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The breakneck deployment of wind and solar infrastructure and battery manufacturing has been slowed by outdated permitting and procurement rules
The infrastructure bill, for instance, included $7.5 billion to build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations; by March 2024—more than two years after the bill passed—only seven new chargers were up and running.
trade-offs require choices. 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.
opposing visions of scarcity
A Lens, Not a List
Then Johnson issued a warning. “Our pride in accomplishment must not ignore the fact that our progress has had two faces,” he said. “Its final direction—abundance or annihilation—development or desolation… is in your hands.”29
Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply? Many valuable questions bloom from this deceptively simple prompt. If there are not enough homes, can we make more? If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy, can we make more? If not, why not? If the government is repeatedly failing to complete major projects on time and on budget, then what is going wrong and how do we fix it? If the rate of scientific progress is slowing, how can we help scientists do their best work? If we need new technologies to solve our important problems, how do
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Political movements succeed when they build a vision of the future that is imbued with the virtues of the past. In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt pitched his expansive view of government as a sentinel for American freedoms—of speech, of worship, from want, from fear. Five decades later, Reagan hailed the same virtues, this time by casting government as freedom’s nemesis rather than its protector.
both abundance and scarcity are stories we tell ourselves. Right now, we see an America that is turning toward a story of scarcity. That turn is changing not just our politics, but our national character.
