'Abundance' Liberals Have a Carbon Problem

The abundance movement is premised on cheap energy, but its advocates support decarbonization policies that would make energy, and the aspirational suburban lifestyle, more expensive.

Dear readers,

There’s a conversation — occurring, as these conversations do, mostly among coastal elites — about how Democrats can better promote abundance. But for that conversation to end up being useful, it needs to be connected to what the average American thinks abundance even is.

To that end, it’s worth thinking about Sen. Ruben Gallego’s comment to the The New York Times last month that “every Latino man wants a big-ass truck.”

Here’s what he told the Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro about how he campaigned in Arizona:

I was talking to men, especially Latino men, about the feeling of pride, bringing money home, being able to support your family, the feeling of bringing security — they wanted to hear that someone understood that need… It was a joke, but I said a lot when I was talking to Latino men: “I’m going to make sure you get out of your mom’s house, get your troquita.” For English speakers, that means your truck. Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck, which, nothing wrong with that. “And you’re gonna go start your own job, and you’re gonna become rich, right?” These are the conversations that we should be having. We’re afraid of saying, like, “Hey, let’s help you get a job so you can become rich.” We use terms like “bring more economic stability.” These guys don’t want that. They don’t want “economic stability.” They want to really live the American dream.

Sen. Gallego’s formulation provides a helpful frame: will my policy agenda help Americans achieve their dreams — not just stability? And it leads to some more specific questions that “abundance” advocates should ask themselves:

1. Will my agenda make it easier to buy a big-ass truck?

2. Will voters find me credible when I say my agenda will help them buy a big-ass truck?

Republicans are the traditional party of the big-ass truck, because Democrats have been the party of fuel-efficiency standards, electric vehicle mandates, carbon pricing, restrictions on domestic oil and gas production, and higher taxes — all policies that make owning and operating a big-ass truck more costly. But maybe there is an opening here. After all, Democrats also used to be the party of tariffs, but now a Republican president is imposing tariffs that stand to raise the prices of big-ass trucks and the gasoline that fuels them. But to become the party of the big-ass truck, Democrats will need to change their political relationship to energy — instead of trying to get people to consume less energy (including by driving more modestly-sized vehicles) they will need to be the party that promises abundant and cheap energy, so Americans can drive the vehicles of their dreams.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance is the latest entry in the effort to get Democrats to embrace growth, investment and prosperity, especially through policies that make it easier to build homes and infrastructure. One of the central themes of the book is that energy must be made extremely abundant and cheap. And while big-ass trucks are not exactly within the ethos of the book (the cover image shows solar-powered skyscrapers rising next to a lush green wilderness), their vision is not inherently in conflict with the idea of a big-ass truck in every garage, even though those trucks would presumably be electric. But the energy component of their agenda still worries me, and I don’t think the book quite passes the big-ass truck test, especially its second prong.

In the introduction to Abundance, Klein and Thompson explain why they wrote a book that is specifically aimed at Democrats, despite the fact that abundance sounds like a concept that should be salable across the political spectrum. And their principal reason is climate:

This book is motivated in no small part by our belief that we need to decarbonize the global economy to head off the threat of climate change. To the extent that the right does not believe this — and in America, at least, it does not — it strikes us as naive to describe the policies that would help Republicans build green infrastructure faster. It is folly to expect a coalition that does not share our goals to do the work to achieve them.

But as I pointed out to Klein and Thompson when I interviewed them at Temple Emanu-El on Monday, the idea that this is an insoluble conflict is not consistent with a vision of life in 2050 that they lay out just a few pages earlier (emphasis added):

You open your eyes at dawn and turn in the cool bedsheets. A few feet above your head, affixed to the top of the roof, a layer of solar panels blinks in the morning sun. Their power mixes with electricity pulled from several clean energy sources — towering wind turbines to the east, small nuclear power plants to the north, deep geothermal wells to the south… You live in a cocoon of energy so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill.

If Klein and Thompson have a plan to offer us energy “so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill” just 25 years from now, then why does it matter whether or not Republicans care about reducing carbon emissions? If the green transition actually makes energy cheaper, then it should not require political arguments about the climate, nor should it require subsidy and regulation to push its adoption. It might require deregulation (of the sort Klein and Thompson advocate) so that it actually becomes possible to install renewable energy generation and electrical transmission at large volumes. But the prospect of energy “so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill” should be appealing even to someone who thinks global warming is a total hoax, and also should be a magnet for unsubsidized business investment. If their vision really is feasible, and on such a short time frame, we should be able to bypass the whole political fight about climate instead of needing to lean into it.

At the event on Monday, Klein responded to my question — if you can make energy this cheap, why don’t you think you can convince Republicans to want what you’re offering? — by pointing out that there is rising hostility among Republicans to clean energy investment, even when the market demands it. Legislators in Texas are considering new laws that would impede that state’s rollout of wind and solar power generation, which has to date put California’s to shame. The president has his own quixotic grudge about windmills. And I certainly understand the idea that it’s pointless to argue with people about their goals. Still, if we take their energy vision seriously, it’s a vision they are claiming would serve not just liberals’ goals but also conservatives’ — since conservatives have long demonstrated a love of cheap energy. It doesn’t seem like as hard a leap as some of the others they take in the book, like trying to convince affluent people to want tall apartment buildings in their neighborhoods.

The problem, I think, is that Klein and Thompson don’t quite believe in their own energy vision. The suite of policies they advocate suggests they believe their agenda as a whole would grow the economy and raise standards of living. (And I agree). But it also suggests they still view decarbonization as a cost center. They would take some of the gains from a pro-abundance policy agenda and plow them into the green transition — maybe producing a higher standard of living than if you didn’t change policy at all, but producing a lower one than if you unleashed abundance in the economy while allowing users of energy to seek out the cheapest possible source, whether fossil or renewable.

Of course, advocates of decarbonization would argue that reducing carbon emissions is itself a benefit — a component of abundance. But the benefits of decarbonization are diffuse: they arise all over the world, and disproportionately in lower-income countries that are less prepared to adapt to climate change. They also mostly accrue far in the future. Meanwhile, the cost of decarbonizing the US economy is borne almost entirely in the US, and in the near term. This is why carbon-reduction policy comes into conflict with a politics of abundance (and also why it’s so politically difficult to implement): It imposes costs on the voters who get to pass judgment on the policy, while producing benefits that mostly go to foreigners, a lot of them not yet born.¹

So if the calculation is that a decarbonization agenda leads to abundance because it will lead to higher global GDP in 2080, with the benefits concentrated in poor foreign countries, even as the investments required for it will raise costs in the United States over the next couple of decades — well, that’s not likely to be perceived by US consumers as increasing abundance, and certainly not as helping them get a big-ass truck.

This is a ChatGPT 4.5 image generation for my vision of abundance, which involves a big house, some big trucks, and plentiful energy production.

I am also suspicious that Klein and Thompson have not fully broken away from the conservation-based vision of carbon reduction because they appeal to Europe as an example of how a smaller carbon footprint can be consistent with abundant living. They write:

America emits about 15 tons of carbon per person per year. Canada and Australia belch out nearly the same. In Germany and Japan, it’s 8 tons. In France and the United Kingdom, it’s less than 5 tons. These are vast differences across similar lifestyles. A wanderer in London or Paris or Tokyo or Berlin would not notice material deprivation relative to Toronto or Sydney or Houston.

The wanderer wouldn’t notice material deprivation in Europe compared to America? I guess he isn’t looking very closely. The average home in the UK or France or Germany is about 1,000 square feet, about half the size of the typical American home. Less than 10% of homes in those European countries are air conditioned. European households have fewer cars, and the cars they do have are smaller — you won’t find a lot of big-ass trucks parked in driveways in Berlin, if the homes have driveways at all.

Energy consumption is far from the only determinant of carbon footprint — France’s widespread deployment of nuclear power is one reason the French emit relatively little carbon — but the main reason that Americans (and Canadians and Australians) emit more carbon than our European counterparts is that our lives are more abundant than theirs. A vision for abundance that doesn’t notice our larger homes and bigger cars isn’t likely to be compelling to voters who want larger homes and bigger cars.

So I think abundance liberals like Klein and Thompson face a choice. Do they believe in the sort of techno-optimism they espouse at the very beginning of their book — that non-carbon emitting energy sources stand to displace fossil fuels by being massively cheaper in their own right within a couple of decades? Then they should make peace with fossil fuels — after all, what’s the point of imposing fuel scarcity today when market participants are unlikely to even be very interested in using fossil fuels pretty soon? They should see a bipartisan permitting reform to ease both renewable and fossil projects not just as the worthwhile trade-off they describe it as in the book but as a win-win, because it makes all kinds of energy cheaper, promoting fossil-driven abundance in the near term while we transition toward a future where the cheapest energy happens to be the kind that does not emit carbon. They should believe they can bring people who don’t care about global warming into their political coalition, because they have an energy solution that would still be the best even if carbon didn't matter. And those who are running for office should do what Gallego did and explicitly call out red-coded ways of using energy — like driving a big-ass truck — as practices that abundance policies will make more affordable.

But if they don’t really believe in that kind of techno-optimism — if they think green technology shows great promise and a rapidly improving cost trajectory, but still remains a choice that has to be incentivized over even-cheaper fossil fuel approaches — then they need to admit that decarbonization and abundance are goals in conflict, producing a trade-off that needs to be managed. And they need to figure out what they are willing to pay for decarbonization — how much political capital to spend on it, and how much abundance to ask voters to give up in exchange for it. The price had better be pretty low if they hope to convince voters that Democrats are now the party that wants them to have a big-ass truck.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. It’s also why decarbonization is so challenging compared to other pollution policy successes Klein and Thompson discuss: when you limit particulate emissions, the policy produces mostly local costs and mostly local benefits, which makes it easier to convince voters that the regulation has actually made their lives more “abundant.”