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May 5, 2025
Key Takeaways:
Many Americans are concerned. They do not think that the federal government works, citing issues ranging from exclusionary zoning laws that prevent affordable new builds to frustrated elected officials stuck in the rut of partisan politics.
Abundance by Ezra Klein, New York Times opinion columnist and host of the Ezra Klein Show podcast, and Derek Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic, explores the role of government in supporting a world people want to live in. The thesis of the book is simple: “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.” The authors underscore three main trends currently limiting progress in the United States: the prevalence of legalism, a misunderstanding of the innovation process, and an underinvestment in novel scientific research.
These issues are intertwined and have evolved over time. According to Klein and Thompson, “The problem we faced in the 1970s was that we were building too much and too heedlessly. The problem we face in the 2020s is that we are building too little and we are too often paralyzed by process.” The recently published book takes the position that to create abundant opportunities for Americans, there needs to be less procedure to make more progress.
According to Klein and Thompson, though lawyers form less than 1% of the population, one third of House members and half of Senators are lawyers. “When you make legal training the default training for a political career, you make legal thinking the default thinking in politics,” Klein and Thompson emphasize. Since Walter Mondale’s election as vice president in 1977, every nominated Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidate has been a lawyer, with the exception of 2024 vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.
Klein and Thompson explain how legalism came about in the 1960s. Lawyer and activist Ralph Nader and his “Nader’s Raiders” were the first to sue the government because of its failure to ensure safe working environments in coal mines, apathy towards oil spills, and tolerance of toxic waste discharges destroying coasts and communities. Nader was successful, and powerful legislation such as the Clean Water Act followed. This new approach of suing the government was not limited to the environmental protection movement, however, and it has now become a common strategic roadblock. It became more advantageous for elected officials to have a background in law, to ensure their policies could withstand challenges.
By Klein and Thompson’s analysis, a new standard of “democracy by lawsuit” was established that painted the government solely as a source of wrongdoing rather than a potentially cooperative ally. The authors write about the government’s struggle with adversarial legalism as it seeks to meet its responsibilities:
Now the government has taken on the task of decarbonization and the responsibility of coordinating a once-in-a-century transformation of America’s built landscape. But it is doing so with laws and agencies and habits that are better designed to block green construction than allow it.
Of the case studies presented in Abundance, high-speed rail in California best illustrates the current challenges of the judicial and regulatory system by showcasing how routinely delaying a project can cripple its budget and kill the momentum of an otherwise exciting innovation that, in this case, would cut carbon emissions by up to 142.6 million metric tons over 50 years.
Adversarial Legalism
Adversarial legalism, a term coined by University of California, Berkeley, Professor Robert Kagan, is used to describe how the judicial system often replaces legislative bureaucracy in the United States.
An exploratory study of high-speed rail in California was first commissioned by California Governor Jerry Brown in 1982, and construction for a line between San Francisco and Los Angeles began in 2008. The initial phases were expected to cost $33 billion and be completed by 2020. Instead, the line will now connect Merced and Bakersfield, and will not be running until 2033. The cost estimates have ballooned to $106 billion for high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco, making it unlikely to happen. As Klein and Thompson note, “In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.”
The authors describe the California rail project’s 12-year ongoing environmental review and the need for individual negotiations with each landowner, business owner, stakeholder, and court. Policies like California’s holiday construction moratorium from October to December bring building to a halt. On the administrative front, the authors found that mandated paperwork takes up more of contractors’ time than actual construction. The authors interviewed Chad Syverson, an economist at the University of Chicago who studies why U.S. construction is stalling. Syverson states, “I don’t know how you get 50 years of decline without having multiple problems. Everyone has their pet theory. But everyone has a different pet.”
After visiting California rail construction sites, Klein recalls speaking to a contractor who explained that adding a year to a project can increase its costs by an additional five percent, one factor in the striking difference between infrastructure costs in the United States compared to other countries. For instance, a kilometer of rail costs $609 million in the United States but only $295 million in Canada and $96 million in Portugal. In anticipation of counterarguments, Klein and Thompson duly note that union density is higher in the countries with higher productivity, therefore labor unions are not the source of the delays. Klein and Thompson conclude that liberal government has become “process-obsessed rather than outcomes-oriented.”
The second half of Abundance focuses on the role of invention in a prosperous society. A quote from philanthropist John Arnold puts the circumstance at hand concisely: “America has the ability to invent. China has the ability to build. The first country that can figure out how to do both will be the superpower.” The authors highlight that solutions to the challenges faced today—from low-carbon jet fuel to carbon dioxide removal—will need to be created for the world of the future.
Inventions are important, but their origins are often oversimplified by the “Eureka Myth,” a term coined by law professor Jessica Margaret Silbey. People believe that inventions are born in a sudden burst of enlightenment, when in reality they take time and grave effort. For example, the common portrayal of the invention of penicillin often misses crucial information. Between the serendipitous spore of mold that led to the 1928 discovery of penicillin by Scottish microbiologist Alexander Fleming to the wonder drug’s scaled deployment in 1945 that saved the lives of one in seven British soldiers in World War II, many hands and minds improved upon the invention. When the years of work between big breakthroughs are not included in our shared narrative, it can make newer inventions seem unsuccessful if their benefits are not immediately obvious.
Energy Earthshots
EESI’s briefing Energy Earthshots: The Frontier of Climate Innovation brought together an expert panel to discuss “earthshots” that the Department of Energy (DOE) set and supported to spur investments in new technology. These goals, or “shots,” are ambitious, science-based targets to speed up clean energy technology innovation and commercial viability in order to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
Economic historian Joel Mokyr calls these improvements between breakthroughs “microinventions,” and they are often just as imperative as the initial invention itself. Klein and Thompson draw the conclusion that microinventions are often made possible by government support. As economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote, “The important thing for government is… to do those things which at present are not done at all.” Klein and Thompson elaborate further:
If technological progress requires money or resources that are beyond the scope of any one company, and the government does nothing, progress slows down … Government should have a vision of the future, and within that vision it can create space for companies to do what they otherwise cannot, to make possible what is otherwise impossible.
In Abundance, Operation Warp Speed is identified as one the most successful recent examples of a quick, impactful government intervention that achieved something not otherwise possible. The eight-month odyssey from the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak to the vaccine involved the slashing of red tape and a conscious collaboration between groups otherwise unlikely to work together. The government invested in three potential vaccine developments, fast-tracked approval for the vaccine, bought all vaccines wholesale, worked with McKesson (a medical supply company), UPS, FedEx, CVS, and Walgreens to distribute the drug, and ensured the vaccine was free for Americans everywhere. This $32 billion investment saved an estimated $6.5 trillion worldwide in less than a year.
Klein and Thompson assert the importance of new technologies and investments in a variety of shapes and sizes. The government plays a paramount role in these innovations: “Federal science spending is so fundamental to the overall economy that a 2023 study found that government-funded research and development has been responsible for 25 percent of productivity growth in the United States since the end of World War II.” The sums involved are relatively small: according to the study, “government spending on basic and applied research each averaged 0.23 percent of GDP” from 1950 to 2020.
It is especially important for the government to fund highly speculative research that the private sector is unable or unwilling to fund. Businesses cannot afford to make expensive bets on research that has a low likelihood of success, even if the potential upside is enormous. The government can afford to take such risks. The National Institutes of Health, for example, has a
High-Risk, High-Reward Research program that gives primarily early-career scientists the chance to think creatively and produce novel research without the pressure to produce results the first time. The program encourages risk-taking at a modest cost: in 2023, less than half of one percent of National Institutes of Health grants went to High-Risk, High-Reward Research. Skeptical political leaders who oppose the use of federal funds for uncommon experiments are cited by the authors as a reason for the current underinvestment in pioneering research.
Energy Efficiency Gets a Boost from Federal Investments
The benefits of federal R&D investments can be huge. Through the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s (EERE’s) Better Buildings program at DOE, companies have saved $20 billion, 20 billion gallons of water, and about 200 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions since 2011 using mostly EERE-developed energy efficiency technologies. Learn more by watching EESI’s briefing, 2024 EERE Investment Snapshot Report Overview: Clean Energy Developments Yield Major Benefits.
Klein and Thompson also point to the importance of private investments in technology that reduces greenhouse gas emissions. For example, in 2022 the payment company Stripe launched Frontier, “an advanced market commitment that raised $1 billion to pay any company that develops carbon-removal technology that meets a high level of efficiency.” This dedication of time and resources to carbon removal technology creates more opportunities for creative solutions in unusual places.
A Harvard University study testing the peer-review process revealed that highly novel experiments received the worst scores by a panel of medical researchers compared to slightly novel or highly familiar experiments. The scientific peer-review process values successful experiments that produce usable results versus cutting-edge projects that have a higher likelihood of failure. Klein and Thompson say that despite scientists’ interest in generating new ideas, the pressure to publish leads to research simply repeating what has already been discovered.
One example of a risky project with many rejected funding requests is the messenger RNA (mRNA) research that led to the first COVID-19 vaccines. Dr. Katalin Karikó, a biochemist at the University of Pennsylvania, was drawn to mRNA in the early 1990s when most researchers were focused on DNA. She received no funding for her novel research despite submitting dozens of grant proposals for over a decade, and she was ultimately demoted from her role as a senior researcher due to her lack of grants. Dr. Karikó notes that even after her fateful introduction to Dr. Drew Weissman, a physician, and their breakthrough mRNA discovery, their work was mostly ignored. In 2013, the two scientists founded Moderna, a company whose “name smushed the words modified and RNA.” In 2020, mRNA became the key to saving millions of lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the pair went on to receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
In the United States, it can be challenging for scientists and start-ups alike to easily access long-term funding for their work. Klein and Thompson are clear: if applying for and winning funding for projects is prioritized over the actual research itself, scientists and their research suffer. Today, scientists spend 40% of their time on average filling out grant applications and administrative paperwork.
“In 2000, China had barely enough solar energy to power a small town,” note Klein and Thompson. “By 2020, the nation was making 70 percent of the world’s photovoltaic panels. As China ramped up manufacturing, the cost of solar panels in the last fifteen years has declined by about 90 percent.” This level of scale and deployment is possible in the United States, but requires attention to achieve.
Many current Congressional debates mirror the concerns and opportunities outlined by Klein and Thompson. From ongoing discussions about permitting reform to annual negotiations to fund the government, Congress makes decisions that either reinforce or reject the trends that are hampering progress according to Klein and Thompson—excessive legalism, lack of a long-term vision for R&D, and underinvestment in pioneering scientific research. When it comes to climate change, Congressional decisions could not be more consequential. Investing in science, technology, and invention will mean the difference between repeated devastating and costly disasters and building what we need for the future we want.
Author: Hadley Brown
Advancing science-based climate solutions
Top-Rated Climate Nonprofit – 4-Star Charity