The insular nature of the “abundance agenda” is revealed just two pages into Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, as the authors paint a picture of their idyllic future.
“You open the refrigerator. In the fruit and vegetables drawer are apples, tomatoes, and an eggplant, shipped from the nearest farm, mere miles away. These crops don’t grow horizontally, across fields. They grow vertically on tiered shelves inside a tall greenhouse. … These skyscraper farms spare countless acres for forests and parks. … When your parents were young, nearly 25 percent of global land was used to raise livestock for human consumption. That is unimaginable now. Much of that land has been rewilded.”
Rewilded.
What does that even mean?
As long as there have been people in North America, they have been managing the land. It hasn’t been “wild” in thousands of years. How will all this “rewilded” land be managed and to whose ends?
Klein doesn’t say directly, but we get hints later on.
“The land that matters most is the land that aids in the fiery creation of the new,” Klein writes. “That land is in the heart of our cities, not at the edge of our settlements.”
The abundance that Klein and his ilk want to deliver is an abundance for urban professionals. The ones that make up “the superstar cities that now drive the economy.”
And what about the people in rural communities? Is abundance for them too? Sadly not. Klein has been very clear that his abundance is not an abundance for all.
“I’ve been completely completely consistent,” Klein said recently on The Realignment podcast. “I have a set of normative goals for society. It is not omnidirectional moreness. It is not that anybody waking up with a plan to produce more of something is my brother in abundance.”
“I want more affordable housing,” Klein continued. “I want more clean energy, not more dirty energy. Right if you come to me with a proposal for how we can build a s*** ton more fossil fuel plants, I am not excited about that. I will oppose you. … I am trying to define a set of goods and services and possibilities that liberalism, which is my political tradition, American liberalism, should get relentlessly focussed on achieving.”
Klein seems to be envisioning a regime where liberal urban professionals are given regulatory relief for their lifestyle preferences, but everybody else must abide by the existing regulatory regime — or, as Thomas Hochman calls it, “deregulatory favoritism.”
The bipartisan Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024, as Hochman notes, did not so much reform the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, a key source of regulatory delay, as it just exempted favored projects, like clean energy and power transmission, from the law entirely.
The result would have been a system where natural gas power plants, highways, and pipelines would all have been subject to NEPA’s cumbersome environmental review and citizen suit provisions, thus making them more expensive and harder to build, but solar farms, wind turbines, and transmission lines would all have been exempt.
Fortunately Republicans in Congress held out for real NEPA reform and the bill fell through. But in California where the Democratic Party has total control of the government, we can see Klein’s “deregulatory favoritism” in action.
In 2021, the University of California wanted to build a new dorm to accommodate more students at its Berkeley campus. But a group of residents in Berkeley did not want a new dorm in their neighborhood so they used the citizen suit provision of the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, to block the project in state court. The case went all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the residents against the dorm.
Here was a great opportunity for California Democrats to weaken CEQA, which would have made it much easier to build everything from housing to power lines to roads statewide. But instead of reforming CEQA, California Democrats decided to just exempt public university housing projects from CEQA entirely.
Now it may be time-consuming to keep exempting certain types of projects from CEQA, but if the Democratic Party is going to ensure that the correct “set of goods and services” are being provided — in line with High Priest Ezra Klein’s interpretation of “American liberalism,” of course — then these case by case exemptions are the only way to go.
WHY THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CAN’T GOVERN
Unfortunately, if you are a raisin farmer in Selma or a dairy farmer in Tulare, according to Ezra Klein, you live on land that doesn’t matter and you work in a “dirty” profession that does not drive “superstar” economic growth. There will be no regulatory exemptions for you and your communities, which, let’s face it, should be scheduled for “rewilding” soon anyway.
And then Democrats like Klein have the audacity to wonder why their party is so unpopular outside the urban professional elite.