Stealing ‘Abundance’

Commonplace ^ | 28 Apr, 2025 | David A. Cowan

[MtnClimber]

Conservatives, not liberals, are best positioned to build—and in many cases, are already doing so.

The Democratic Party is in total disarray. Its exhausted leadership has struggled to focus on any single front to concentrate its fire on the new administration, while AOC and Gavin Newsom do their warmups for the 2028 primaries. DOGE cuts and trade wars could give Democrats a launchpad for retaking the House in 2026, but it does not give them a positive platform in any meaningful sense. Perhaps that is why a new book from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson has captured the policy world’s attention so soon after the Left’s big defeat last November. In Abundance, they argue for a liberalism that builds. But the Right is already doing the building.

There is plenty to like in what has come to be called “the Abundance Agenda”. More energy, homes, trains, roads, medicines, and technology are undoubtedly needed to improve the lives of Americans and would increase our national strength. It is also encouraging to see some liberals making the case for supply-side reform at a time when most do not seem ready to sit down and reflect on how their philosophy created so much of what they now complain about. Getting tough with the folks on your side of the aisle is never easy, and they are playing a productive role in the national conversation, unlike the people burning Teslas or engaging in the performative politics of “the resistance.” But there is no getting away from the fact that the blockers—not the builders—have been empowered by decades of liberal governance at the state and federal levels.

It is undeniable that environmental legislation from Congress, like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), has hamstrung America’s ability to build. Restrictive zoning—putting a legal limit on how much housing can be built in particular areas—in states like California has consistently failed to deliver more homes. Poor planning has blocked big construction projects like high-speed rail, despite successive waves of federal subsidies under Obama and Biden. Blue state governance has led to people voting with their feet, moving from California to states like Arizona, Texas, and Georgia. But lost in the abundance debate is that red states are not simply the beneficiaries of liberal misrule. They have been bolder in delivering what abundance requires, including reforming zoning regulations and paring back environmental protections that have caused problems elsewhere.

Texas is arguably the greatest display of abundance policymaking, and yet it is also one of the reddest states in the Union. Plentiful land, abundant natural resources, and lots of sunshine give Texas several advantages over other states. But the state also gets out of the way so Texans can exploit these opportunities. The state underwent a housing boom thanks to a flexible planning system. Utah recently streamlined its permitting rules with similar moves being made in Montana, Arizona, and Virginia. In fact, Utah’s Environmental Permitting Modifications Act, sponsored by Representative Tyler Clancy, should inspire Republican state legislators across the country. Idaho’s zero-based regulation program— using a combination of sunset provisions, regulatory budgets, regulatory impact analyses, and independent reviews to require agencies to overhaul regulations every five years—has drastically cut the state’s administrative code to make Idaho the most lightly regulated state in the Union at 39,000 restrictions.

Today’s right of center is better positioned ideologically to embrace a renewed supply side reform program. State legislators who hail from the New Right with an interest in American dominance over the industries of the future, such as Utah’s Tyler Clancy, are already pushing for permitting reform to get more homes and infrastructure built. While there is still some conservative resistance to using state power more proactively to pursue growth, through tools like industrial policy, there seems to be more flexibility on display there than there seems to be among liberals who are unwilling to abandon a decades-long commitment to redistributive economics. But red states still have much more work to do on curtailing regulation and bureaucracy. The State Leadership Initiative was recently launched to aid these efforts.

Change has not just been coming from red states. It is also coming from the Trump administration. In an address to the American Dynamism Summit, Vice President Vance said:

We are a nation of builders. We make things. We create things. Each of you came to this summit not because you developed some flash-in-the-pan application, but because you’re building something very real. You’re raising new factories. You’re turning profits back into research and development. And you’re creating new, good-paying jobs for your fellow Americans. This is why I’m such huge fans of yours, and that we recognize now is the time to align our work interests with those of all of you. It’s time to align the interests of our technology firms with the interests of the United States of America writ large.

This bold rhetoric has been matched with rapid executive action. President Trump signed executive orders targeting the Council on Environmental Quality, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act, while also using emergency powers to streamline permitting rules and exploit exemptions. This could fast track energy and infrastructure projects all over America. Research has shown that cancellation rates for major energy infrastructure projects, such as pipelines and solar, have reached between 12% and 32% due to excessive litigation during the NEPA review.

On top of the zeal for regulatory reform, the Right is also much more concerned about providing affordable, plentiful, and domestic energy than the Left. Liberals like Klein and Thompson recognize that growth and innovation need cheap and abundant energy. From data centers to support new AI technology to an expansion of steelworks and other factories needed for reindustrialization, you cannot build in America without access to energy, at low cost. But from the Green New Deal on down, liberals are fixated with wind, solar, and other renewables as the means of achieving this.

Nuclear is still taboo for many on the Left. Renewables are important, and the solar boom in Texas shows how beneficial this technology can be in the right places, but that is not the case everywhere. If we want to lead in industries like AI and reshore manufacturing, then the American economy will become much more energy intensive. Wind and solar cannot meet that demand, and there are situations in which fossil fuels are still needed. Data center expansion is projected to drive half of the growth in US power consumption by 2030. Greater nuclear capacity will be necessary, but this will take time, meaning more gas-fired plants are being built to support new data centers.

To build renewables at the scale required to support the American economy, it’s not enough to just construct wind and solar farms and hydro stations across the country. We must also significantly expand grid infrastructure to transmit power from these sites to where it’s needed. This could cost as much as $4.5 trillion to achieve, and our existing grid infrastructure is already under massive strain. Battery storage technology has certainly improved in quality and fallen in price, but vast amounts of public funds would still be needed to go into decarbonizing the grid through renewables.

Carbon capture and storage technology promises to effectively remove emissions from the sky, reduce greenhouse gases, and allow some energy-intensive industries to continue. Sadly, the technology is unproven and incredibly expensive. The federal government would have to invest significantly in the hope that prices will lower as the technology improves, which is not a given. The cost is not solely due to the process of capturing the carbon itself, but also to finding places under the seabed where it can be safely stored. The fact is that oil and gas are not going away in the short to medium term, nor should they.

Nuclear is the only pathway to reach the goal of affordable, plentiful, and reliable clean energy. A reinvestment in nuclear energy can come in a variety of forms. Large nuclear plants are needed to meet future energy demand, especially if we are going to electrify vast areas of the economy, as many on the Left advocate. Electric vehicles, heat pumps, and the rest will consume immense power, and progress toward making them more energy-efficient has been slow. Only nuclear delivers the truly abundant clean energy that can make the green transition a reality without impoverishing America. While nuclear plants take longer to build, nuclear energy has a much higher and more reliable baseload capacity than most renewables sources. An average nuclear reactor has the same capacity as 800 wind turbines or 8.5 million solar panels. New technologies like small modular reactors (SMRs) and advanced nuclear reactors (AMRs) are being invested in across the developed world. The costs are high, and it takes time, but you have the certainty that it can deliver the power needed. For example, France has insulated itself from energy price shocks through its extensive use of nuclear power to generate electricity. To achieve this, conservatives will have to support a blend of expansive deregulation and targeted intervention to achieve energy dominance.

Klein and Thompson frame their vision of liberalism in opposition to the politics of scarcity as championed by the populist Left and Right. It is a convenient and seductive framing, but it underestimates how much of human existence is defined by scarcity. Steel, uranium, lithium, oil, gas, copper, and aluminum are all needed to get building again; all of them are finite. Territory, air space, shipping lanes, subsea cables, and space are being contested by rival powers. Deregulation can deliver more prosperity, but it cannot end geopolitical competition for scarce resources. A golden age of American innovation demands a reckoning with that scarcity and a path forward.

By facing the constraints on our actions and resources, people are forced to innovate and find ways of doing more with less or overcoming obstacles. Even if we achieve some of the sci-fi-like technologies in Abundance—fusion power, say, or skyscraper farms—we will live in a world of finite resources, which might spur human colonization in space. Striving ahead and achieving progress in the face of the odds is the triumph of human endeavor and endurance. That is what defines the human spirit and has shaped much of American history, from Lewis and Clark to Neil Armstrong. There is something more grounded in the reality of scarcity and how to overcome it that can help the Right deliver not just abundance, but a revival of American dynamism.

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TOPICS: Books/Literature; Business/Economy; Society
KEYWORDS: abundance; books; derekthompson; ezraklein; leftism; pages; theabundanceagenda

[MtnClimber]

Republicans are the builders and democRATs are the blockers.

[MtnClimber]

Republicans are the builders and democRATs are the blockers.

[goodnesswins]

Demcommies are the DESTROYERS, too