“The planetary versions–the heroic versions–of our problems have attracted great intelligence. But these problems, as they are caused and suffered in our lives, our households, and our communities, have attracted very little intelligence.”
Wendell Berry; Feminism, the Body, and the Machine, 2003
Introduction
“…It was not just the greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives…it was also our demand that energy be cheap and plentiful.” (Berry; Feminism, the Body, and the Machine)
Abundance (a personally long-anticipated book arrival) was published in March of 2025, at a time when Progressives were wandering listless and soul-searching after a dramatic presidential election defeat. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance was, only a handful of months ago, a rallying cry to regroup and refocus what the central promise of Democratic leadership could and should be. Throughout the book, Klein and Thompson diagnose the Left’s historic failure to implement the social change it so often advocates for, all while arguing that the intentions of these efforts–clumsy as they’ve often been to date–remain the planet’s last remaining hope. The failure point, they present, is sluggish governmental infrastructure: mired, out-of-date bureaucratic systems that aren’t taking their responsibility seriously enough.
Now, just over half a year later, after the rise and fall of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), in the ever-growing wake of ICE raids, a government shutdown, and the demolishing of the East-wing of the White House, how does this critique sit? For all of the utopian world & coalition building that Abundance was trying to do, did it get swallowed by the news cycle entirely like so many other revolutionary ambitions? And if so, why is one of its authors now advocating for a watered down, compromise politics after all that rally crying?
Klein and Thompson wanted to gain momentum behind a vision of an “unshackled” government, one that wields a big stick and is able to deliver more, faster. Part of their core critique of the previous milieu of liberal thought is that it was lost in the weeds incentivizing consumer-driven (demand-side) market change through the subsidization of good choices, unlocking huge amounts of public money to support individual Americans making better decisions for the planet or their own health. But, as the authors implore, this is not nearly an aggressive enough or effective enough lever to pull on to affect the kind of change we need at the kind of pace that we need. Rather, Klein and Thompson would like see radical investment in developing and implementing “supply-side” levers that don’t bother with motivating individuals, but drive the economy and environment from the top directly towards the places we need to go.
And surely, I want the things the authors are describing, too. I want fast trains, housing at scale, and renewable energy sources to be the standard form of energy production. But, in so many ways, the arguments the authors cite feel just adjacent to the core of the issues we face at large today in ways that, admittedly, have long fed the critique of Liberals as disconnected from common experience–idealistic and entrenched in a framework that is inherently (and blindly) hypocritical, un-embodied, out of touch, or any combination therein.
(Brief aside #1: I don’t want to lean too hard on critiquing these authors, even though my hopes for this book’s release were far from met. Truth-be-told, I’m a big fan of Mr. Klein–I’d argue he’s one of the most thoughtful journalists we have on everything from AI to the Palestine-Israel conflict. But, to one of my favorite public thinkers, I’d ask the question simply: if plentiful, cheap energy is what got us to into this mess [for better and for worse], why must we be then so quickly convinced that even more, even cheaper energy is going to be the thing that gets us out?)
More ≠ More
As Amory Lovins argued in 1979, our modern economy is all too quick to conflate more energy with more performance. In actuality, what we care about as a society is the end-uses of energy (light, heat, speed, entertainment, etc.), we’re fairly ambivalent (or used to be before green energy became such a partisan issue…) about where the energy itself comes from–as long as it’s not too expensive. In effect, we want things to work well and their applications to be convenient and accessible. How that happens is a secondary matter, one for the engineers and policy makers. However, the assumption stated initially pervades our cultural imagination at every scale, from my house to the White House. Politicians (and journalists like Mr. Klein & Mr. Thompson) could be forgiven for wanting to ensure the conveniences modern technology affords us, but what they need to better understand is that ever more energy is not inherently tied to an ever increasing quality of life–in actuality, calibrating the energy we already have on hand could have far greater impacts on that quality metric to begin with.
I hope it goes without saying that we all want to transition from high-emission fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. But even these renewable energy sources (solar, hydro, nuclear, etc.) come with their own associated pollution profiles. Unfortunately, we’re not in a position to pick and choose which energy source is the cleanest and go all-in with it, simply cleaner will have to do for now. But whatever the source may be, the conversation always needs to be tied back in to our conception of its use. Whenever we dig deep geothermal wells, cover fields with solar panels, grow plants in skyscraper greenhouses, or build facilities to produce synthetic meat, there are associated hard costs of that material use, each with their own associated emissions. These green technologies may not pay back their upfront impact with the efficiencies gained from their use for decades, if not centuries. Monitoring and mitigating energy use is a much less sexy topic than the promise of endless ‘green’ energy, but, like rain and clouds, there is not one without the other.
As a rule, policy makers (and political thinkers like dear Ezra and Derek) balk at projections that would require less energy use from the population at large in order to meet even our least-ambitious climate goals, categorizing these scenarios as impractical or unrealistic with a sort of “Less is more? Less is a bore” mindset. Without thinking twice, it’s implicit that we all should agree: mitigating climate change needs to make economic sense; there needs to be continued economic growth as we bring down emissions; nobody will buy in to an “austerity” economy. So, it would appear, we must go on innovating, building, and world-changing at ever greater scales to keep up and clean up all the collateral we produce in the process. But, it’s helpful to remember that the only future we can have any measure of confidence in is the one we have precedent for, and the only scenario we have precedent for is one in which we use less energy. Historically, yearly energy consumption has only ever increased, meaning we have never lived in a world in which we use more energy than the one we live in now…until tomorrow, and then the next day, and then the next day. The only scenario we cannot understand–and therefore potentially cannot help–is the very same scenario we’re running headlong into. All under the auspices of economic necessity. Temperance be damned.
Regular Bad
“…the word ‘planetary’ refers to an abstract anxiety or an abstract passion that is desperate and useless exactly to the extent that it is abstract….the adjective ‘planetary’ describes a problem in such a way that it cannot be solved. In fact, though we now have serious problems nearly everywhere on the planet, we have no problem that can accurately be described as planetary…..the problems, if we describe them accurately, are all private and small. Or they are so initially.” (Berry; Feminism, the Body, and the Machine)
Now, I want to be careful not to build an argument that advocates regression or any teetotaling asceticism–that’s not the point I’m trying to make, but it is a fine line to walk. The reality is, there is no comprise in “abundance” even if we don’t have “abundant” (read: endless) energy. But, as with the profusion of any resource, without a tempered use strategy in kind, you get profuse waste. “Efficiency without sufficiency is lost,” like Samuel Alexander says in a A Critique of Techno-optimism. In effect, I’d like to offer to Mr. Klein and Mr. Thompson that the idea is not to find ways to have so much energy that we couldn’t possibly go wrong if things should get hairy, but the idea is rather to live in better relationship to the earth, to each other, and to our circumstances. There’s a participatory aspect missing from how this whole consumer-economy thing has been set up; a lack of awareness of cause and effect. I know Ezra would agree on this front that relationship, at all scales, is what contributes to a rich life. And this richness, at the bottom of it, is what we’re missing en masse. Health in one sphere is health in another and, beyond energy, modern society is feeling more than a little unhealthy of late. Somewhere in the making of the American industrialized economy, relationships were eroded to the point of anonymity–fundamental relationships between production, discovery, and use, whether it be food, building material, energy, or social networks. Our participation in this relational stew not only makes our lives possible, but makes them meaningful in general.
Maybe this is all big talk, but to move the needle in a big way towards ‘sustainability’, we don’t actually have to go that far. There’s an obscene (in the truest sense of the word) amount of fat to trim in our modus operandi–the low hanging fruit is abundant, and it’s so ripe it’s rotting on the vine. A brief survey of a few high-level examples: we use more fuel to transport fuel than the fuel we’re transporting, we flush more clean drinking water down the toilet than we drink ourselves, nearly one third of all of the food we produce in a dangerously hungry world goes bad or voluntarily thrown away without being eaten. As much as I want a high-speed rail to connect me to my loved ones, many of the solutions to our predicament are much less sexy, and they would hardly clock in the collective conscious as a compromise. All it would take is paying some attention.
Like the ripples formed by throwing a stone into a still pond, health often occurs in concentric circles–let paying some attention be a first stone.
(Brief aside #2: If you’ve been in on this cosmic joke for any amount of time, you probably know that these few examples are just the tip of the iceberg…but they can still feel like a proper punch in the gut. When reeling after receiving a solid punch, it’s worth remembering that even with all this being our field of play, we still have a planet at all. Oftentimes, in this drama we’re in, the biosphere is cast as hanging in a “delicate balance,” a fragile ecosystem on the brink of collapse. But–holy shit!–when you pull back the curtain on even some of the stuff we’re throwing at it every day, you quickly understand that the “climate” is one tough mother effer…the fact that ecosystems are on the brink of collapse is only evidence of just how hard we’ve plowed into an incredibly durable system. And if we could just give Mother Earth a breather, what could happen? And how fast? The true scale of our abuse of the environment while performing business-as-usual is scarcely grappled with, and disappointingly wasn’t much alluded to in this book.)
Conclusion
“We can be assured only that, if there is to be a future, the good of it is already implicit in the good things of the present. We do not need to plan or devise a ‘world of the future’; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now.” (Berry; Feminism, the Body, and the Machine)
Before we begin casting carbon-capturing plants in plastic and burying them in the ground, or building facilities to desalinate the ocean in efforts to provide freshwater at scale, could we not start with a half-awake audit of our current protocol? I can’t quite yet buy that our future, hanging delicately in the balance, is in need of an anonymous yet-to-be-discovered hero technology before it can be saved. Service of the Economy’s growth has been the American aim for over one hundred years, and, go figure, in those same one hundred years we’ve brought the planet that gave us every ounce of opportunity we’ve had to its knees. Not because it’s delicate or fragile, but precisely the opposite: it’s incredibly durable, productive, and resilient–we’ve just pushed it that hard.
We have more of everything than we’ve ever had in the past—more wealth, more material possessions, more access to technology, more food, and more people. We currently live in decadent abundance at large, but the asymmetry of the availability of these resources is perhaps the primary culprit. Our economy does not need to grow, it needs to be re-calibrated. We have no shortage of financial resources available–freeing up just some of the wealth of even a few individuals at the upper echelons, society could be transformed into utopian dream that would make even the authors blush. The environmental question is not a question of having any more resources than we currently have available to us; the environmental question is about stewardship, appropriate technology, and reckoning–as a culture–with what enough could mean.
A lack of restraint doesn’t have to be an inherent part of the American character, much less a celebrated one. Abundance versus scarcity, in this context, is a false binary–choosing one over the other is a rhetorical smoke screen. The truth is, seen from a non-power-grabbing political lens of which party is in leadership, we have all of the pieces of the puzzle we need to make life in the particular feel abundant, but we too often remain tangled in abstract ambitions for solutions “at scale.” This may very well be the fundamental modern American delusion: if some is good, more is better–the world belongs to you, take it all.
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