Abundance

by Ezra Klein

New problems and new solutions require new laws. Ruhl and Salzman favor past models by which certain kinds of projects have been fast-tracked past environmental and legal challenges. A 1996 law offered this favoritism to border security, and the Trump administration used it to great effect in constructing parts of their border wall. In another example, Congress recognized that we had too many military bases after the Cold War and that closing them through the normal congressional process would be politically impossible. So they created an independent base-closing commission that received recommendations from the Department of Defense, proposed plans for closure based on those recommendations, and ensured those plans got simple and fast up-and-down votes. In October 2024, President Biden signed legislation exempting semiconductor-manufacturing facilities receiving subsidies under the CHIPS and Science Act from environmental review.101 Something similar could be created for green infrastructure, Ruhl and Salzman suggest, with projects deemed important to our climate goals fast-tracked past a slew of normal hurdles. Something akin to this system would, in their thinking, update our environmental laws for a new age, tuning them to meet the challenge of today rather than the challenge of yesteryear.