado River Negotiations with guests Kathryn Sorensen and Sarah Porter (September 19, 2025)
Understanding Groundwater Risks in the Southwest with Jay Famiglietti (June 6, 2025)
Checking in on Tense Colorado River Negotiations with Anne Castle and John Fleck (April 10, 2025)

Episode Credits 
Host: Duke Reiter
Audio Production: Louie Duran
Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler

As the Colorado River approaches a pivotal moment facing historically low flows and record-breaking shortages, decisions made in 2026 will help determine the future of water, energy, and economic security across the American West. Today, Ten Across Conversations shares an episode from Arizona State University's Labcoat Optional podcast, featuring Ten Across friend and water law expert Rhett Larson.
With existing Colorado River operating agreements approaching expiration, stakeholders across seven states, tribal nations, and two countries are grappling with how to manage a resource that faces increasing pressure from aridification and competing demands. Larson explains why these negotiations are among the most consequential water policy discussions in decades and what they reveal about the challenges ahead for communities throughout the Southwest.
Drawing connections between water governance, urban development, climate adaptation, and regional resilience, Lab Coat Optional host Pete Zroika chats with Larson to explore how long-foreseen challenges in the Colorado River Basin are becoming a present-day reality—and why rethinking our assumptions about growth and sustainability may be essential for the future.
Guest Bio
Rhett Larson is a Professor of Law and the Richard Morrison Professor of Water Law at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, where his research focuses on the impact of technological innovation on water rights regimes, particularly transboundary waters, and the sustainability implications of a human right to water. He specializes in dispute resolution and improved processes in water rights adjudications in Arizona and the Colorado River Basin. Professor Larson also practiced environmental and natural resource law with law firms in Arizona, focusing on water rights, water quality, and real estate transactions.
Relevant Articles and Resources 
What's more important, Arizona, building houses or water? (Rhett Larson for The Arizona Republic, May 2026)
Agencies in 3 states sign MOU to share water across dry Colorado River basin (Times of San Diego, June 2026)
West prepares for extreme measures to relieve pressure on Colorado River (Marketplace, May 2026)


Explore the Kyl Center’s Arizona Water Blueprint to find out the source of your water
Just Add Water: Solving the World's Problems Using its Most Precious Resource by Rhett B. Larson (Oxford University Press)
Day Zero: How Cities Run Out of Water by Rhett B. Larson (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2027)


Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts
The Hard Decisions Ahead for Lower Basin Colorado River States with guest Terry Goddard (December 5, 2025)Latest Deadpool Projections Inject New Urgency into Colorado River Negotiations with guests Kathryn Sorensen and Sarah Porter (September 19, 2025)Understanding Groundwater Risks in the Southwest with Jay Famiglietti (June 6, 2025)Checking in on Tense Colorado River Negotiations with Anne Castle and John Fleck (April 10, 2025)


Episode Credits
Ten Across Conversations Host: Duke ReiterAudio Production: Louie DuranResearch and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler 
Lab Coat Optional is a production of the Strategic Marketing and Communications team at Arizona State University’s Knowledge Enterprise. 
Executive produced by Kate HowellsProduced by Alexander Chapin and Pete ZriokaHosted and reported by Pete ZriokaShot by Alexander ChapinEdited by Quinton Kendall and Alexander ChapinOriginal music from Patrick CheungMotion graphics by Andy RamosArt by Andy Keena and Sophia Franz

As artificial intelligence has grown globally, so has the construction of immense, resource-intensive data centers. The arrival of these projects-- both the facilities and the powerful tech companies behind them-- in communities throughout the U.S. has created some controversy. Ten Across cities like Tucson, El Paso and San Antonio have made headlines recently for community resistance to development deals that might strain local resources in exchange for uncertain or marginal economic benefits.  

In the fourth and final installment in this series on the nexus of Texas water, energy, and growth, host Duke Reiter looks at what these stories can tell us about similar scenarios playing out in the Ten Across region and in the nation at large. He is joined by San Antonio District 6 Councilmember Ric Galvan and Robert Moore, founder of the nonprofit newsroom El Paso Matters, to discuss:  

• The importance of preventing “develop-by-right” policies and preferential treatment toward private industry from permitting data center developments at significant expense to local communities
• The value of intentional partnership between local utilities and governments when evaluating resource-intensive land use proposals
• What the AI boom may mean—for better and for worse—for the future of local economic development and job growth  

Stay until the end of the episode for takeaways from the rest of the series and for the Interstate 10 corridor as a whole. Missed an episode? Get caught up on parts 1-3, linked below.

Relevant Articles and Resources  

“San Antonio looks to create tailor-made model for data center growth” (Community Impact, March 2026)

“El Paso Electric filings detail power plant impact behind Meta’s $10 billion data center” (El Paso Matters, March 2026)  

“’We can’t do this a lot’: El Paso Water CEO warns as questions grow over Meta data center’s water use” (El Paso Matters, December 2025)  

“Podcast: We discuss Northeast El Paso data center, tax breaks for Meta, city’s economic future” (El Paso Matters, December 2025)  

“Tucson City Council rejects Project Blue data center amid intense community pressure” (Arizona Luminaria, August 2025)  

Local Data Center Development Guides Produced by Friends of Ten Across

“The Data Center Next Door” (USC Annenberg Center for Climate Journalism and Communication, April 2026)  

“Turning the data center boom into long-term, local prosperity” (Brookings, February 2026)  

Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts  

Texas Series Trailer  

Part One: Can Texas Drought-Proof Its Economic Miracle?  

Part Two: Does Texas Have the Water Support an AI Boom?  

Part Three: Oil Wars, Nuclear, and AI—Can Texas Power America’s Future?  

Credits
Host: Duke Reiter
Writer and producer: Taylor Griffith
Editor: Kate Carefoot
Research and support provided by: Rae Ulrich, Kelly Saunders, Maya Chari, and Sabine Butler  

About our guests
Ric Galvan represents District 6 on San Antonio’s City Council. Prior to that, he was a District 5 staff member and President of the Piper Meadow neighborhood association. At 25, he is among the youngest members ever elected to the council.   

Robert Moore is the founder and CEO of El Paso Matters. He has been a journalist in the Texas Borderlands since 1986.

As conflict in the Persian Gulf threatens global oil supplies and artificial intelligence drives unprecedented demand for electricity, Texas is in a race to unlock the full potential of its diverse and deregulated grid. The path it chooses may arguably shape the U.S. economy and global energy markets.  

In this third episode of our series on Texas water, energy, and growth, host Duke Reiter is joined by UT Austin professor, author, and global energy consultant, Dr. Michael E. Webber and president of the Texas Nuclear Alliance, Reed Clay to discuss:  

• How the U.S.-Israel-Iran war has sent the world reaching for U.S. oil and natural gas and what this means for Texas
• How Texas came to lead the nation in renewable energy generation in the years following Winter Storm Uri, despite the rhetoric 
• What makes Texas a leading contender in the U.S. for a nuclear energy renaissance
• Why surging AI-driven energy demand could accelerate the clean energy transition, not slow it down  

Relevant Articles and Resources  
“US LNG exports break record high as Middle East war disrupts global supply” (Reuters, April 2026)  
“A Texas City Faces Water Crisis as Big Oil and Gas Use Most of It” (Truthout, March 2026)  

“Is the US headed toward an electricity crisis of its own making?” (Canary Media, January 2026)  

“Texas’ power grid weathered another winter storm. Is it ready for the future?” (Texas Tribune, January 2026)  

“Trump, atoms, AI and the Texas data center gusher” (Politico, January 2026)  

“New U.S. nuclear power boom begins with old, still-unresolved problem: What to do with radioactive waste” (CNBC, November 2025)  

“Texas renewable energy grid defies Trump’s claims on solar and wind” (Power Technology, July 2025)  

The Timeline and Events of the February 2021 Texas Electric Grid Blackouts (University of Texas at Austin)  

Final Report on February 2021 Freeze Underscores Winterization Recommendations (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission)  

Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts  

Part One: Can Texas Drought-Proof Its Economic Miracle?  

Part Two: Does Texas Have the Water to Support an AI Boom?  

Credits 
Host: Duke Reiter
Writer and producer: Taylor Griffith
Editor: Kate Carefoot
Research and support provided by: Rae Ulrich, Kelly Saunders, Maya Chari, and Sabine Butler  

About our guests


Reed Clay is president of the Texas Nuclear Alliance. Prior to that, Reed was the Chief Operating Officer of Texas under Governor Greg Abbott and the founder of the government affairs consulting firm Crestline Group. He is also an experienced litigator and founding partner of Clay Scott LLP, with prior experience in the U.S. Department of Justice and Texas Attorney General’s Office.  

Dr. Michael E. Webber is the Sid Richardson Chair in the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Cockrell Family Chair #16 in the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to that, Michael served as CTO of Energy Impact Partners and Chief Science and Technology Officer at ENGIE, a global energy company. Michael has authored or co-authored more than 600 publications, including the book “Power Trip: the Story of Energy” and “Thirst for Power: Energy, Water, and Human Survival,” both of which, were developed into award-winning documentaries.