The Breakthrough Institute’s critique is so bad I must defend Klein and Thompson.
I have criticized Abundance in the past, and I’ll likely do so again. But a critique published by The Breakthrough Institute, written by their board member, Jennifer Hernandez, was so bad I felt the need to defend the book. Who would have thought?
Despite being on the board of an organization that hosted the 2024 Abundance Conference and is included as part of the Abundance movement by other organizations, Hernandez comes out swinging against Abundance. And she does so without citations, and quite frankly, she just makes stuff up. I almost appreciate the boldness.
Made-up poverty stats
Early on in the piece, Hernandez says:
“In their defense, California’s ruling progressives have achieved ‘abundance’ in a few categories. We have the nation’s highest poverty rate, the highest homeless rate, and a million people without safe drinking water in their home.”
There is not a single citation for any of the claims in this section, but that’s probably because there is nothing you could possibly cite to substantiate the claim that California has the nation’s highest poverty rate – because that’s a lie. According to the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, California ranks 29th out of 52 jurisdictions (all states plus DC and Puerto Rico) when it comes to the share of families below the poverty line, with 8.4% – 0.3% lower than the national average. In her defense, Google’s AI will tell you that California does have the highest poverty rate in the nation, but you only need to read further along in the sentence to learn that assertion was untrue! Off to a great start!
(Of course, Klein and (especially) Thompson are AI enthusiasts, and we think much of Abundance should be read as an argument for prioritizing AI data centers fueled by natural gas over environmental concerns, so… live by AI, die by AI, I guess?)
Blaming green tech for high gas prices
Not long after, Hernandez seems to imply that California’s large percentage of electric cars is what has caused the state to have higher gas prices. Once again, this baffling claim comes without any citation. Here’s Hernandez:
“It’s no coincidence that Democratic states with the most wind and solar, and the most electric vehicles, also have the highest electricity and gasoline costs. That is because these technologies are not yet ready to be the backbone of our electricity or transportation systems.”
Not only does this not make sense as the decreased demand for gas should lower prices, but it ignores the two obvious reasons for California’s relatively higher gas prices:
- California has the highest gas tax in the nation at nearly $0.70 a gallon. In total, the taxes and fees add up to nearly $1.20 a gallon. Other blue states like Illinois also have higher gas taxes, because, well, Democrats are more inclined to implement this type of tax than Republicans.
- California has stricter fuel blending requirements than other states, which means that the state cannot import much gasoline from elsewhere. Over 90% of the state’s gasoline comes from refineries located in the state. This environmental requirement has nothing to do with supporting electric vehicles.
Anti-urban bias
Hernandez goes on to attack Abundance’s focus on well-off urban areas. That’s a fair criticism, but she does so for ridiculous reasons. Instead of pointing out that a book attempting to offer a path forward for the national Democratic Party should probably have a broader vision beyond coastal cities, she complains that she doesn’t like cities, and not-so-subtly implies she does not want to be near poor people. In Hernandez’s words:
“But nowhere in Abundance is there even a passing wave to those who choose not to live in city centers, who want to be able to buy a detached, single family home, and who don’t want to share a wall, sound, ride or odors with their neighbors—or find cities claustrophobic or dirty or unsafe or annoying or just not what they prefer for themselves and their families.”
This should be unsurprising for someone from the Breakthrough Institute, whose co-founder, Michael Shellenberger reinvigorated his career by catering to the right-wing’s view of San Francisco as a dangerous, diseased place. But of course there is not the same cost of living crisis in suburban or rural America that there is in cities. If Hernandez wants to live in a suburb, she can!
The reason why YIMBYs focus on cities is because that’s often where the greatest crisis exists. Hernandez could, of course, be focusing on the ridiculously expensive suburbs of Silicon Valley, but doesn’t that make her guilty of an even more specific myopia than Klein and Thompson? Her anger seems less that Klein and Thompson are too focused on cities, but that they discuss them at all. She wants a program catered to those, who like her, are revolted at the idea of using public transportation, but want to be within hailing distance of an economically successful city.
Dismissing Renewable Energy
Finally, Hernandez finishes off her criticism by pretending that solar power is some pie-in-the-sky idea fit more for a children’s book than reality. According to Hernandez:
“[P]laces like California have effectively built two electrical grids. One is powered by wind and solar, is supposed to save us from climate change, and, sometimes, for a few hours on a sunny spring day meets all of the state’s electricity demand. The other is powered by natural gas, nuclear energy, and hydroelectric power and actually keeps the lights on most of the time.”
And in case she was too subtle, she makes sure the reader understands what she wants more of: fossil fuels. She writes:
“It requires abundant and affordable energy, which today and well into the future will likely have to include natural gas and petroleum fuels while we work to scale up clean technologies where we can and develop better ones where we need them.”
My hat goes off to Hernandez here. This is possibly the only piece of writing that could have inspired me to come to the defense of Klein and Thompson.