“Imagine boarding a train in the middle of a city,” former President Barack Obama rhapsodized in April 2009. “No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over a hundred miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination.”
It’s a curious statement to find one-third of the way into a book titled Abundance. Not 10% of Americans live or work in the middle of a city within walking distance of a passenger train station, but, as coauthors, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson quickly make clear, their focus is on “the land that matters … in the hearts of our cities,” by which they mean the giant coastal metropolitan areas where one-quarter of the public live.
They make it clear as well that they’re writing for fellow liberals. They expect 4 to 6 degrees Celsius of global warming, a high-side estimate in my view, and assert confidently that “the stocks of fossil fuels are finite,” even though fracking has shown that innovation can vastly increase the amounts recoverable. They decry “closing our gates to immigrants,” ignoring the nearly 1 million new U.S. citizens every year.
Nevertheless, Abundance is full of thoughtful analysis and useful perspectives on “the pathologies of the broad left.” They tell their intended audience — Klein writes for the New York Times, Thompson for the Atlantic — things already familiar to readers of conservative publications: how former President Joe Biden’s multi-billion program produced just seven (or maybe 55) electric vehicle charging stations, how the Biden rural broadband project connected no one, how California’s high-speed rail program authorized by voters in 2008 after spending unpredicted billions is still struggling to connect the metropolises of Fresno and Merced. They understand why most voters think red states are governed better than blue states.
In the process, they tell the story of how the government in the 1970s vastly improved the quality and healthiness of air and water — a story little appreciated today because conservatives don’t like crediting the government, and environmentalists like to raise money by lamenting that things are worse than ever. Unhappily, federal and many state laws allowed, even encouraged, lawsuits challenging environmental infringement. Thus began, with leadership from many of my law school contemporaries, the environment lawsuit industrial complex.
The corollary to that has been what Klein and Thompson call “everything bagel liberalism.” The 2023 Biden semiconductor bill required an environmental questionnaire to assess environmental review, mandated an “equity strategy” for applicants, and required plans to include women and other disadvantaged people such as minorities, veterans, and small businesses in their supply chains — Something for every Democratic Party constituency. If you handed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite New Dealer, Harry Hopkins, that paper, he’d quickly draw a diagonal line crossing out everything but the amount appropriated and then send telegrams to people he knew could deliver and get the job done.
Klein and Thompson don’t advise anybody to do anything like that. In fact, they don’t have any recommendations for leaving any liberal constituency out in the cold. Nor do they make the point that Philip Howard makes in his several books that responsible individuals should make final decisions and not leave them to endless committee deliberations and court processes.
Instead, they point to what great things they think must be accomplished. We need more solar and wind energy and high-transmission lines — they admit red Texas does better than blue California on this — and to double the electric grid because of artificial intelligence. Those solar and wind devices will require land the size of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee, plus Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Then, “electrify everything,” replacing one billion machines “within the next few years.”
You will have to replace your accustomed gas stove with electric induction and your gas heat with an electric heat pump, both of which, they assure you, will work better. One suspects that the several-thousand-dollar outlays will not be voluntary, at least for nonmembers of “everything bagel” constituencies. But just when you start wondering whether such things will ever happen, you read that the nation’s largest wind farm in Wyoming, which “if all goes well from here, … will be completed in 2026 — eighteen years after it was proposed.”
“The arc of history does not always bend toward our beliefs,” the authors admit in their conclusion. Americans are not lining up to turn in their gas stoves, and it’s apparent California’s electric-car mandate won’t be met by 2035, as Democrats torch electric vehicles rather than buy them. American trust in expert scientists was frayed by the lies and misjudgments of Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, and others during the COVID-19 pandemic.
DOGE COMES FOR CALIFORNIA HIGH-SPEED RAIL
It’s hard to see America making the transition from spending money to reduce carbon emissions to realizing economic gains from doing so — and even harder to see how Democrats who want to build things cut through the pettifoggery of “everything bagel” constituencies’ vetoes and get to the authors’ promised land of low carbon emissions abundance.
I guess that Klein and Thompson (briefly a next-door neighbor, and a very nice one, in my Washington apartment building) wrote this book to show their fellow liberals the need to change, to stimulate on national issues the innovative success urban liberals have scored on revising big-city zoning to allow more housing. And without any of the hatred, contempt, and snobbish disdain so many liberals show for the views and habits of their fellow citizens who do not share their views.