Abundance

We’ve been writing about the emergence of the neoliberal “abundance agenda” providing useful cover for pro-corporate deregulation since 2023.

Over the past few years, a cohort of neoliberal pundits from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson to Matt Yglesias and Eric Levitz have increasingly problematized the modern regulatory state. They frame the government’s many environmental and labor standards as an impediment to “abundance.” Multiple books advancing this argument were published in the first months of 2025, from Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works to Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

“Supply-side liberals” take aim at the procedures that environmental and labor laws require the federal and state governments to follow as they assess the impacts of new infrastructure projects. They seek to limit tools that public interest groups have wielded since the mid-twentieth century to hold government accountable when it fails to adequately do so, including litigation. Sometimes they frame the “need for speed” in the urgent terms of the energy transition. But they have tended to back legislative concessions to the fossil fuel industry and other corporate interests in the name of greater expediency. They argue that weakening the requirements of the landmark National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) will benefit renewables, though studies have shown that the main obstacle to more expedient NEPA permitting is inadequate staffing at permitting agencies, and that the vast majority of renewable projects undergoing federal permitting have exceptions from review processes or streamlined reviews.

The Achilles heel of these thinkers is their credulousness towards capital. Their techno-optimism leaves them gullible to the empty promises of industry, and prone to gloss over the material consequences of the corporate motive to maximize profit at whatever cost. Squeamish about populist anger towards billionaires and corporations, they want the Democratic Party to be focused on an affirmative vision for the future more oriented around growth than justice. This push to deprioritize redistributive politics is increasingly out of touch with a political reality in which white-collar criminals and billionaires are looting the government for private gain.  (Musk himself should be a cautionary tale of why not to take the promises of “green-friendly” businessmen at face value, given his extraction of at least $38 billion in government subsidies on the road to hollowing out government capacity via DOGE.)

Right-wing officials aiming to unleash extractive and polluting industry have increasingly taken up the rhetoric of energy abundance, including Trump himself and his appointees like Lee Zeldin, Chris Wright, and Doug Burgum. It is clear that an agenda of “unleashing abundance” without an analysis of power and a critique of those that benefit from current inequality leaves the door open for co-optation by the ambassadors of capitalist greed and grift.

Abundance proponents eager to dispute this are encouraged to reach out to Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser.