Abundance

by Ezra Klein

California has about 12 percent of the nation’s population, 30 percent of the nation’s homeless population, and about 50 percent of its unsheltered homeless population.

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.

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.

In 2010, when Tesla needed cash to launch its first family-friendly sedan, the Model S, the company received a $465 million loan from the Obama administration Department of Energy.

Despite making up only about 14 percent of the US population, immigrants accounted for 23 percent of US patents from 1990 to 2016, 38 percent of US Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine, and physics from 2000 to 2023, and more than half of the billion-dollar US start-ups in the last twenty years.

more people died of bacterial pneumonia during the 1918 influenza pandemic than from the virus itself.

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. For secretary of energy, he appointed James Edwards, a dentist with no expertise or interest in developing nascent energy technology.26 Solar R&D spending under Reagan fell by over 60 percent his first year in office.27 Some of the dismantling was painfully literal: in 1986, Reagan removed the solar hot-water panels installed on the White House roof by Jimmy Carter.

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.47 If you heat and cool your home with power drawn from natural gas, you’re tapping into an energy revolution that began with federal research into drilling shale formations. If you own a home in the suburbs, you drive down state-funded roads with federally subsidized mortgages.

In his four years in office, Biden put his name to several laws that broke with the anti-build trend of modern politics. With the bipartisan infrastructure bill, he signed the largest authorization of infrastructure spending since the Interstate Highway program of the 1950s.18 With the CHIPS and Science Act, he announced America’s intention to invest billions of dollars in scientific discovery and invention—and tens of billions more to build advanced computer chips within our borders.19 With the Inflation Reduction Act, the US passed the largest clean energy bill in its history, with record investments in electric vehicles, batteries, solar and wind manufacturing, and next-generation climate technology, such as carbon-removal plants.