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.
The problem is Gallego knows people who own or want to own Big Ass Trucks while Thompson and Klein probably don't. To them it's vulgar to value such things.
I was kind of interested in this book and topic when the book was first announced but between this article and Klein's interview with Tyler Cowen I'm much more down on the impact in the conversation and discourse that Thompson and Klein want to drive here.
Abundance has to mean 4000 sq ft homes with a 20 minute drive to work just as much as it means lots of residential building with 3 bedroom units next to the Metro station.
There's clearly considerable pent-up demand for 3 bedroom units next to the metro, lots of people like me have to decide between paying a lot to be near the subway vs. paying less for a bigger place and driving everywhere, but it's fair to say we don't know how deep that pool of consumers is. At the margin we need more apartments by the metro, but suburb-preferers may be the strong majority.
In my experience, there are lots of people who love their suburban SFH neighborhood, but also want public transit and urban amenities close by. When you look at real estate in suburbs, usually the most expensive SFHs are either the ones close to these things or close to water.
Right, but you can only have a few hundred detached homes near a subway station since each one takes up land, so that will never be a scalable amenity.
By "suburbs" I guess I meant detached houses. If you mean little urban islands around the subway, yes, that could be available to many people.
By suburbs, I mean both. You can still have a SFH suburban neighborhood with bus lines and grocery stores, cafes, bars, and other kinds of shops all within walking distance.
I grew up in upper Queen Anne in Seattle, which isn't technically "suburban", but it's a walkable SFH neighborhood with public transit, low traffic, and low crime to this day. No reason suburban neighborhoods can't achieve this and I think many suburbanites would support this.
I assume that the market doesn't supply enough 3 bedroom units because the incentives and financial metrics for developers to build smaller units are just too great to overcome.
As Barro and others have pointed out (and Thompson and Klein), in a zoning/regulatory environment that makes it difficult (i.e. raises costs and restricts available land/height) to build, the incentives to maximize unit revenue are even stronger. If the cost to build was reduced and supply of space to build was increased, builders could saturate the demand for 1 and 2-bed and luxury units, and would have to start building larger and more affordable units to capture those buyers.
I don't like Big Ass Trucks and 4000 sq ft homes, but I would happily allow for building more of them if it also meant more relaxed zoning laws that allowed for more denser, mixed-use developments and public transit.
What makes you say that Thompson and Klein think valuing a big ass truck is vulgar? I agree the point you're making about guys like Gallego being more in-touch with your average Jose than guys like Thompson or Klein, but that's not a good reason to assume Thompson and Klein look down on truck drivers.
I guess they could surprise me here and think otherwise but I've been reading both of them for a long time (Klein since he was at Wonkblog) and I've been reading climate change worriers for even longer and Klein/Thompson clearly share their views. One view is that we have too many cars, the cars are too big and why can't people just drive smaller cars and do it less often.
Those views are certainly out there, for sure. Just think it’s good to give people the benefit of the doubt. One of the most annoying things about American politics is the widespread tendency — among both liberals and conservatives — to assume that disagreement also means personal hatred. That is true on the internet but not in real life, in my experience. Speaking as a guy who wants a big ass truck (mostly for work but not exclusively) and also thinks that generally speaking people should drive less.
I don't know specifically about Thompson and Klein, but I think what Patrick is getting at is their milieu. It's very hard for me to imagine a bunch of guys at the faculty club talking about what trucks or even what luxury car brands they want to buy. We . . . don't do that.
For sure. It seems to me like Thompson and Klein wrote their book in part to try to convince faculty types to care more about real world results (which usually demand the involvement of trucks) rather than paradigm shifts or whatever.
This is a great critique because it points at a simple and direct contradiction. It is blessedly limited and specific.
That said, I'm really interested in the boarder "Abundance Liberals have a ~liberals~ problem".
I'd argue that constraining general growth in the housing and energy sectors in favor of an ever narrower and unobtainable idea of "moral and sustainable" growth is the core concept of blue state liberalism. At a certain point, the system is what it does!
From my perch in the Hudson Valley, screaming about the overdevelopment of green spaces, decrying the redevelopment of blighted upstate factory towns as gentrification, and blaming the housing crisis on AirBNB and Black Rock is how Democrats win votes and govern. Closing reliable clean energy sources in favor of a pie-in-the-sky vision of off-shore wind and roof top solar is how Democrats win votes and govern.
I love the concept of abundance liberalism, but it feels like someone is selling me the concept of a pro-LGBT Republican party. It's a message that is incredibly at odds with the reality.
Imagine if Democrats could put out an ad last year saying "the US has pumped more and more and more oil every year, now at a record level never achieved by any country in history."
Their campaign staff would have quit en masse... and these staffers would be justified because they signed up to work for a party that fundamentally doesn't believe in energy abundance!
"Abundance Liberals have a ~liberals~ problem". Exactly.
Because, of course, the corollary of Josh's point is that the moral element of 'sacrificing to save the world from catastrophe' is precisely the appeal of decarbonisation to liberals.
But few folks, even those who vote for leaders who advance those policies, personally choose to make those sacrifices in their life. I know a few, such as my grandparents included, who built a passive-solar home in the 1980s, captured rainwater, and built a system to recycle bath/shower water to flush the toilet, and rode their bicycles to work and many errands (all in Monroe, WI; not exactly a hippie city). Most of my climate-change-fearing friends live remarkably similar lives with remarkably similar energy use to my climate-change-denying friends. They might drive a slightly-more-efficient SUV instead of a 4-door pickup, and might buy stuff at Whole Foods that says "sustainably sourced" on it, but their overall energy use doesn't look much different.
Deeply correct. This is the basic moral rot of American leftism. It's necessary to warp the idea of self-sacrifice to arrive at the view that it's morally superior to demand that someone else give them their money so they can, in turn, give it to their friends. Sacrifice, in their minds, has nothing to do with personally sacrificing, just voting with the right team.
What reality? Who are the people making these claims? Are their views representative of the general population or just a loud minority? Because Democrats making policy and messaging based on these loud unrepresentative minorities has cost them among many demographic groups.
Advocates claiming to speak for Latinos insisted that every Latino either was an illegal immigrant or related to one and that the key to their votes was to be more lax on illegal immigration and border security, when it turned out to be almost the exact opposite.
Advocated claiming to speak for young voters insisted that young people cared about climate change and Israel/Gaza above all else when they really care about housing costs and getting a job.
I get what you are saying about the message being at odds with the reality but I view the current abundance ideas as kind of an opening salvo in trying to get liberals to rediscover the benefits of growth. I'm in the Midwest so the liberals here aren't as NIMBY but I certainly understand on the coasts the situation is much more grievous. The conversation has to start somewhere and it seems like Klein and Thompson realize that they are paddling upstream right now.
This all feels like a part of a reenergized center left willing to take on more fights against the left and progressive wings of the Democratic party. The conversations and debates are still in their infancy, but this loss feels different than 2016. Lots of Dems are pissed at the left of the party over their pathetic litmus tests and tent shrinking attitudes. Having gone through it for a second time now in 2024 (by second time I am of course referring to losing a winnable election to Trump), I think Dems will be angrier about progressives insisting on candidates taking public stances on absurd issues. Living in suburban WI I can't tell you how often my conservative family and friends razz me about the transition surgery for inmates thing that Harris said.
You make a good point, but perhaps a bit overstated.
Not just a pro-LGBT Republican party. The abundance folks have other material differences from republicans, like supporting expansion of the social safety net, abortion rights, and y'know, not deporting green card holders without due process, etc.
I think Thompson&Klein agree that there are some crappy lefty tendencies in the party that are anti-abundance, and that's why they are crusading against that.
But again, I agree with you that selling the free-market elements of the agenda to the left will be an uphill battle.
I think Klein and Thompson should read Vaclav Smil's book "How the world really works". There is no discernable path to their version of 2050.
In addition, decarbonizing our economy is not likely to occur for decades, if not a century. And the amount of carbon required to generate all the steel, concrete, and plastics required to achieve a carbon-neutral economy is likely much higher than one might imagine.
There are 2-3 billion people in the world who generate less than a ton of carbon/year, and they all wish they could live a lifestyle where they generate at minimum 8 tons/year, if not more. Telling them they should not increase their carbon footprint is IMO similar to when we tell the Brazilians they should not be deforesting the Amazon. Their most compelling response is 'And where are your forests, bro?', given the fact that we have already deforested any farmable land east of the Mississippi. Hard to tell someone no when your lifestyle is predicated on having done/doing exactly what they want to do.
Josh, I think your critique misses something key about Klein and Thompson's book. Being a Dem to the left of you, probably not surprisingly I've listened to interviews with both of them (and their own podcasts) a lot lately. And its extremely clear to me their message is aimed at Democrats not voters generally. And specifically aimed at older Democrats likely to the left of me who wield disproportionate power in places like SF and our home here in NY.
I kind of think of their book in tandem with Matt Yglesias' takes about how to get get people to be YIMBYs. If your audience for convincing someone to be YIMBY are swing voters or right of center voters, talking about how zoning is a form of structural racism and that zoning itself as concept has an extraordinarily racist history is not really an ideal strategy and likely going to backfire. But if you're audience is lefties who live in Park Slope who don't want "luxury" apartments go up, this argument is going to carry more sway.
For Klein and Thompson, I think their goal is to reorient the views of the Democratic party. And specifically to point out that the early 70s environmental mind set that made sense in a world where cities are strangled by smog, rivers caught fire and there were no rules at all regarding what could be spewed in the air, no longer makes sense in a world where we are trying to adapt new technologies.
I think the idea is to tell Democrats, that they're never going to convince swing voters that Dems are worth trusting if you can't get the simplest stuff done in super blue cities. And that you have to reorient a "degrowth" mindset to one where Dems are the party that gets things done as opposed to the party that's most embodied William F Buckley's mindset of the world.
And then at that point in 2028, candidate Shapiro can make his case to swing voters that Democrats are the party of getting things done, even if his message needs to be a different one (maybe closer to Gallego's) than the one Klein and thompson are putting out.
In rural Ohio, you often see a sign reading, "No Solar on Prime Farmland."
For the life of me, I can't understand it. If YOU don't want solar on YOUR farmland, okay. But why do they care what their neighbor does? Nobody is taking farmland to install panels.
There's definitely a NIMBY component, so maybe this is just a way to frame this as advancing the public good, but is there a general consensus that solar farms are an active nuisance to neighbors - other than the construction process? These people are complaining about noise.
If Republicans side with rural Ohioans who oppose solar panels on farmland by creating more laws and regulations to prevent them, Democrats might have an opening to win over some rural voters, not by touting the virtues of solar panels and clean energy, but by taking the libertarian growth-oriented approach of saying that rural farmers shouldn't be significantly restricted from building what they want on property they own.
Such a strategy doesn't necessarily need to win over a majority of rural Ohioans. Simply reducing the margin from 80-20 to 70-30 or 60-40 can be enough to win statewide races and break the Ohio GOP's legislative supermajorities.
If it really is a better world, if you can sell us that we'd want all this stuff even if global warming was a hoax, then do that! No need to attach a negatively polarizing discussion to things.
The mindset of abundance basically means that we build things again. And I think that's a great mindset for Democratic politicians to have. "I want there to be so much energy of all kinds being built everywhere, all kinds, all the time, do it, build baby build." When someone holds up the construction of something with a lawsuit you say "that's bullshit" and get it built anyway. The Cape Cod liberals who blocked offshore wind should be considered to have alien ideas incompatible with the rest of the party.
Except that offshore wind is a really bad idea and although they were opposing it for NIMBY reasons, they were right this time. Big windmills kill whales, pollute the water, and as we found out when a blade broke, spread dangerous debris over a very large area of ocean.
The groups that protect whales and sea turtles, who have the motivation to care for them, and have the knowledge to understand what's going on, don't think it's happening. Of course, to any good conspiracy theorist, that just means *they are in on it*. https://time.com./6254785/whale-deaths-offshore-wind-power/
Y'know, the YouTube experts probably have the better idea than the ones who crawl inside dead whales to autopsy them. After all, how smart can you be if you spent years of your life going to school so you could squeeze inside a rotting whale carcass, while I'm sitting here comfortably on my couch? Clearly one of us has made better life decisions.
We used to harvest whales for their blubber for energy. Now we annoy them with our construction noise. This is way better for both groups.
Offshore drilling creates dead zones of thousands of square miles and occasionally sets the ocean on fire, but sure, you’re super concerned about debris and whales. You’re not being disingenuous at all.
Although I didn't mention it in my review, the Europe paragraph struck me as well. Aside from the points you make, it also doesn't consider the vast differences in climate, especially vis a vis air conditioning demand.
Americans put an a/c in their home even if the climate is such that they will use it for one month out of the year. Really nice to have during that month.
My wife thought it was quite hot in Geneva in the summer to not have a/c, which she didn't have when she lived there.
"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."
I'd have to take a closer look at what they're saying. They're saying, I think, that the "energy" component of your bill will be small, not that your bill will be small. Which seems like a cagey sleight of hand.
My electric bill in Virginia has roughly 5 line items:
Taxes & Fees
Distribution
Transmission
Generation (plant and plant costs, I think)
Fuel
This last month, fuel was only 15% of my total bill. Generation was 37% of my bill. So even if you could cut the cost of fuel to zero, and the cost of "Generation" by half (I think you still have to pay for power plants of some type), you still have 74% of the of original bill. Not bad. Not great either. Especially considering that adding lots of renewables is going to require lots of transmission, which is going to push that Transmission line item higher.
TL;DR - I'm not sure I buy their premise on energy. I suggest taking it with a huge grain of salt.
A few reality checks: an electric big-ass truck is completely useless if you want it to do the job that most people buy heavy-duty pickup trucks to do: haul a heavy trailer. The battery range is so drastically reduced that you can't even get out of town with it before you need to charge it again. This has been demonstrated by actual people trying to do this.
We have been subsidizing alternate energy sources for a very long time and they are still can't stand on their own economically, they take up a lot of land upon which they destroy the habitat for the animals and plants (environmentalists used to care about this), and when you account for their intermittency, their cost per kWh is very high and will never be much less. Wind and solar offset perhaps 10% of the generating capacity of standard 24/7 power plants, which become more expensive to run (and less efficient) when they need to be powered up and down as fill-in for the widely-varying output of wind and solar. There is also no mention of the mining and fossil fuels needed for the materials to build wind and solar, the short lifespan of many of the installations, and the disposal problem for the useless junk when the equipment stops working. Wind and solar are anything but cheap, abundant, clean energy sources, and there is no reason to think that will change in the next few decades. It is sheer fantasy to think otherwise.
Abundance might be possible with widespread installation of nuclear generation, but we still need liquid transportation fuels because electric vehicles are just not suitable for a great many applications, and the batteries are a serious hazard. And we still need plastics. And chemical feedstocks. And many other things that fossil fuels provide for an abundance lifestyle.
And, we also need more CO2 in the atmosphere to make plants grow, so we have abundant food. CO2 is not a poison, it is absolutely necessary and atmospheric levels now are not far above starvation level for plants. The war on CO2 is not about CO2, it is about destroying the Western abundance lifestyle and Western culture in general. So any discussion on the Left about abundance is just one of their usual plans to figure out how to lie to the voters - again - that they really "care" about people, so elect us, we think you are too stupid to notice that once we get in office we are going to do the exact opposite of what we promised and we actually plan to regulate away real abundance. That's what they did under Biden, and Trump is reversing it as fast as he can. That is why he was elected. I hope that the people are now smart enough to know that the Dems lie about everything, all the time, and should never be elected again to anything until they have purged the liars out of the party.
Yes we all remember that time 100 years ago when there wasn’t enough CO2 in the atmosphere so plants didn’t grow and everyone died. Thank god for heavy industry and cars or we wouldn’t have any food.
You seem quite convinced that we are at the theoretical limit of EV range. I don't see how you reach that conclusion.
The original Tesla Model S from 2008 made 265 miles on a charge, newer models can get up to 405. That's a 53% increase, in 17 years. You can get 512 miles from a Lucid Air nowadays.
Moreover, there is a new wave of Li-Ion batteries on the horizon. That is, Li-Ion batteries using Silicon (rather than graphite) anodes. These batteries will have a bout 50% higher energy density. There are various approaches to making the Silicon anode work that have been demonstrated in labs and in small-scale production. A bunch of firms are currently racing to be the first to achieve mass production. (disclosure-- I am invested in one of these firms).
At the same time, faster charging and denser charging networks are also both developing. These advances would make it less crucial to have a very long range off a single charge.
With energy that's cheap enough, the big ass truck doesn't have to be electric. Solar panels can be 100s or 1000s of times more efficient than plants (plants do things other than photosynthesis and they don't do it as well as photovoltaics)... so you can use cheap solar to direct capture carbon from the air and synthesize fuel directly much more cheaply than the current sun --> corn --> ethanol --> truck route.
The complex systems podcast had an episode [1] with an entrepreneur working on synthetic natural gas which discussed some of the amazing advancements in solar over the last 10-15 years and the vista of possibilities this opens up of which synthetic hydrocarbons are really interesting because of all the existing infrastructure.
Your critique is assuming there is no advance in battery technology. Chinese electric cars have battery banks that can be swapped out in under a minute largely eliminating any concerns about range.
I think you're giving short shrift to Ezra's response to your question about how you should be able to convince Republicans if energy is that cheap. We have seen over and over that Republicans care about "owning the libs" more than just about anything. They will reject policies that produce cheaper energy for themselves strictly because it may make a liberal somewhere happy. I live in Texas and we are watching this happen.
This is not a book that otherwise shies away from the project of convincing people that the policies they instinctively favor aren’t serving their underlying goals. And the widely-hated hidden hand behind the president is an electric car entrepreneur. I simply don’t believe that selling conservatives on electrification could be harder than the other projects they’re pursuing here — if their math pencils. But I’m skeptical that it does, and they don’t really seem to have conviction in the math either.
I'm pretty sure I'm wrong, but I still like joking that Musk becoming the MAGA wingman (boy, how does Vance feel these days) is just a secret plot to get Republicans to like electric cars.
It's a tell that the love for EV's is more about virtue signaling than anything else. I mean, they wouldn't be vandalizing Teslas and charging stations if they truly believed climate change is in fact an existential threat.
Yes. The correct argument is that it's just wrong to destroy someone else's property, and especially wrong when it's done to intimidate political rivals.
The loudest, most obnoxious conservatives think that way, but they're also not the ones that are persuadable to begin with and a small enough minority that Democrats could win every state without a single one of their votes.
Klein responded "by pointing out that there is rising hostility among Republicans to clean energy investment" and your piece explains why. Obviously there are some business and economic interests that make some conservatives hostile to clean energy, but mostly it's because conservatives correctly intuit that the liberals spruiking it *don't really believe what they're saying*.
I worry that liberals (of whom I am one) will not be able to overcome their disdain for people wanting big trucks (etc.) long enough to do any kind of strategy around this. Paying $7 for a pint of organic berries several times a week is normal, of course.
Coastal liberals and normal people are two different species now, who both despise the other. Liberals don't need a strategy around overcoming their disdain for someone who wants to drive a truck, they need to understand that it's none of their business if I want to drive a truck. Basically, liberals need to understand that the way other people live is ALL none of their business, and they have no right to use government coercion to force the majority to live their lives the way the coastal elites want them to. Considering the mansions they live in, the cars they drive, and their high level of consumption, preaching an austerity lifestyle to others is the height of hypocrisy for those living in abundance that many people can only dream of.
My dream would be a new party based on a core philosophy of "You do you". Both sides now seem more invested in using power (especially concentrated at the federal level) at telling the other half they need to live life their way, and since the overreach ensures that we flip control at least once a decade, the whiplash is getting worse.
Once upon a time, this was the Libertarians, but they've even lost their minds now. As I told my wife last November "I can't even make a good-conscience protest for a 3rd party this year."
Big-ass truck driver here, in a city that is around the 100th largest MSA in the country (so, not large). Although mine is a hybrid that makes a quite decent 24MPG.
There aren't many latinos here, but the mostly white men sure as hell prefer driving big ass trucks. It's a real status symbol. It's remarkable, driving down the street seeing some homes in very bad shape, but with a $50k pickup truck in the driveway.
It's interesting that you contrasted the Ds and Rs on the big-ass truck issue. I agree with all you say about the implications for big-ass trucks of the general policy concepts of the two sides. Still, I think it's noteworthy that the video of Biden test-driving an F-150 Lightning (and driving it very fast) went viral. There was rather minimal backlash from the left as to the size of that vehicle (it's huge). It's a bit unclear whether Biden specifically wanted to be seen in the troquita, or if that's just the vehicle the union people most wanted to put him in. It was Ford's newest EV, so it might have just been a coincidence of that.
"Barro argues that if Klein and Thompson really cared about giving Americans cheap energy, they wouldn’t even mention the fact that cheap energy is also green energy. The fact that they do mention that, Barro argues, is evidence that deep down, despite what they say, Klein and Thompson actually believe that green energy isn’t really cheap.
That doesn’t sound like a very reasonable argument on Barro’s part, does it? But I don’t think I’m misrepresenting it."
“The president has his own quixotic grudge about windmills.”
I see what you did there
The problem is Gallego knows people who own or want to own Big Ass Trucks while Thompson and Klein probably don't. To them it's vulgar to value such things.
I was kind of interested in this book and topic when the book was first announced but between this article and Klein's interview with Tyler Cowen I'm much more down on the impact in the conversation and discourse that Thompson and Klein want to drive here.
Abundance has to mean 4000 sq ft homes with a 20 minute drive to work just as much as it means lots of residential building with 3 bedroom units next to the Metro station.
There's clearly considerable pent-up demand for 3 bedroom units next to the metro, lots of people like me have to decide between paying a lot to be near the subway vs. paying less for a bigger place and driving everywhere, but it's fair to say we don't know how deep that pool of consumers is. At the margin we need more apartments by the metro, but suburb-preferers may be the strong majority.
In my experience, there are lots of people who love their suburban SFH neighborhood, but also want public transit and urban amenities close by. When you look at real estate in suburbs, usually the most expensive SFHs are either the ones close to these things or close to water.
Right, but you can only have a few hundred detached homes near a subway station since each one takes up land, so that will never be a scalable amenity.
By "suburbs" I guess I meant detached houses. If you mean little urban islands around the subway, yes, that could be available to many people.
By suburbs, I mean both. You can still have a SFH suburban neighborhood with bus lines and grocery stores, cafes, bars, and other kinds of shops all within walking distance.
I grew up in upper Queen Anne in Seattle, which isn't technically "suburban", but it's a walkable SFH neighborhood with public transit, low traffic, and low crime to this day. No reason suburban neighborhoods can't achieve this and I think many suburbanites would support this.
I assume that the market doesn't supply enough 3 bedroom units because the incentives and financial metrics for developers to build smaller units are just too great to overcome.
As Barro and others have pointed out (and Thompson and Klein), in a zoning/regulatory environment that makes it difficult (i.e. raises costs and restricts available land/height) to build, the incentives to maximize unit revenue are even stronger. If the cost to build was reduced and supply of space to build was increased, builders could saturate the demand for 1 and 2-bed and luxury units, and would have to start building larger and more affordable units to capture those buyers.
I don't like Big Ass Trucks and 4000 sq ft homes, but I would happily allow for building more of them if it also meant more relaxed zoning laws that allowed for more denser, mixed-use developments and public transit.
What makes you say that Thompson and Klein think valuing a big ass truck is vulgar? I agree the point you're making about guys like Gallego being more in-touch with your average Jose than guys like Thompson or Klein, but that's not a good reason to assume Thompson and Klein look down on truck drivers.
I guess they could surprise me here and think otherwise but I've been reading both of them for a long time (Klein since he was at Wonkblog) and I've been reading climate change worriers for even longer and Klein/Thompson clearly share their views. One view is that we have too many cars, the cars are too big and why can't people just drive smaller cars and do it less often.
Those views are certainly out there, for sure. Just think it’s good to give people the benefit of the doubt. One of the most annoying things about American politics is the widespread tendency — among both liberals and conservatives — to assume that disagreement also means personal hatred. That is true on the internet but not in real life, in my experience. Speaking as a guy who wants a big ass truck (mostly for work but not exclusively) and also thinks that generally speaking people should drive less.
I don't know specifically about Thompson and Klein, but I think what Patrick is getting at is their milieu. It's very hard for me to imagine a bunch of guys at the faculty club talking about what trucks or even what luxury car brands they want to buy. We . . . don't do that.
For sure. It seems to me like Thompson and Klein wrote their book in part to try to convince faculty types to care more about real world results (which usually demand the involvement of trucks) rather than paradigm shifts or whatever.
This is a great critique because it points at a simple and direct contradiction. It is blessedly limited and specific.
That said, I'm really interested in the boarder "Abundance Liberals have a ~liberals~ problem".
I'd argue that constraining general growth in the housing and energy sectors in favor of an ever narrower and unobtainable idea of "moral and sustainable" growth is the core concept of blue state liberalism. At a certain point, the system is what it does!
From my perch in the Hudson Valley, screaming about the overdevelopment of green spaces, decrying the redevelopment of blighted upstate factory towns as gentrification, and blaming the housing crisis on AirBNB and Black Rock is how Democrats win votes and govern. Closing reliable clean energy sources in favor of a pie-in-the-sky vision of off-shore wind and roof top solar is how Democrats win votes and govern.
I love the concept of abundance liberalism, but it feels like someone is selling me the concept of a pro-LGBT Republican party. It's a message that is incredibly at odds with the reality.
Imagine if Democrats could put out an ad last year saying "the US has pumped more and more and more oil every year, now at a record level never achieved by any country in history."
Their campaign staff would have quit en masse... and these staffers would be justified because they signed up to work for a party that fundamentally doesn't believe in energy abundance!
Those campaign staffers quitting would have probably been a net positive
"Abundance Liberals have a ~liberals~ problem". Exactly.
Because, of course, the corollary of Josh's point is that the moral element of 'sacrificing to save the world from catastrophe' is precisely the appeal of decarbonisation to liberals.
But few folks, even those who vote for leaders who advance those policies, personally choose to make those sacrifices in their life. I know a few, such as my grandparents included, who built a passive-solar home in the 1980s, captured rainwater, and built a system to recycle bath/shower water to flush the toilet, and rode their bicycles to work and many errands (all in Monroe, WI; not exactly a hippie city). Most of my climate-change-fearing friends live remarkably similar lives with remarkably similar energy use to my climate-change-denying friends. They might drive a slightly-more-efficient SUV instead of a 4-door pickup, and might buy stuff at Whole Foods that says "sustainably sourced" on it, but their overall energy use doesn't look much different.
Deeply correct. This is the basic moral rot of American leftism. It's necessary to warp the idea of self-sacrifice to arrive at the view that it's morally superior to demand that someone else give them their money so they can, in turn, give it to their friends. Sacrifice, in their minds, has nothing to do with personally sacrificing, just voting with the right team.
What reality? Who are the people making these claims? Are their views representative of the general population or just a loud minority? Because Democrats making policy and messaging based on these loud unrepresentative minorities has cost them among many demographic groups.
Advocates claiming to speak for Latinos insisted that every Latino either was an illegal immigrant or related to one and that the key to their votes was to be more lax on illegal immigration and border security, when it turned out to be almost the exact opposite.
Advocated claiming to speak for young voters insisted that young people cared about climate change and Israel/Gaza above all else when they really care about housing costs and getting a job.
I get what you are saying about the message being at odds with the reality but I view the current abundance ideas as kind of an opening salvo in trying to get liberals to rediscover the benefits of growth. I'm in the Midwest so the liberals here aren't as NIMBY but I certainly understand on the coasts the situation is much more grievous. The conversation has to start somewhere and it seems like Klein and Thompson realize that they are paddling upstream right now.
This all feels like a part of a reenergized center left willing to take on more fights against the left and progressive wings of the Democratic party. The conversations and debates are still in their infancy, but this loss feels different than 2016. Lots of Dems are pissed at the left of the party over their pathetic litmus tests and tent shrinking attitudes. Having gone through it for a second time now in 2024 (by second time I am of course referring to losing a winnable election to Trump), I think Dems will be angrier about progressives insisting on candidates taking public stances on absurd issues. Living in suburban WI I can't tell you how often my conservative family and friends razz me about the transition surgery for inmates thing that Harris said.
That's my take as well. Josh is right, but the book's ambitions strike me as fairly modest. It's a manifesto (ergo fairly superficial) for a specific type of progressivism. My review : https://reason.com/2025/03/18/lawn-sign-liberalism-vs-supply-side-progressivism/
You make a good point, but perhaps a bit overstated.
Not just a pro-LGBT Republican party. The abundance folks have other material differences from republicans, like supporting expansion of the social safety net, abortion rights, and y'know, not deporting green card holders without due process, etc.
I think Thompson&Klein agree that there are some crappy lefty tendencies in the party that are anti-abundance, and that's why they are crusading against that.
But again, I agree with you that selling the free-market elements of the agenda to the left will be an uphill battle.
I think Klein and Thompson should read Vaclav Smil's book "How the world really works". There is no discernable path to their version of 2050.
In addition, decarbonizing our economy is not likely to occur for decades, if not a century. And the amount of carbon required to generate all the steel, concrete, and plastics required to achieve a carbon-neutral economy is likely much higher than one might imagine.
There are 2-3 billion people in the world who generate less than a ton of carbon/year, and they all wish they could live a lifestyle where they generate at minimum 8 tons/year, if not more. Telling them they should not increase their carbon footprint is IMO similar to when we tell the Brazilians they should not be deforesting the Amazon. Their most compelling response is 'And where are your forests, bro?', given the fact that we have already deforested any farmable land east of the Mississippi. Hard to tell someone no when your lifestyle is predicated on having done/doing exactly what they want to do.
I hope Klein and Thompson will respond to this very good critique.
Josh, I think your critique misses something key about Klein and Thompson's book. Being a Dem to the left of you, probably not surprisingly I've listened to interviews with both of them (and their own podcasts) a lot lately. And its extremely clear to me their message is aimed at Democrats not voters generally. And specifically aimed at older Democrats likely to the left of me who wield disproportionate power in places like SF and our home here in NY.
I kind of think of their book in tandem with Matt Yglesias' takes about how to get get people to be YIMBYs. If your audience for convincing someone to be YIMBY are swing voters or right of center voters, talking about how zoning is a form of structural racism and that zoning itself as concept has an extraordinarily racist history is not really an ideal strategy and likely going to backfire. But if you're audience is lefties who live in Park Slope who don't want "luxury" apartments go up, this argument is going to carry more sway.
For Klein and Thompson, I think their goal is to reorient the views of the Democratic party. And specifically to point out that the early 70s environmental mind set that made sense in a world where cities are strangled by smog, rivers caught fire and there were no rules at all regarding what could be spewed in the air, no longer makes sense in a world where we are trying to adapt new technologies.
I think the idea is to tell Democrats, that they're never going to convince swing voters that Dems are worth trusting if you can't get the simplest stuff done in super blue cities. And that you have to reorient a "degrowth" mindset to one where Dems are the party that gets things done as opposed to the party that's most embodied William F Buckley's mindset of the world.
And then at that point in 2028, candidate Shapiro can make his case to swing voters that Democrats are the party of getting things done, even if his message needs to be a different one (maybe closer to Gallego's) than the one Klein and thompson are putting out.
Very well put. I was going to write a reply like that, no way I could have done it better.
In rural Ohio, you often see a sign reading, "No Solar on Prime Farmland."
For the life of me, I can't understand it. If YOU don't want solar on YOUR farmland, okay. But why do they care what their neighbor does? Nobody is taking farmland to install panels.
There's definitely a NIMBY component, so maybe this is just a way to frame this as advancing the public good, but is there a general consensus that solar farms are an active nuisance to neighbors - other than the construction process? These people are complaining about noise.
If Republicans side with rural Ohioans who oppose solar panels on farmland by creating more laws and regulations to prevent them, Democrats might have an opening to win over some rural voters, not by touting the virtues of solar panels and clean energy, but by taking the libertarian growth-oriented approach of saying that rural farmers shouldn't be significantly restricted from building what they want on property they own.
Such a strategy doesn't necessarily need to win over a majority of rural Ohioans. Simply reducing the margin from 80-20 to 70-30 or 60-40 can be enough to win statewide races and break the Ohio GOP's legislative supermajorities.
Put the comment about farmland in the wrong place - people are building solar farms in my area on farmland, in some projects.
This sounds like the discussion around this dumb cartoon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Pett#What_if_it's_a_big_hoax_and_we_create_a_better_world_for_nothing?_cartoon
If it really is a better world, if you can sell us that we'd want all this stuff even if global warming was a hoax, then do that! No need to attach a negatively polarizing discussion to things.
The mindset of abundance basically means that we build things again. And I think that's a great mindset for Democratic politicians to have. "I want there to be so much energy of all kinds being built everywhere, all kinds, all the time, do it, build baby build." When someone holds up the construction of something with a lawsuit you say "that's bullshit" and get it built anyway. The Cape Cod liberals who blocked offshore wind should be considered to have alien ideas incompatible with the rest of the party.
Except that offshore wind is a really bad idea and although they were opposing it for NIMBY reasons, they were right this time. Big windmills kill whales, pollute the water, and as we found out when a blade broke, spread dangerous debris over a very large area of ocean.
> Big windmills kill whales
This is a Michael Shellenberger talking point, but it's part of his descent into nuttiness.
Woods Hole: https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/are-offshore-wind-farms-harming-right-whales/
NOAA: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/new-england-mid-atlantic/marine-life-distress/frequent-questions-offshore-wind-and-whales
The groups that protect whales and sea turtles, who have the motivation to care for them, and have the knowledge to understand what's going on, don't think it's happening. Of course, to any good conspiracy theorist, that just means *they are in on it*. https://time.com./6254785/whale-deaths-offshore-wind-power/
Y'know, the YouTube experts probably have the better idea than the ones who crawl inside dead whales to autopsy them. After all, how smart can you be if you spent years of your life going to school so you could squeeze inside a rotting whale carcass, while I'm sitting here comfortably on my couch? Clearly one of us has made better life decisions.
We used to harvest whales for their blubber for energy. Now we annoy them with our construction noise. This is way better for both groups.
I'm currently reading Moby Dick, so I have no choice but to like this comment!
Offshore drilling creates dead zones of thousands of square miles and occasionally sets the ocean on fire, but sure, you’re super concerned about debris and whales. You’re not being disingenuous at all.
Although I didn't mention it in my review, the Europe paragraph struck me as well. Aside from the points you make, it also doesn't consider the vast differences in climate, especially vis a vis air conditioning demand.
Americans put an a/c in their home even if the climate is such that they will use it for one month out of the year. Really nice to have during that month.
My wife thought it was quite hot in Geneva in the summer to not have a/c, which she didn't have when she lived there.
I get the no a/c but why no screens in the windows????
"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."
I'd have to take a closer look at what they're saying. They're saying, I think, that the "energy" component of your bill will be small, not that your bill will be small. Which seems like a cagey sleight of hand.
My electric bill in Virginia has roughly 5 line items:
Taxes & Fees
Distribution
Transmission
Generation (plant and plant costs, I think)
Fuel
This last month, fuel was only 15% of my total bill. Generation was 37% of my bill. So even if you could cut the cost of fuel to zero, and the cost of "Generation" by half (I think you still have to pay for power plants of some type), you still have 74% of the of original bill. Not bad. Not great either. Especially considering that adding lots of renewables is going to require lots of transmission, which is going to push that Transmission line item higher.
TL;DR - I'm not sure I buy their premise on energy. I suggest taking it with a huge grain of salt.
lol what the hell are you on about
A few reality checks: an electric big-ass truck is completely useless if you want it to do the job that most people buy heavy-duty pickup trucks to do: haul a heavy trailer. The battery range is so drastically reduced that you can't even get out of town with it before you need to charge it again. This has been demonstrated by actual people trying to do this.
We have been subsidizing alternate energy sources for a very long time and they are still can't stand on their own economically, they take up a lot of land upon which they destroy the habitat for the animals and plants (environmentalists used to care about this), and when you account for their intermittency, their cost per kWh is very high and will never be much less. Wind and solar offset perhaps 10% of the generating capacity of standard 24/7 power plants, which become more expensive to run (and less efficient) when they need to be powered up and down as fill-in for the widely-varying output of wind and solar. There is also no mention of the mining and fossil fuels needed for the materials to build wind and solar, the short lifespan of many of the installations, and the disposal problem for the useless junk when the equipment stops working. Wind and solar are anything but cheap, abundant, clean energy sources, and there is no reason to think that will change in the next few decades. It is sheer fantasy to think otherwise.
Abundance might be possible with widespread installation of nuclear generation, but we still need liquid transportation fuels because electric vehicles are just not suitable for a great many applications, and the batteries are a serious hazard. And we still need plastics. And chemical feedstocks. And many other things that fossil fuels provide for an abundance lifestyle.
And, we also need more CO2 in the atmosphere to make plants grow, so we have abundant food. CO2 is not a poison, it is absolutely necessary and atmospheric levels now are not far above starvation level for plants. The war on CO2 is not about CO2, it is about destroying the Western abundance lifestyle and Western culture in general. So any discussion on the Left about abundance is just one of their usual plans to figure out how to lie to the voters - again - that they really "care" about people, so elect us, we think you are too stupid to notice that once we get in office we are going to do the exact opposite of what we promised and we actually plan to regulate away real abundance. That's what they did under Biden, and Trump is reversing it as fast as he can. That is why he was elected. I hope that the people are now smart enough to know that the Dems lie about everything, all the time, and should never be elected again to anything until they have purged the liars out of the party.
Yes we all remember that time 100 years ago when there wasn’t enough CO2 in the atmosphere so plants didn’t grow and everyone died. Thank god for heavy industry and cars or we wouldn’t have any food.
You seem quite convinced that we are at the theoretical limit of EV range. I don't see how you reach that conclusion.
The original Tesla Model S from 2008 made 265 miles on a charge, newer models can get up to 405. That's a 53% increase, in 17 years. You can get 512 miles from a Lucid Air nowadays.
Moreover, there is a new wave of Li-Ion batteries on the horizon. That is, Li-Ion batteries using Silicon (rather than graphite) anodes. These batteries will have a bout 50% higher energy density. There are various approaches to making the Silicon anode work that have been demonstrated in labs and in small-scale production. A bunch of firms are currently racing to be the first to achieve mass production. (disclosure-- I am invested in one of these firms).
At the same time, faster charging and denser charging networks are also both developing. These advances would make it less crucial to have a very long range off a single charge.
Some Chinese electric cars simply swap out the battery (in minutes) which makes refueling as (if not more) efficient than gasoline.
Plug in hybrid solves this problem nicely.
With energy that's cheap enough, the big ass truck doesn't have to be electric. Solar panels can be 100s or 1000s of times more efficient than plants (plants do things other than photosynthesis and they don't do it as well as photovoltaics)... so you can use cheap solar to direct capture carbon from the air and synthesize fuel directly much more cheaply than the current sun --> corn --> ethanol --> truck route.
The complex systems podcast had an episode [1] with an entrepreneur working on synthetic natural gas which discussed some of the amazing advancements in solar over the last 10-15 years and the vista of possibilities this opens up of which synthetic hydrocarbons are really interesting because of all the existing infrastructure.
[1] https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/solar-economics/
Your critique is assuming there is no advance in battery technology. Chinese electric cars have battery banks that can be swapped out in under a minute largely eliminating any concerns about range.
Seems like a great way to elect Republicans who are even bigger liars than Democrats and are even worse at governing
I think you're giving short shrift to Ezra's response to your question about how you should be able to convince Republicans if energy is that cheap. We have seen over and over that Republicans care about "owning the libs" more than just about anything. They will reject policies that produce cheaper energy for themselves strictly because it may make a liberal somewhere happy. I live in Texas and we are watching this happen.
This is not a book that otherwise shies away from the project of convincing people that the policies they instinctively favor aren’t serving their underlying goals. And the widely-hated hidden hand behind the president is an electric car entrepreneur. I simply don’t believe that selling conservatives on electrification could be harder than the other projects they’re pursuing here — if their math pencils. But I’m skeptical that it does, and they don’t really seem to have conviction in the math either.
I'm pretty sure I'm wrong, but I still like joking that Musk becoming the MAGA wingman (boy, how does Vance feel these days) is just a secret plot to get Republicans to like electric cars.
Have people stopped ICEing out Tesla charging stations? I wonder if Pam Bondi would pursue charges against them.
Ironically, now it's crazies on the left vandalizing charging stations.
If I didn't have to live in it, I'd find amusement in the absurdity of our era.
It's a tell that the love for EV's is more about virtue signaling than anything else. I mean, they wouldn't be vandalizing Teslas and charging stations if they truly believed climate change is in fact an existential threat.
Welcome to 2025 when every car manufacturer has at least one EV for sale.
This is a child’s argument.
Yes. The correct argument is that it's just wrong to destroy someone else's property, and especially wrong when it's done to intimidate political rivals.
The loudest, most obnoxious conservatives think that way, but they're also not the ones that are persuadable to begin with and a small enough minority that Democrats could win every state without a single one of their votes.
Klein responded "by pointing out that there is rising hostility among Republicans to clean energy investment" and your piece explains why. Obviously there are some business and economic interests that make some conservatives hostile to clean energy, but mostly it's because conservatives correctly intuit that the liberals spruiking it *don't really believe what they're saying*.
I worry that liberals (of whom I am one) will not be able to overcome their disdain for people wanting big trucks (etc.) long enough to do any kind of strategy around this. Paying $7 for a pint of organic berries several times a week is normal, of course.
Coastal liberals and normal people are two different species now, who both despise the other. Liberals don't need a strategy around overcoming their disdain for someone who wants to drive a truck, they need to understand that it's none of their business if I want to drive a truck. Basically, liberals need to understand that the way other people live is ALL none of their business, and they have no right to use government coercion to force the majority to live their lives the way the coastal elites want them to. Considering the mansions they live in, the cars they drive, and their high level of consumption, preaching an austerity lifestyle to others is the height of hypocrisy for those living in abundance that many people can only dream of.
My dream would be a new party based on a core philosophy of "You do you". Both sides now seem more invested in using power (especially concentrated at the federal level) at telling the other half they need to live life their way, and since the overreach ensures that we flip control at least once a decade, the whiplash is getting worse.
Once upon a time, this was the Libertarians, but they've even lost their minds now. As I told my wife last November "I can't even make a good-conscience protest for a 3rd party this year."
They are taking farmland here to build solar farms. Some are on lower-productivity ranch land, but not all.
Big-ass truck driver here, in a city that is around the 100th largest MSA in the country (so, not large). Although mine is a hybrid that makes a quite decent 24MPG.
There aren't many latinos here, but the mostly white men sure as hell prefer driving big ass trucks. It's a real status symbol. It's remarkable, driving down the street seeing some homes in very bad shape, but with a $50k pickup truck in the driveway.
It's interesting that you contrasted the Ds and Rs on the big-ass truck issue. I agree with all you say about the implications for big-ass trucks of the general policy concepts of the two sides. Still, I think it's noteworthy that the video of Biden test-driving an F-150 Lightning (and driving it very fast) went viral. There was rather minimal backlash from the left as to the size of that vehicle (it's huge). It's a bit unclear whether Biden specifically wanted to be seen in the troquita, or if that's just the vehicle the union people most wanted to put him in. It was Ford's newest EV, so it might have just been a coincidence of that.
Noah Smith disagrees with this critique.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-things-e34
"Barro argues that if Klein and Thompson really cared about giving Americans cheap energy, they wouldn’t even mention the fact that cheap energy is also green energy. The fact that they do mention that, Barro argues, is evidence that deep down, despite what they say, Klein and Thompson actually believe that green energy isn’t really cheap.
That doesn’t sound like a very reasonable argument on Barro’s part, does it? But I don’t think I’m misrepresenting it."