Abundance co-author’s word salad about environmental review left us scratching our heads.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, was published on March 18. My colleague Hannah Story Brown has a critical review coming out soon in The American Prospect. Meanwhile, Klein and Thompson have been busy promoting their book, with an apparent focus on winning over right-wing audiences. Thompson spoke at length last week with notorious white supremacist Richard Hanania.
Klein, for his part, recently talked about the book with American Compass, a right-populist think tank whose endgame seems to be rebranding Republicans as “pro-worker.” A clip is circulating on social media in which Klein, asked to describe which policy changes he favors, fails to articulate a concrete suggestion.
Instead, we’re treated to pro forma and confusing sentences like:
- “I would like to see environmental review fast-track things we know are good for the environment.”
- “It’s good to have the government think about what it’s doing before it does it. It’s not good for it to think for four-and-a-half years before it does it… That process has gotten nuts and needs to be root-and-branch reformed.”
- “My principle would be: You sort of know what it is you need to build… and you should make a speed run for that. But how literally you write that law, I mean each one of these things does have a lot of complexity to it.”
I’m sorry, what? The hard work of governing requires writing specific rules to delineate what is good; the principle of “what Klein and Thompson probably meant in Abundance” is not something that can be applied by any government. And yet, when it comes to the hard work of delineating what is good, the book’s authors seem to be rejecting that as buzzkill.
A note on the source of the video: Thomas Hochman, infrastructure director at the Foundation for American Innovation, is no friend of ours. Last month, Hochman praised the Trump White House for weakening the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) “on day one.” Hochman is frustrated by Klein’s failure to advocate for additional specific ways to thwart the administrative state.
We’ve written about this at length elsewhere, so suffice it to say that a) new clean energy projects are usually delayed by factors other than environmental review and b) 95 percent of all projects subject to NEPA analyses receive “categorical exemptions,” meaning that no review is required. Hiring more civil servants is one way among many to expedite the permitting process without sacrificing vulnerable communities and ecosystems.
More broadly, Klein underestimates the value of rulemaking and enforcement. The alternative to a society governed by laws (in which lawyers play an important role) is one ruled by fiat. Donald Trump is making it clear that arbitrary and authoritarian governance is a recipe for economic, social, and environmental disaster.
The so-called Abundance™ agenda—also known as “rebranded neoliberalism” thanks to my colleague Dylan Gyauch-Lewis’ early critique of the broader corporate-backed project last fall—is perfectly compatible with right-wing goals such as environmental deregulation and union-busting.
It’s no mystery why the Kochs and other libertarians support the ostensibly Democratic “abundance agenda”: It launders conservative ideas. Knowingly or not, Klein and Thompson are trying to make Ronald Reagan’s lie that “government is the problem” palatable to liberals. It’s worrisome generally to push the claim that government civil servants and the regulations they promulgate and enforce are a core impediment to progress. To do so when Trump and Elon Musk are taking a chainsaw to the federal workforce, with mortal consequences, is quite the choice.