Abundance

by Ezra Klein

Industrial animal agriculture is more than a climate problem. It is a moral stain upon modernity. There is probably no single change that would do more for our interlinked environmental problems than for the world to cease using cows and goats and sheep for food.

The stocks of fossil fuels are finite and their continued combustion is lethal. This would be true even if climate change was a hoax. Air pollution kills between 7 million and 9 million people each year; that is six or seven times the death toll from traffic accidents and hundreds of times the death toll from war or terrorism or all natural disasters combined.

POLITICS IS A WAY OF organizing conflict, and so our attention is naturally drawn to divisions. That is particularly true now, when the divisions are so fundamental.

Liberals might detest the language that Trump and Vance use to demonize immigrants. But blue America practices its own version of scarcity politics. Zoning regulations in liberal states and cities that restrict housing supply have increased costs far more than the recent influx of immigrants. These restrictions exacerbated an affordability crisis that was harnessed by the right. Thus, the mistakes of liberals contributed to the rise of illiberalism.