Abundance

by Ezra Klein

We are early in the story of humanity’s relationship with energy. Today’s technologies will come to seem comical, even barbaric.

Too many see clearly the costs that dirty energy can impose on the environment but do not dare imagine the possibilities clean and abundant energy unlocks for it.

Because these advantages are not universally known—and because new technologies are more expensive than mature ones—subsidies need to be generous, and advertising needs to be everywhere.

“One way to put that is for every fifteen years from 2020 to 2050, we need to build the entirety of our electricity grid worth of supply again,” says Jesse Jenkins, an energy expert at Princeton University.

This was, and is, a liberalism that changed the world through the writing of new rules and the moving about of money.

What matters is not what gets spent. What matters is what gets built.

In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.

As Ezra walked the path of the track with the engineers who built it, he heard less about engineering problems than political problems.

Trains are cleaner than cars, but high-speed rail has had to clear every inch of its route through environmental reviews, with lawsuits lurking around every corner.

Even so, the United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get.

Portugal is the cheapest country in the database, at $96 million. All those countries build more tunnels than we do,54 perhaps because they retain the confidence to regularly try. The better you are at building infrastructure, the more ambitious you can be when imagining infrastructure to build.

The new generations of power tools and computer modeling and teleconferencing and advanced machinery and prefab materials and global shipping. You’d think we could build so much more, so much faster, for so much less money, than in the past.

That power leads to abuse and imperiousness.

But time has exposed gaps in the theory. Japan has gone from economic poster child to growth laggard. Olson’s argument would seem to imply that the United States, with its geographic protection against invasion and its long history of continuity, would be far more sclerotic than Germany, but it isn’t. And Olson has no real answer for why so few countries that fall into crisis subsequently grow into affluence.

It’s relatively easy to build inside the confines of computer code. It’s harder, but manageable, to manipulate matter within the four walls of a factory. When you construct a new building or subway tunnel or highway, you have to navigate neighbors and communities and existing roads and emergency access vehicles and politicians and beloved views of the park and the possibility of earthquakes and on and on.

The world we live in—where manufacturing productivity rises and rises even as construction productivity falls—is a new phenomenon, not a historical inevitability.

“Every society, whatever its institutions and governing ideology, gives greater rewards to the fittest—the fittest for that society,” Olson writes.67 A young country that is still in its building phase creates opportunities for engineers and architects. A mature country that has entered its negotiations phase creates opportunities for lawyers and management consultants.

“I don’t think that the ambitious upstarts who go into high-speed rail (in America, anyway) are going to have a great time or have much success in convincing their friends to follow them. And I suspect that, for various reasons, too many domains look somewhat like high-speed rail.… There’s a view that the internet is a frontier-of-last-resort and I don’t think it’s totally wrong.”

But what they were building was an arm of liberalism—with associated institutions, laws, and leaders—designed to relentlessly sue the government itself, and that would go on to fight for more bills and rules that would widen the opportunities to sue the government.

But behind these victories, Nader’s revolution created a new layer of government: democracy by lawsuit.

The result, Sabin argues, was a new kind of liberalism, which regarded government not as a partner in the solution of societal problems but rather as the source of those very problems.

They would bury it in paperwork and procedure and hearings and disclosure demands and lawsuits.

Behind these procedures, Bagley suggested, were two very real concerns: legitimacy and accountability.

Decisions that are often made by bureaucracies in other countries are made by judges in our country.

America is unusually legalistic. It always has been. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”

When you make legal training the default training for a political career, you make legal thinking the default thinking in politics. And legal thinking centers around statutory language and commitment to process, not results and outcomes.

Olson predicted that a thriving, successful society would become more complex to navigate over time. There would be more groups and voices and laws and processes. Those who succeeded would be those best suited to operating at the nexus of that complexity.

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.

“So, despite its participatory ethos, the United States does not succeed in producing more trust.”

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.

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.

The government is a plural posing as a singular. Different factions and officials and regulations and processes push in different directions.

Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do. Conservatives talk as if they want a small state but support a national security and surveillance apparatus of terrifying scope and power.

He does not provide any evidence for this claim, but there is evidence against it.

Each individual decision is rational. The collective consequences are maddening.

It is hard to hear Marston’s story without being reminded of Nicholas Bagley’s argument that liberalism has become obsessed with procedure rather than with outcomes, that it seeks legitimacy through rule following rather than through the enactment of the public’s will.

In 2022, President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law. The Biden administration believed semiconductors would be to the twenty-first century what oil was to the twentieth century and that America must be a leader again in manufacturing them.

The semiconductor industry was invented in America—the “silicon” in Silicon Valley refers to the material that semiconductors are made from—but we long ago lost our dominant position in making what we invented.

Since 1960, federal government spending has risen more than fivefold—and yes, that’s accounting for inflation.

The job was turned over to a vast assemblage of consultancies.

And all of it must be done while following procurement and contracting rules that no private technology company would ever impose on itself.

Read that again: They had not been working on modernizing their technology stack for ten years. They had been working for ten years on the massive contract they would award to outside firms to modernize and manage their technology stack.

“Hiring as fast as they possibly could had been the one consistent directive coming from everyone above them: the governor’s office, the legislature, the federal Department of Labor, and every oversight body with jurisdiction over the EDD’s operations,” Pahlka was told.48 Telling all those overseers they were wrong was not in anyone’s interest. And no one believed they would listen anyway. Firing workers during a crisis of EDD performance would look terrible.

Fraudulent applications using these sources will not get flagged: the data entered on the application will exactly match the sources the EDD checks against, because it is usually a copy of precisely that data,” Pahlka writes.

What Pahlka and her team found, again and again, was that the rules and regulations that governed California’s unemployment insurance system and that had been written into its code had just kept growing.

For government to do more—or even for it to just do what it is already doing—sometimes it first needs permission to do much less.

And it would have taken months, or longer, under Pennsylvania’s normal rules.

A twenty-four-hour live cam trained on the site allowed the public to follow along. Shapiro took to giving updates on Twitter and TikTok.

These were risks. There are reasons these rules are in place. No-bid contracts can enable corruption as well as speed.

But in turning these questions from choices into rules, we have taken discretion and judgment away from people like Carroll. We prefer that projects go badly by the book. We minimize some risks but make delay and high costs routine.