The EIS requirement of the National Environmental Policy Act was only one of the hurdles facing Cape Wind. Committed opponents raised concerns about potential effects on fishing, tourism, air quality, bird and bat populations, and historic preservation. After 16 years of regulatory submissions and legal wrangling, including multiple trips to the federal courts of appeals, Cape Wind Associates threw in the towel.

Whatever the specific merits of the Cape Wind project, it is but one example of how regulatory burdens and litigation risk hamper the deployment of renewable energy projects. The nation’s first commercial offshore wind farm—five turbines off Block Island, RI—eventually opened in 2016. Originally planned as a 100-turbine development, even a shrunken Block Island project took nearly a decade to navigate the permitting process. Literally hundreds of wind and solar power projects have been delayed, constricted, or blocked over the past 20 years.

Renewable energy projects are hardly the only projects ensnared by the nation’s bureaucratic gauntlet. Electricity transmission lines and other linear infrastructure (such as pipelines) are particularly vulnerable to regulatory traps and litigious opposition. Such projects stretch across jurisdictions, so they can be subject to many duplicative and overlapping legal requirements, any one of which can scuttle the entire project. The average time to permit a transmission line project is a decade, though some take far longer. As electricity demand grows, transmission capacity and interconnection are not keeping pace.

Left-leaning journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are disturbed by this state of affairs and, in particular, the role their political brethren have played in creating it. Abundance is their attempt at a corrective, but like California’s never-to-be-fully-completed high-speed rail project, they stop short of their destination.

Decarbonization / Klein and Thompson see climate change as one of humanity’s greatest challenges and among the policy areas most in need of an abundance agenda. “To maintain the climate we have had, or anything close to it, requires us to remake the world we have built,” they advise. As they see it, current environmental laws were motivated by a fear that “we were building too much and too heedlessly.” Today, however, “we are building too little and we are too often paralyzed by process.” And yet, the environmental movement—and progressive politicians—remains focused on how to impose regulatory constraints and economic costs on disfavored technologies and refuses to think seriously about what sorts of policies are necessary for a decarbonized future. Mandating emission reductions, shoveling out government subsidies, and ignoring the broader legal and regulatory environment will not produce carbon stabilization.

While Klein and Thompson may be too sanguine about the ability to decarbonize, blithely asserting we “know how to power economies without fossil fuels,” they seem to recognize that doling out subsidies for electric cars that cannot be charged or wind farms that cannot be permitted is no way to meet the challenge. One wonders what took them so long to have this realization. Some of us have been warning for decades that existing environmental laws—permitting requirements in particular—impede the development and deployment of renewable energy and other environmentally desirable technologies. Yet Klein and Thompson write as if this is a recent discovery and the unanticipated consequence of well-intentioned regulatory measures.

They recognize that “energy is the nucleus of wealth” and that “there are few inequalities more fundamental than energy inequality.” Climate change will not be mitigated and prosperity will not be achieved without addressing the bottlenecks blocking energy abundance. Dreams of “degrowth” are just that: misanthropic fantasies. “Turning global politics into a zero-sum contest for allotted energy rations will not deliver a greener future,” they write. The United States will not reach net-zero carbon emissions without record-breaking construction and deployment of new energy projects and transmission capacity. “The climate crisis demands something different” than what progressive politicians have been offering. “It demands a liberalism that builds.”

Housing / Energy is hardly the only area in which 20th century progressive policies stand in the way of abundance. Housing is another. Although many want to deny it, “housing follows the laws of supply and demand.” It is shocking that so basic a truth needs to be said, but the prevalence of academic-sounding NIMBY arguments makes it necessary. The United States lags other developed nations in houses per thousand people, 425 to the OECD average of 470. Policymakers—and, Klein and Thompson are insistent to note, liberal policymakers in blue jurisdictions—deliberately used “policy levers that made life in dynamic cities too costly for the poor to afford.” The consequence, they note, “is a housing crisis of staggering proportions.” Urban centers bear the brunt of these effects as “high housing costs wreak havoc on the city’s offering of opportunity.” But the effects are not confined to cities, as urban centers are “engines of creativity” essential to innovation and economic growth.

That contemporary liberal governance is to blame for this is readily observable by looking across jurisdictions. California’s urban centers in particular present “dystopia tucked amid…plenty.” In 2022, while Los Angeles and San Francisco struggled to permit three new housing units per 1,000 residents, Austin, TX, permitted 18 per 1,000. In 2023, the Houston metro area issued more housing permits than San Francisco, Boston, New York City, Newark, and Jersey City combined. This is not an accident.

The failure to build increases housing prices, exacerbates economic inequality, and fosters homelessness. The empirical evidence is clear: Poverty rates do not predict homelessness, “the availability and cost of housing” do. And as with the effect of layered permitting processes on infrastructure development, this should not come as a surprise: William Tucker’s The Excluded Americans: Homelessness and Housing Policies (a Cato Institute book) was published in 1990.

If policymakers want housing to be affordable and accessible, they need to make it easier to build. Yet “many liberal jurisdictions have layered on rules and regulations that make housing pricier even when it is constructed—and that, of course, makes it less affordable.” Throwing money around to subsidize housing just feeds the beast. At best it covers the regulatory costs government imposed in the first place. One hand is doling out money to cover the costs imposed by the other. This is hardly a liberalism that builds.

Innovation / It is not just building that is required. Problems like climate change will not be solved “without more invention.” Here again, progressive governance chokes off what is needed in predictable ways. While the federal government lavishly funds scientific research, it has also “haphazardly burdened the scientific process with the same flavor of procedural kludge that has slowed down other critical parts of the economy.” Funding rules and the associated bureaucracies often “privilege the game of performing the act of science over the actual practice of science.” Scientists today spend as much as 40 percent of their time working on grant-writing and administrative tasks instead of their actual research. The sort of innovation necessary to address problems like climate change “will require a level of risk-taking and ambition that we are too effective at snuffing out.”

Abundance is an effort to awaken the Left—and the Democratic Party in particular—to the need to make a more abundant future possible. It pushes “a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.” The ugly truth Klein and Thompson want their ideological bedfellows to recognize is that contemporary left-leaning governance is the greatest obstacle to achieving this end. To combat this, they seek to channel “the anger any liberal should feel when looking at the states and cities liberals govern.”

Their frustration is palpable:

We say that we want to save the planet from climate change. But in practice, many Americans are dead set against the clean energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar projects. We say that housing is a human right. But our richest cities have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new homes. We say we want better health care, better medicine, and more cures for terrible diseases. But we tolerate a system of research, funding, and regulation that pulls scientists away from their most promising work, denying millions of people the discoveries that might extend or improve their lives.

As Klein and Thompson see it, contemporary liberals—and Democratic policymakers in particular—can easily see the problems of economic inequality and want, but they have a hard time understanding the needs of entrepreneurs, creators, and investors. Liberals “assumed that so long as enough money was dangled in front of it, the private sector could and would achieve social goals.” But throwing money around did not create abundance. In some cases, it makes things worse because subsidizing demand for goods when supply is constricted only drives up their cost.

Limited vision / Klein and Thompson want to shift the focus, but without giving up their government-centric vision of contemporary liberalism or exploring why they and others were so blind to the consequences of the policies they supported for so long. It is fair to note that while the left has been too enamored of government, the right has often been too antagonistic toward it. The right frequently ignores the importance of state capacity and the need for governmental institutions to perform particular functions, including maintaining and securing the institutional arrangements upon which private markets depend. But the idea that these market functions—that discovery and production—can be transferred to or driven by the government reflects a myopic vision and Klein and Thompson’s failure to learn the lessons of the episodes they recount.

They recognize that when a project is funded by public money, “you have to abide by public requirements.” Bureaucratic constraints on how government money is spent and on how development decisions are made are necessary because public-sector actors do not face market discipline. Public decision makers are not spending their own money and do not risk economic losses if they make bad decisions. Such constraints can make the public sector less dynamic than the private sector. Yet, Klein and Thompson still seem surprised by this effect, asking “shouldn’t things happen faster when they are backed by the might and money of the government?” That naivete would be quaint if it were not so serious. They think it is “damning that you can build affordable housing so much more cheaply and swiftly by forgoing public funds.” What is more damning is the government-centric myopia that presumes government must build housing, particularly at a time when land-use regulations and other measures prevent private actors from meeting housing demand and inflate the costs of the housing that gets built. It is fair to critique private-sector priorities and conclude that some public-spirited investments may need governmental encouragement, but the idea that government enterprises will outperform the private sector in building, innovating, or providing is fantastical.

Klein and Thompson are wary of overtly endorsing deregulation, as such. They nonetheless endorse the idea of creating “bottleneck detectives” who search out “restrictions that should not exist” and needlessly block the building, deploying, and inventing we need. More broadly, they resist detailing specific policy prescriptions because they “are proposing…less a set of policy solutions than a new set of questions about which our politics should resolve.”

Lest some of their intended progressive audience see the “supply-side” focus as conservative, Klein and Thompson insist that “abundance is a return to an older tradition of leftist thought,” Marxism in particular. Karl Marx was concerned that capitalism fettered production and that proper control of the economy could rationalize production and overcome scarcity. According to Klein and Thompson:

Among capitalism’s many sins, Marx wrote, was that it prevented the most wondrous and useful technology from being invented and deployed in the first place. An economy run amok with useless fettering serves the rich few at the expense of the poorer many.

The Marxist agenda, they continue, was “not to turn the production machine off, but to direct its ends toward a shared abundance: to unburden the forces of production and make possible that which had been impossible to imagine.”

Unfortunately, Klein and Thompson ignore the history that followed. The Marxist dream of replacing a fettered capitalism with socialist abundance was quickly shattered. As elucidated in the 20th century’s socialist calculation debate, it is not possible to maximize production and ensure plenty without property, prices, and profit. In this regard, Klein and Thompson are like Oskar Lange and Abbe Lerner insofar as they want an abundance agenda without having to embrace the market institutions upon which abundance depends. Rather than provide a solution to the information problem that plagues central planning, Lange and Lerner effectively assumed it away. In much the same fashion, Klein and Thompson seem to think the failures of centralized government decision making can be repaired while maintaining centralized government decision making. They want a “liberalism that builds” without thinking too deeply about what building requires. It would have helped had they consulted Mises or Hayek at least as much as they did Marx.

Klein and Thompson admit they are discovering problems today that they studiously ignored in the past when flagged by market-oriented analysts. The recognition that progressive legal institutions are obstacles to growth, innovation, and solving societal problems is welcome. Yet they show little curiosity as to why they and their fellow-travelers had so many “blind spots” for so long. Other than a brief nod to Mancur Olson, they offer no real explanation for why well-intentioned laws become obstacles to economic and social progress, nor do they show much willingness to second-guess or revisit their own assumptions about the proper role of government in facilitating economic growth, technological innovation, or material abundance. Klein and Thompson may understand what it takes to build political support for supply-side thinking on the political left, but their lack of introspection renders much of their substantive analysis hollow.

They close the book by offering “a new set of questions around which our politics should revolve. What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy? What inventions do we need that we do not yet have?” A more fundamental inquiry would be who decides? And what sorts of institutional arrangements are necessary to answer such questions? In failing to even pose such questions, Abundance does not offer much of an answer to the problems it seeks to solve. Klein and Thompson say they want a “liberalism that builds,” but they never really consider how it was that liberalism once built.