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The cost of solar is falling so fast that for much of the day it will be effectively free, in much of the world, by 2030.
In 2022, the US Energy Information Administration released a report estimating life-cycle costs for new energy installations in the coming decades. Solar was already cheaper than natural gas. Wind was a dollar more. Both were about half the price of coal.19 As the climate writer and activist Bill McKibben put it, “In the place of those fires we keep lit day and night, it’s possible for us to rely on the fact that there is a fire in the sky—a great ball of burning gas about ninety-three million miles away, whose energy can be collected in photovoltaic panels, and which differentially heats the
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The climate crisis demands something different. It demands a liberalism that builds. The Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act add up to about $450 billion in clean energy investments, subsidies, and loan guarantees. This is how the scale of such bills is normally described in Washington: by a price tag. The more money, the bigger the bill. That is an incomplete measure, at best.
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.
The challenge is to increase innovation and efficiency while preserving democratic norms.
What has taken so long on high-speed rail is not hammering nails or pouring concrete. It’s negotiating. Negotiating with courts, with funders, with business owners, with homeowners, with farm owners.
Those negotiations cost time, which costs money. Those negotiations lead to changes in the route or the build or the design, which costs money. Those negotiations lead to public disappointment and frustration, which leads to loss of money that might otherwise have been approved if the project were speeding toward completion.
After World War II, Germany’s and Japan’s cities were bombed out, their people dispirited, their economies wrecked. The question of the age, Olson writes, was “whether these abjectly defeated societies would be able to provide themselves with even the rudiments of survival.”
Instead, West Germany and Japan thrived, growing far faster in that era than Britain, which had
emerged victorious from the war.
Affluent, stable societies have more negotiations. And that means they have more negotiators. There’s great good in that. It means people’s concerns can be voiced, their needs can be met, their ideas can be integrated, their insights can be shared.
It also means that it becomes difficult to get much of anything done. This is why China can build tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail in the time it takes California to fail to build hundreds of miles of high-speed rail. China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to high-speed rail.
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.
It was as if the right had studied the tactics of Nader’s Raiders and adopted them for their own purposes. The 2017 Regulatory Accountability Act, which Republicans proposed but couldn’t pass,80 was a good example. For every major regulation, it would have forced the government to open a period of comment and solicit alternative approaches from the public, given those affected the opportunity to cross-examine the agency proposing the rule at an oral hearing, forced the publication of ongoing frameworks for evaluation, and much more.
Liberal legalism—and through it, liberal government—had become process-obsessed rather than outcomes-oriented. It had convinced itself that the state’s legitimacy would be earned through compliance with an endless catalog of rules and restraints rather than through getting things done for the people it claimed to serve.
Crux of their analysis.
The system we developed is unique. Decisions that are often made by bureaucracies in other countries are made by judges in our country. Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, calls it adversarial legalism. “It is only a slight oversimplification to say that in the United States, lawyers, legal rights, judges, and lawsuits become functional equivalents for the large central bureaucracies that dominate governance in the activist states of Western Europe,” he writes.84 There’s a reason, Kagan thinks, that America has ended up with the system we have.
Americans were asking the government to do more than it ever had but they were not willing to give the government the trust and authority it needed to do it. But reformers could not simply devolve power to state and local governments. Liberals had just seen, in the fight against Jim Crow, that you could not trust the states, much less the localities, to do what
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.
Wow.
Either we build faster or we accept catastrophe. There is no third option.
It is damning that you can build affordable housing so much more cheaply and swiftly by forgoing public funds. Shouldn’t things happen faster when they are backed by the might and money of the government?
Each individual decision is rational. The collective consequences are maddening. We hire skilled, dedicated people to do the public’s work and then make it impossible for them to do that work well.
“Rather than climate denial, the environmental community has tradeoff denial. We don’t recognize that it’s too late to preserve everything we consider precious, and to linger in making decisions. Society has run out of time to save everything we want to save, and to mull things over for years.”
A government that tries to accomplish too much all at once often ends up accomplishing nothing at all.
Call this “everything-bagel liberalism.” The everything bagel is, of course, the best bagel.
In the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, there is an attempt to create a true everything bagel, and it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape. The same is true for public projects. When the government adds the right number of goals, standards, and rules, much can be accomplished. When it adds too many, the project can collapse under its own weight, as has happened to high-speed rail in California.
As late as 1900, bacterial infections were the most common cause of death in the US; more people died of bacterial pneumonia during the 1918 influenza pandemic than from the virus itself.
The US has more Nobel Prizes for science than the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and Austria combined. But if there were a Nobel Prize for the domestic deployment of technology—even technology that we invented—our legacy wouldn’t be so sterling.8
Americans invented the world’s first nuclear reactor and solar cell. But today, we’re well behind various European and Asian countries in deploying and developing these technologies.
Penicillin saved the equivalent of full battalions by reducing the mortality rate of bacterial pneumonia in soldiers from 18 percent to 1 percent.
Tinkering, embodiment, scaling: these are examples of what Mokyr calls microinventions, or the incremental improvements needed to turn a new idea into a significant product.
Edison did not make electric light possible. But his microinventions did something even more important. Through exhaustive tinkering, embodying, and scaling, he made electric light useful.
After World War II, the American approach to innovation has been to throw money at the initial eureka moment, sporadically support its development, and then watch idly as the technological frontier moves to other countries.
Yikes.
The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, however, decimated the solar revolution in America. Driven by a conservative ideology that favored free markets and limited government intervention, Reagan dismantled much of the solar infrastructure built up over the previous decade.
In 2000, China had barely enough solar energy to power a small town. By 2020, the nation was making 70 percent of the world’s photovoltaic panels.
When you use an iPhone, you are playing with a technology that bundles silicon chips, the internet, GPS, voice-recognition software, and multi-touch technology, which were in part funded by the Defense Department, NIH, the National Science Foundation, and other government entities.
The highest purpose of a pro-invention government is to make possible what would otherwise be impossible. No private company could orchestrate the national production of penicillin in World War II, so OSRD did it. No private companies were close to putting a man on the moon in the 1960s, so NASA did it.48
“We let one of the biggest pharmaceutical distributors in the world (McKesson) handle the vaccines, let the most successful delivery companies in the world (UPS and FedEx) deliver the vaccines, let those entities who knew best how to vaccinate millions of Americans (CVS and Walgreens) conduct vaccinations.”60
What can be done with the cooperation of government and business.
In all, the US government spent less than $40 billion to develop, produce, and buy mRNA COVID vaccines.63 It might be one of the best bang-for-buck policies in US history. COVID vaccines prevented up to 20 million64 excess deaths worldwide, with several million of those saved lives directly attributable to the acceleration of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
The US has fewer primary-care physicians as a share of its population than almost any other rich country, despite having the world’s most expensive health-care system.
The medical schools say they can’t easily expand, because there aren’t enough residency slots for their graduates to fill. But there aren’t enough residency slots because Washington has purposefully limited federal residency financing.”71 The arithmetic is simple: more funding means more residents; accepting more residents allows medical schools to
Liberals spent decades working, at every level of government and society, to make it harder to build recklessly. They got used to crafting coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted, even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive, or slow to construct, or perhaps never found its way to completion at all. To unmake this machine will be painful. It will require questioning treasured nostrums and splitting old alliances.
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. Marx’s
What we are proposing is less a set of policy solutions than 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?
There are rhymes that we have found across these challenges, echoes across these problems, but they are not unified enough to yield a single set of answers.
Abundance contains within it a bigness that befits the American project. It is the promise of not just more, but more of what matters. It is a commitment to the endless work of institutional renewal. It is a recognition that technology is at the heart of progress, and always has been. It is a determination to align our collective genius with the needs of both the planet and each other. Abundance is liberalism, yes. But more than that, it is a liberalism that builds.
A liberalism that builds and that works to meet the important needs of all people.
