Abundance

by Ezra Klein

But that bargain has broken down. The problem we faced in the 1970s was that we were building too much and too heedlessly. The problem we face in the 2020s is that we are building too little and we are too often paralyzed by process. And this is not just the view of a few law professors. “The environmentalist movement evolved to stop bad people from destroying the world, and so we have perfected the art of saying no,” says Larry Selzer, the president and CEO of the Conservation Fund. “But we can’t ‘no’ our way to the kind of growth we need. The Interstate Highway System is forty-nine thousand miles of road. The interstate clean-energy system—the solar farms, the wind turbines, the geothermal land, the transmission lines, the pipes—will touch more than five hundred thousand miles of land. This will be an enormous project. We have to build, and build, and build.”