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When I was an intern in Chuck Schumer’s office 25 years ago, I tried to pitch my then-boss on including a line in a speech about how the legislation he was opposing was an effort to crucify mankind upon a cross of corn.

The higher-ups, probably wisely, didn’t go for it.

But while ethanol isn’t a subject I cover a lot, every time it comes up, I get kind of angry. And last week someone in marketing decided it would be a good idea to send me spam texts about the virtues of E15 and how we ought to legalize E15 year-round on a permanent basis.

Standard gasoline is 10 percent ethanol by volume, but a higher blend of 15 percent works fine in car engines. You’re normally not allowed to sell E15 in the summer because of concerns about ozone in hot weather. But starting in 2022, waivers have been issued every summer to help contain summer gasoline price spikes. Claude tells me that there’s a reasonable case that this evaporative ozone issue is overblown and year-round E15 is probably fine.

However, I am declining to look into this question in detail because the underlying policy of requiring gasoline to be blended with ethanol is incredibly stupid.

Manufacturing liquid fuel out of corn and soybeans is a thing that one can do, chemically speaking. And if you remember the “peak oil” discourse of 15–20 years ago, one might think “Well, in the future, liquid hydrocarbons will be scarcer and scarcer so we’ll be manufacturing fuel out of corn.”

Instead, though, we found a bunch more oil.

Of course, the particular foreign-policy blunders of Donald Trump have put us in a bit of a global oil supply squeeze this spring. But that’s not about a physical shortage of oil. If for some reason the Strait of Hormuz were closed forever, investors would spend money to build more pipelines (or drill more in Alaska) and the supply problem would be solved.

The world has plenty of oil. The thing that worries people about drilling for, refining, and burning endless amounts of oil is that it’s bad for the environment. We increasingly have batteries and electric motors to address that concern. But more to the point, there’s essentially no reason to believe that biofuels are good for the environment.

If you take their biggest supporters’ claims at face value, biofuels are an incredibly expensive way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And even that case for ethanol tends to ignore the broader environmental downsides. Biofuels also push up the global price of staple grains.

Both the Biden and Trump administrations have been torn between an acute desire to do something to bring down grocery prices and a conviction that they have no fast-acting tools available, but they absolutely do: Stop forcing oil companies to turn cropland into gasoline!

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The origins of a mistake

If you rewind the tape back to the George W. Bush administration, a lot of conservatives who wanted to drill more oil domestically were talking about energy independence. And a lot of Democrats who wanted to increase fuel efficiency were also talking about energy independence.

The aforementioned Schumer in his 2007 book, “Positively American,” described his efforts to craft a legislative compromise that would have both opened up more Alaskan wilderness to drilling and also raised Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, an effort he said fell apart amidst advocacy group purism.

But this debate featured a third force: Midwestern agricultural interests.

Their idea was that rather than drilling more oil or burning less gasoline, we could step up our reliance on biofuels.

And in response to their lobbying, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 created a system — greatly expanded by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 — whereby Americans were required to blend ethanol into our gasoline.

At the time, a lot of people rolled their eyes at this, but everyone knew that Iowa was the quintessential swing state so savvy politicos knew there was nothing to be done about it. And to be clear, I fully expect Josh Turek to fight like a rabid dog on behalf of American biofuels interests. But Iowa is no longer a swing state and thus there is no longer any politically compelling reason for this to be a fixed point of the American political landscape. Iowa is the king of corn, but even if you throw in a much larger bucket of farm states (including places like Illinois), there’s just no reason the corn people can’t be rolled by a mix of southern Republicans and coastal Democrats.

To somewhat limit the logistical hassles involved in all this ethanol blending, refiners are allowed to buy their way out of the obligation by purchasing tradable credits from refiners who exceed their quota. This adds up to something like a 30-cent-per-gallon tax on gasoline, which is much higher than the actual federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents, except instead of generating revenue for the Treasury, it generates revenue for agricultural landowners.

Note that even as a response to oil scarcity, this policy does not make sense.

If oil was expensive enough, it would be worth refiners’ while to blend ethanol into their gasoline. The only reason to require them to do this is that oil is not scarce enough for it to make sense — not today and not in the Bush era when these policies were adopted. For the policy to be justified it would need to have environmental benefits, but it does not.

Ethanol flunks any reasonable cost/benefit analysis

There is an exciting technical debate over whether blending ethanol into gasoline reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

Uisung Lee, Hoyoung Kwon, May Wu, and Michael Wang from the Argonne National Laboratory say that it does because improvements in corn yields have eliminated prior concerns. By contrast, Tyler Lark, Nathan Hendricks, Aaron Smith, and Holly Gibbs say that the land-use changes induced by ethanol mandates (i.e., turning more acreage into growing corn) mean that “the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the [Renewable Fuel Standard] is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24 percent higher.”

The thing is, even if you use the Argonne numbers, this still comes out to something like $160 to $190 in costs per ton of carbon dioxide abated. Using less generous math, of course, the cost is essentially infinite because you’re raising emissions.

Beyond the specific carbon accounting, though, there are without a doubt significant environmental impacts of growing dramatically more corn. This means extra pesticide in the water and corn grown in space that could otherwise be used for conservation or recreation or housing. In a world of growing electrification, that land could also be used for utility-scale solar and wind projects that are dramatically more energy-dense.

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All this carbon math really hinges on the fact that the amount of land dedicated to growing corn goes up, which happens because the biofuels mandate pushes up the price of corn, making it lucrative to grow more corn.

The primary cost here is simply that turning corn into gasoline makes food more expensive.

A 2013 paper by Michael Roberts and Wolfram Schlenker with the boring title “Identifying Supply and Demand Elasticities of Agricultural Commodities” has a fairly striking conclusion. The authors look at past shocks to agricultural commodity supplies — including corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans — and they show that the prices of these things are linked. If wheat crops fail somewhere, this raises the price of all four crops because people are substituting. As a result, mandating that American oil refiners turn corn into gasoline raises the global price of rice, as well as the global price of corn.

The authors concluded that the then-current version of the biofuels mandate was raising the global price of food by between 20–30 percent.

The exact number may be different today than it was in 2013 because the world is always changing. But the direction is unquestionably the same.

By forcing refiners to put more ethanol into gasoline than is warranted by the underlying economics, we are pushing up the price of both gasoline and food. We are doing so for emissions reductions that are probably non-existent, and administering considerable non-climate environmental damage for our trouble. Iowa is not a swing state, the politics of this don’t matter anymore, America has plenty of oil, and the future is electric cars anyways.

But we keep crucifying mankind — not just middle-class grocery shoppers but the majority of the global poor — upon a cross of corn. Let’s stop!

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I am annoyed that the climate movement, which is constantly imposing politically and economically destructive ideas on the Democratic Party, is not instead focused on this pro-growth means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. But beyond my petty personal resentments and feuds, I don’t actually think that emissions reductions are important enough to supersede the genuine national-security concerns about completely gutting America’s manufacturing capacity and generating an overwhelming dependence on Chinese supply chains.

Jerusalem counters that a serious policy of strategic competition with China would be one thing, but the actual policy of the United States looks a lot more like rank protectionism than a smart approach to global trade featuring openness with allies and neutral countries.

But if our politicians were actually serious about countering China rather than placating special interests, they would be more open to policies like friendshoring — a trade strategy where we import from countries with a friendlier disposition toward the U.S. That never seems to be a serious part of the conversation, however. Especially under Trump, our most hawkish president on China.

On some level, maybe Jerusalem and I are not disagreeing so much. At least I think we are close to a consensus on what we would do if we got to jointly run the country. But in a world of complicated coalitions, political tradeoffs, and second-best alternatives to ideal policy, she’s inclined to open the floodgates and I’m happier holding off. I also drive a Volvo plug-in hybrid, which, though manufactured in Sweden, in fact comes from a company owned by China’s Geely Group and is thus the closest thing one can actually purchase to a Chinese EV, so perhaps I am a huge hypocrite. But I would argue that the existence of Volvo manufacturing facilities in Europe and the American South underscores that trade barriers plus openness to investment can help diffuse Chinese technology while preserving Western manufacturing capacity.

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It’s easy to forget now, but when the ROAD to Housing Act was first unveiled last summer in the Senate Banking Committee, it was like a Secret Congress miracle.

Somewhere down the line, Elizabeth Warren had gotten supply-pilled on housing and hired a really good staffer who was networked with all the smart housing analysts. On the Republican side, Tim Scott was willing to break some taboos around local control that had prevented any prior bipartisan housing-supply initiatives from gaining traction. Their bill had some language on mortgage lending that I was surprised Warren agreed to. But she did what serious legislators do and got to yes on a package that I’m sure she felt was flawed in key respects.

The land-use provisions were limited in their impact, but kind of visionary in their outcomes-oriented design and could have laid the groundwork for more forceful action leveraging larger grant programs in the future. Other good proposals that had been floating around Congress for a while — including, of particular note to me, chassis reform — got folded in.

And while Scott understandably wasn’t going to get into an overt fight with Donald Trump about it, suddenly the Project 2025 stuff about defending single-family zoning and Trump’s promises to defend the “suburban lifestyle dream” against apartments didn’t matter to Republicans on the committee.

Initially, the big outstanding question was about the House.1 Remarkably, though, that side ended up working out thanks in no small part to the efforts of the new Build America Caucus.

Instead, the whole thing has been derailed because Trump, with some critical assists from Warren, has ginned up outrage around the fake problem of private equity buying up single-family homes and devised a legislative “solution” that will greatly reduce the construction of new rental housing.

The possibility that the anti-supply provision will be taken out keeps being raised, only for those hopes to be dashed. The latest drama is that even though key leaders in the House want to fix the problem and send a better bill back to the Senate, Trump and JD Vance are leaning hard on them to pass the Senate’s bill as written.

But the House, for now at least, is not taking Trump too seriously and seems to be trying to fix it. They’re right to do this, and I hope they stay the course in the face of continued criticism and opposition.

From fake problems to real ones

Private-equity investors “buying up” single-family homes en masse was a very real trend in the wake of the foreclosure wave that hit the country in 2007–08.

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My ninth-grade history teacher was a bit old-fashioned. She’d taught the class for many years and always referred to it as Western Civilization I rather than its official title World History I, presumably because that was the name when she began teaching it.

Her framing always stuck with me, so much so that I’ve recently been considering a post making the case for bringing back the notion of “Western civilization.” I think a certain old-fashioned and somewhat Whiggish version of history that emphasized the idea that contemporary Americans are the heirs to a kind of specific historical legacy is a useful and constructive idea.1

There’s something of course both arbitrary and false about this kind of historical conceit. But there’s no one true way for nations to narrativize themselves, and this traditional understanding of “the West” has a lot of real value. I was envisioning this as a fairly conservative-inflected take that would, among other things, endorse the Trump administration’s push to get civic buildings to use neo-classical architecture. I’m not a hater of modernist buildings per se, but that design language has a particular meaning that pays homage to the Founders’ conceit that they were acting in the tradition of Athens and early Rome and it’s good to respect that.

Instead, though, I get to give a more libbed-out version of this take because Elon Musk spent much of last week being mad online about the casting of Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming movie, “The Odyssey,” arguing in particular that the decision to cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy reflects the nefarious influence of Academy Award diversity rules.

Musk is factually wrong about the Oscars,2 and I genuinely think the underlying pattern here is one of his worst qualities as a public figure. He likes to mouth off on Twitter (I sympathize), which means he sometimes gets stuff wrong (I also sympathize), but he absolutely never acknowledges error.

Whatever is going on with this movie, it’s not about the Academy Awards. And more broadly, I think we should take a more positive and optimistic view of a racially inclusive “Odyssey.”

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One way that smart people sometimes like to demonstrate their broad-mindedness is to give Donald Trump credit for something that he supposedly got right. And a common talking point among this crowd (here’s Jamie Dimon) is that Trump was “right about China.”

But as his trip to Beijing unfolded last week, I was struck once again by how deeply untrue that is.

It is clearly true that the circa-1999 optimism that trade with China would lead to domestic political reform in the People’s Republic has proven false. Some people, of whom Nancy Pelosi strikes me as the most politically prominent, were genuinely right about this all along.

The views of others evolved over time in response to events: The Great Firewall was erected in 2006, power gradually shifted from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping between 2008 and 2012, and the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong was crushed in 2014, which was also when the government stepped up repression of the Uyghurs. Xi had entrenched himself as a personalistic dictator by 2018, and the last whiff of freedom was wiped out in Hong Kong in 2019–20.

By Barack Obama’s second term, the old consensus was dead and discredited, and the White House was pitching a vision that combined sound understanding of the economics of trade with a new skepticism of the geopolitical aspects of intensive economic integration with China.

That was the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Trump, because he has insane ideas about the economics of trade, was always skeptical of trade with China.

But he’s also skeptical of trade with Canada, and he was definitely skeptical of forming a large integrated trade zone featuring Japan and Vietnam and Australia and other Pacific Rim countries. He’s incapable of approaching the economic relationship with China in a way that makes sense because he doesn’t understand any of the relevant issues. He’s incapable of positioning the United States as the leader of a coalition of free nations to defend the value of liberal democracy because he does not believe in the value of liberal democracy.

There have been plenty of efforts to backfill his dumb ideas with better ones. If the president is inexplicably fond of Vladimir Putin, his defenders might say, “Maybe he’s hesitant to make generous financial contributions to Ukraine’s defense because he wants to conserve resources for the Pacific.”

Maybe!

But in practice he promotes the domestic political fortunes of pro-Russian political parties in NATO member states and runs down our munitions stockpiles in Iran.

Obama’s grand strategy of pivoting to Asia and confronting China was very much open to criticism. The Biden administration had a somewhat different view of these issues, and I think there are reasonable alternatives to both the Obama and Biden views.

But Trump is not doing either of those things.

In his first term, Trump spent the critical early months of the Covid pandemic lavishing praise on China’s handling of the situation because he was hoping to score a major soybean sale.

That was dumb. But this time around, he is once again touting agreements to export soybeans and energy commodities to China. He also brought Jensen Huang with him on the trip and keeps handing favorable decisions to Nvidia on export controls.

These are the actions of a man in the grips of a sick obsession with bilateral trade balances, not someone serious about geopolitical competition.

If not free trade, then what?

As a basic conceptual point, I think it’s good to start with the fact that “free trade” is basically one idea, while “not free trade” is a bunch of different ideas.

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First off, some housekeeping: I will be on vacation next week, so instead of my usual evening lineup, please expect discussion posts every day.

Talk to you after Memorial Day!

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And then, just when the Trump administration curtailed remote work, it hammered the city’s economy with DOGE. This is having all kinds of downstream adverse consequences for the city’s restaurants and other businesses and taking a toll on working-class people. McDuffie is doing an excellent job of understanding that this is the problem we are facing and that the solution has to be a city government that is focused on reviving private-sector economic growth. These are issues specific to Washington, while George is essentially copy-and-pasting a progressive playbook out of New York or Boston, which are cities facing very different circumstances. I’ve also been disappointed to see many local YIMBY groups endorse as if we are replaying the New York mayor’s race, which featured a socialist who favored upzoning facing off against Andrew Cuomo, a “moderate” NIMBY backed by all the building trade unions.

The actual election that DC is having features two candidates, both of whom are proposing large changes to the comprehensive plan and the city’s land-use framework. George has offered a higher target number of new units of housing as part of a comprehensive pattern of saying yes to every interest group demand from every quarter, but is also proposing many different large regulatory-burden increases that will make new housing investment impossible. McDuffie’s pro-growth housing proposals are grounded in an overall pro-growth platform that I think might actually succeed because, again, he is paying attention to what the actual situation is — job losses, building closures, and capital flight — and thus is trying to solve real problems.

The Digital Entomologist: A couple weeks ago Matt said that politicians who need to BS their voters should let him know their true policy objectives so he can help them. I guess a sort of Irving Kristol’s 4 truths type of thing. Is there a way, in general, to discover a politician’s true policy objectives as just a regular voter who is interested in finding them? Or do you have be in the back rooms and have deep sources?

It is extremely hard to tell what politicians really think, not only because it is generally hard to truly know the mind and soul of another human being, but also because most politicians don’t really think that way. A good politician will have a couple of issues he cares a lot about and works hard on and is very knowledgeable about, but then mostly passes through life addressing things either on the basis of going along with his colleagues or else some specific consideration related to politics in his home state or home district.

I don’t think it would occur to the vast majority of members of Congress to seek out factual information about the climate impact of liquefied-natural-gas exports and develop an accurate opinion about it.

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But the proximate cause is very clear: The war with Iran spiked jet fuel costs, and the already-battered airline couldn’t absorb the hit to its bottom line. Spirit also had fundamental problems — a Pratt & Whitney engine recall that grounded a huge share of its fleet, legacy carriers copying its unbundled-fare model and capturing some of its customer base. The odds are good, in fact, that if JetBlue had purchased Spirit the combined airline would be bankrupt today. In a pure business sense, Biden probably did the industry a favor.

As an antitrust analysis, though, the fact that Spirit went bust calls into question the idea that the airline industry is uncompetitive and full of monopolies that need busting.

Members of the neo-Brandeisian movement, however, are undeterred. Which is what I think makes this episode such a useful skeleton key for understanding what this movement is really about — not fighting monopolies or promoting competition, but promoting a return to an economy with a much higher level of central planning and state control. In the latest episode, Jerusalem and I talk through the specific circumstances of Spirit’s failure and the debates around the JetBlue merger. But I also don a literal tinfoil hat to discuss the real history of the “anti-monopoly” movement and its goals.

The transcript will be after the paywall in this post for paying subscribers.

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Time stamps:

0:00-Spirit Airlines is dead

7:07-The blocked JetBlue merger

14:54-1960s airline nostalgia

21:12-Matt’s tinfoil hat theory

26:29-Pre-Carter airline monopolies

35:26-The dawn of deregulation

47:17-Anti-monopolists want less competition

54:19-America’s protectionist policies

58:22-Peer review: Marriage and gender-coded purchases

Corrections:

• At 0:55:00, Jerusalem says the EU began creating its single aviation market starting in 1992 and going through 1997. While the full package of legislation did take effect in 1997, the first legislative package was passed in 1987.

• At 0:55:24, Jerusalem says that the five largest European aircraft control 45% of the European market while the four largest U.S. aircraft control 80% of the U.S. market. Those figures were accurate, but slightly more recent analysis shows the markets have shifted somewhat. A 2018 analysis showed the four largest European airlines controlled 40% of the EU market, while a 2025 analysis showed the four largest U.S. airlines controlled 74% of the U.S. market.

Show Notes:

• Coverage of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas travel, being closed since Feb. 28: Brookings article, CBS News article

• Coverage of jet fuel composing 20% to 30% of airlines’ costs: OpenAirlines article, Seeking Alpha article, IATA article

• Coverage of Spirit attempting Chapter 11 bankruptcies to save itself before shutting down under Chapter seven: Law.com article, OAG article, Las Vegas Sun article

• Coverage of Spirit blaming rising fuel costs in bankruptcy filing: AirlineGeeks article, Time article

• Podcast hosted by conservative comedians Stu Burguiere and Dave Landau that blamed Spirit’s failure on the Biden administration’s decision to block Spirit and JetBlue’s merger: BlazeTV podcast episode

• Coverage of Transportation Sec. Sean Duffy blaming Spirit’s failure on the Biden administration’s decision to block Spirit and JetBlue’s merger: Fox News article, ABC7 article

• Coverage of JetBlue losing money: Reuters article, Quartz article, The New York Times article

• Coverage of Pratt & Whitney’s recall of its geared turbofan engine, which impacted more Spirit aircraft than all other airlines combined: Simple Flying article, FlightGlobal article

• Coverage of Spirit receiving over $150 million in compensation from Pratt & Whitney due to recall: Aerospace Global News article

• Coverage of a Reagan-era judge blocking JetBlue’s merger with Spirit Airlines after President Biden’s DOJ sued to stop it: AP article, CNBC article

• Coverage of Spirit boosting premium offerings after its merger was blocked: Reuters article, Upgraded Points article, Spirit Airlines release

• Coverage of Delta president grudgingly introducing Basic Economy fares to compete with Spirit, even though “People don’t really want the product when they see exactly what it is.”: Conde Nast Traveler article, CNBC article, AJC article

• Photos shown depicting 1960s and 1970s air travel: Getty image, Getty image

• Coverage of plans at low-cost European airlines, including Ryanair, to offer short flights with small, vertical, stool-like seats that resemble leaning more than sitting. Prices for these flights could be as low as five Euros: EuroWeekly News article, Thrillist article

• Coverage of 1978 airline deregulation changes, initially under Jimmy Carter: Journal of Transport Geography article, Air and Space Museum article, EBSCO article

• Coverage of Trump Shuttle’s operations and failure: The Washington Post article, AeroTime article

• “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” article by Lina Khan on Amazon’s e-commerce domination: The Yale Law Journal article

• “Terminal Sickness,” article by Phillip Longman and Lina Khan attacking airline deregulation: Washington Monthly article

• “Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It,” book by Ganesh Sitaraman arguing that airline deregulation was a mistake: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “The Anti-Bigness Ideology,” article by Matt Bruenig about why bigness isn’t a huge concern for his socialist ideology: Mattbruenig.com article

• Federal Aviation Report of 1935, which defended the lack of competition created by strict airline regulations, saying “To allow half a dozen air lines to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence where there is enough traffic to support one really first-class service and one alone would be a piece of folly.”: Govinfo page

• Article profiling former Sec. Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s conversion to the anti-monopoly cause: Politico article

• “How Airline Markets Work… or Do They? Regulatory Reform in the Airline Industry,” paper by Severin Borenstein and Nancy L. Rose arguing that the price volatility in airlines can be explained by normal macroeconomic conditions: NBER chapter

• Abundance, book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Airline Deregulation, Revisited,” essay by former Justice Stephen Breyer expressing regret about the effect airline deregulation had on workers: Bloomberg Businessweek article

• History of the United Fruit Company’s actions in Latin America: Harvard Review of Latin America article, Retrospect Journal article, The World article

• “Why airlines are always going bankrupt,” article by David Oks about competition in the airline industry: David Oks article

• “We Fly Congress: Market Actions as Corporate Political Activity in the U.S. Airline Industry,” Temple University study showing airlines increase flights to districts where members of Congressional transportation committees live: Organization Science article

• “The Secret to Reindustrializing America Is Not Tax Cuts and Tariffs. It’s Regulated Competition,” 2025 article by Phillip Longman, cited by Matt: Washington Monthly article

• Red Plenty, book by Francis Spufford about communist abundance: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• 49 USC § 40102(a)(15), U.S. law that states domestic airlines must have 75% of voting stock and a majority of equity owned by U.S. citizens: GovInfo U.S. code

• Fact sheet on EU air transport rules to form a single aviation market, which began in 1987 and were implemented through 1997: EU fact sheet

• 2015 analysis showing the five largest European airlines (Ryanaid, EasyJet, Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, and IAG) control 45% of the European market: European Commission page

• Slightly more recent analysis (2018) showing that the four largest European airlines (Ryanair, Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, and IAG) control 40% of the European market: Global Finance article

• 2025 analysis showing the four largest U.S. airlines (United, American, Delta, and Southwest) control about 74% of the U.S. market: Spherical Insights analysis

• “Do Airlines in Chapter 11 harm their rivals?: Bankruptcy and pricing behavior in U.S. airline markets,” paper by Severin Borenstein and Nancy Rose showing that bankruptcies can cause prices to dip briefly: NBER working paper

• Peer review: “Gender-Specific Economic Shocks and Household Bargaining Power,” paper by Rania Gihleb, Osea Giuntella, and Dor Morag: NBER working paper

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I believe contentiousness and disagreeability can play a productive role in the discourse, so I’ve been meaning to say for a while that many of the people and institutions who believe that they have embraced an “abundance” approach to clean energy have not, in fact, done any such thing.

What they’ve done is adopt a kind of fanboy attitude toward a few booming technologies, notably solar panels and electric cars, and post charts showing their rapid adoption in some jurisdictions.

That’s great! I think it’s good for people to be excited about things. And the progress that’s been made in driving down the cost of batteries in particular is wonderful for the world.

It’s even possible that this kind of solar cheerleading could be a gateway that leads to a genuine clean-energy-abundance mindset.

Traditionally, solar power has been expensive, so advocacy for it was, almost by definition, not advocacy for abundance; solarheads were instead obsessed with conservation and efficiency. The idea was to get total energy use low enough that humans could conceivably meet their electricity needs with the generation that was possible via expensive solar installations on rooftops. The fact that you can now build cheap utility-scale solar projects genuinely does change the game and means that solar is actually a possible path to abundance.

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But it’s still the case that an abundance mindset is a hard conceptual break from the old-time vision of humanity eking out just enough to get by through rinky-dink small-scale solar installations.

In 1954, Atomic Energy Commission Chair Lewis Strauss1 spoke of his aspiration to use nuclear reactors to generate electricity that was “too cheap to meter.”

And that’s abundance: a desire to create so much electricity that nobody’s bothering to conserve electricity.

The organization Rewiring America says that it’s “forging a path to limitless clean energy for everyone.” That’s a great slogan for an advocacy organization whose mission centers clean energy abundance. But they recently put out a report with a bunch of policy proposals that in turn are downstream of some efforts to model around incredible levels of uncertainty.

I am not a detail-oriented energy wonk, just a guy who knows how to search a PDF. The report includes 14 instances of the word “efficiency” and goes on at some length about the benefits of virtual power plants. I am not against virtual power plants, but a virtual power plant is not a power plant. It does not generate any electricity. The idea of a virtual power plant is to use software and connected devices to manage demand timing so that you can get by with less overall generation.

The report claims that this is good because “aggregating household-based energy resources is a faster, lower-cost way to meet rising electricity demand than building new power plants.”

But in a world of limitless clean energy for everyone, we would not be fussing around with “aggregating household-based energy resources” or bragging that “efficiency avoids unnecessary capital investment.”

It’s fine if you work for, donate to, sit on the board of, or are a politician who listens to environmental organizations that are uninterested in clean energy abundance. But I would ask people like that to stop lying to themselves and the world about what they think and care about so that politicians who want to advocate for clean energy abundance can start listening to people who favor clean energy abundance.

Imagining abundant solar

Back on May 4, a blogger who goes by Soub wrote a post arguing that Massachusetts “should assemble several large parcels of land totaling 10,000 acres and make it available for utility-scale solar farms.”

I think that what’s important to understand about clean energy abundance as a concept is that this is a hot take. Massachusetts is a very liberal state. It’s a place where the environmental movement has a lot of political clout. Of course in Massachusetts and elsewhere that clout is not unlimited. Green ideas that greatly increase household costs are hard to enact even in Massachusetts. So are ones that would make the business climate much worse. So are ones that are harmful to the interests of labor unions. But assembling large parcels of land for utility-scale solar isn’t bad for labor and it’s not bad for business and it’s not bad for household energy costs either. If environmental organizations and their donors and members supported this idea, they could make it happen. And maybe someday they will decide that clean energy abundance is the way forward and they will support ideas like this. That would be great, because a lot of them seem to think they favor clean energy abundance and I do hold out some hope that this is a “fake it ’til you make it” kind of situation.

For now, though, assembling large parcels of land and making them available for utility-scale solar is not what environmentalists are about. That’s because, as Soub concedes, the only way to make this work is to cut down a bunch of forest.

Now Soub argues it’s not really that much forest relative to the extent of woodland in Massachusetts and that climate change and energy affordability are very important so they should do it. And I’m inclined to agree. But clearly the powers that be in the environmental community — including organizations that say they are very focused on climate change or that (like Rewiring America) try to own the label of abundance or affordability — disagree.

Which is fine. What I don’t think is fine is that lots of elected officials who like the slogan “clean is cheap” don’t understand or want to acknowledge that the policy organizations they have picked this talking point up from are mostly not interested in a vision of energy abundance. If you read the Roosevelt Institute’s effort to outline a progressive vision for energy permitting reform, not only are they relentlessly hostile to any compromise with the fossil-fuel industry, they are not actually eager to make it easier to build utility-scale renewables either. The report is full of stuff about “the power of conducting regional planning to discern how land should be allocated to value environmental protection, the energy transition, and other factors like agriculture, cultural significance, and more” and how “according to a recent study by the Nature Conservancy, the U.S. could limit land-use change by 70 percent through strategies like colocating wind and solar.”

Abundance solves many problems

To be clear, these land use tradeoffs with wind and solar are real. This is why, traditionally, energy-abundance advocates have been more skeptical of wind and solar than environmentalists.

If you built coal-fired power plants on such a scale as to make electricity too cheap to meter, you would choke the country in smog. Truly abundant energy really does need to be clean. But ideas like geothermal and nuclear power are appealing to abundance advocates in part because they are compact. It’s not that traditional environmentalists never thought of these land use issues; they’re just genuinely skeptical of the energy-abundance vision. That’s what drives the push for things like rooftop solar, agrivoltaics, and solar-covered parking lots. Rather than seeking maximally abundant electricity, they want to squeeze as much electricity as possible out of the existing human footprint.

Then we have ideas like distributed energy resources and home efficiency retrofits to reduce the amount of new energy that we “need.”

But while this is all offered in good faith, I think it fundamentally underrates the merits of energy abundance.

For example, despite the considerable progress that’s been made with batteries, we are nowhere near being able to electrify things like aviation and maritime shipping. It is, however, chemically possible to manufacture liquid hydrocarbons (including jet fuel, bunker oil, and so forth) out of the carbon dioxide present in the air.

This is a lossy, energy-inefficient process for reasons of fundamental physics. If you snapped your fingers and generated enough clean energy to replace all the coal and gas currently burned to make electricity without raising prices for consumers and then snapped again to generate enough clean energy to electrify all cars and trucks and home heating, that would still leave you with electricity that’s wildly too expensive to make jet fuel.

But if electricity were abundant — too cheap to meter — then it wouldn’t matter that using electricity to manufacture liquid hydrocarbons is inefficient. It would still be cheaper to do it that way than to drill for oil and refine it. The problems of the “hard to decarbonize” sectors would be solved.

This is why, again, despite my disagreeable insistence on saying that clean energy abundance is different from conventional green politics, I sincerely think most adherents to conventional green politics should switch sides. A genuine abundance approach can solve the problem they’re trying to solve, and tweaking utility regulation or getting people to use better-insulated windows can’t.

This is also true of the land use problem itself.

By far, the biggest human footprint is not housing or commercial developments or renewable energy — it’s farms and pastures. Thirty million acres of that farmland are going to biofuels, which even given the not-so-sunny conditions of Iowa is a comically inefficient way to turn flat land into energy.

But beyond that, there’s occasional excitement when someone notices that we could produce food with a dramatically smaller land footprint by using vertical farms. Such farms would also involve radically less use of water and pesticides, with enormous ecological benefits. The problem is that while sunlight is free, vertical farming requires energy-intensive lighting and climate control. I believe the economics are loosely within the ballpark of working specifically for certain kinds of lettuce, but it basically doesn’t work for anything else.

Again, though, if electricity became radically cheap, then everything would be different. If we had the energy for vertical farming, we could easily quadruple national parkland while opening up tons of new space for housing development by relying on electricity rather than sunshine for food production. Every water-shortage issue you’ve ever heard of would be immediately solved.

A lot of scientific work has been done on growing real animal protein in labs, which would save even more land and eliminate a vast source of animal suffering. The problem, again, is it takes too much energy to be workable.

Shout your energy policy

Democrats have largely stopped talking about climate change during the 2026 election cycle, which seems to be mostly working for them. However, Bill McKibben and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse are upset about this and want Democrats “to talk about climate change now.”

The Crucial Years

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a month ago · 334 likes · 60 comments · Bill McKibben

I also agree that hushing is a non-optimal strategy. That said, it is a much better strategy than Whitehouse’s plan to make it harder for Mary Peltola and James Talarico and Sherrod Brown to win elections in states that have fossil-fuel industries.

I think it’s pretty scandalous that Whitehouse wants to sacrifice the interests of low-income Americans who are threatened by Trump’s Medicaid cuts, women who are worried about their reproductive rights, and decent people everywhere alarmed by Trump’s threats to democracy on the altar of some kind of ego trip.

I also don’t understand how he thinks electoral suicide will help solve climate change.

Most of all, I don’t really understand the Whitehouse/McKibben view that talking about climate change will address climate change.

What I think would be better would be to start saying and doing substantively different things about climate change. Sporadically blocking domestic fossil-fuel extraction and distribution infrastructure will not meaningfully curb global emissions. Trump’s war in Iran, which every Democrat agrees is unacceptably costly to the world economy, is actually a more effective version of this supply-constraint approach to climate than anything Whitehouse has ever put on the table. And while we should of course try to use our existing electrical grid infrastructure efficiently rather than wastefully, making it more efficient isn’t going to solve the problem either.

What really can solve it — and myriad other problems facing the world — is clean energy abundance.

But clean energy abundance is not posting levelized cost of energy charts or talking about community solar projects or bickering over the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

Clean energy abundance is identifying the barriers to deploying wind and solar and nuclear and geothermal power and breaking them down. It’s about parcel assembly in the Northeast. It’s about interregional transmission and interconnection. It’s about Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules. It’s about getting companies that want to build data centers to pay for innovative first-of-n projects so we can bring new ideas to scale. It’s about manufacturing synthetic hydrocarbons instead of scolding people about the carbon footprint of their cookout.

Just recognize that if you embrace this vision, you’re breaking in a real way with what major green groups are advocating for.

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“Senators Bernie Moreno and Tim Scott have worked to ensure my call becomes a reality, and have a Bill which has passed the Sena…

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The fact that a quarter of 11-year-olds are not allowed to leave the house unsupervised doesn’t seem all that shocking, until you realize that this means they’re not allowed to play in their yard unsupervised.1 Leaving the yard is a whole separate category.

I’ve also been surprised to see so much skepticism about the idea that nine- and 10-year-olds can be left home alone. We are a family with two parents who both have flexible schedules and just one child, so it’s not like our kid is left home alone all that frequently. But sometimes it’s the logistically reasonable course of action and what’s the problem?

The thing that really makes us outliers, though, is that our child is allowed to “leave the street” in the parlance of this poll and walk to places in the neighborhood.

Yet even though that’s the answer I would give to a pollster (because it’s accurate), I have to confess that in practice, he doesn’t often walk places in the neighborhood without an adult.

One reason for that is just that norms are self-reining and sticky; most people modulate their own behavior in part to match the behavior of peers. And if his friends aren’t allowed to walk around the neighborhood, he won’t do much of that either.

But I do think there’s more than sheer conformity at work here.

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I’m a little bored with the Twitter “moderation wars” in which people debate whether more centrist candidates are better at winning elections.

But I have noticed a funny thing recently where, as anti-moderation advocates start articulating their vision of what winning candidates look like, they appear to be reinventing moderation from first principles.

On the other side, every time I sit down with a group of moderates who want to chart a course for promoting moderate politics and moderate politicians, the one thing they absolutely agree on is that we should not use the word “moderate” to describe what we’re aiming for.

Moderation sounds boring, blah, uncool, and everyone hates it, including moderates.

So here’s an idea that I think may solve all our problems:

Forget about moderates and moderation. That’s lame. Let’s instead listen to Astead Herndon, who points out that lots of voters have eclectic beliefs that don’t fit into tidy boxes, with some views coming more from the progressive bucket and others that are more conservative.

What would we call this kind of eclectic, outside-the-box, bucket-mixing person?

Well, not moderate, that’s for sure. Let’s call him shmoderate.

The problem solvers’ caucus

What do shmoderates want? Well, they are distinct from both progressives and conservatives in that they don’t particularly want elected officials to pursue a dogmatic policy agenda. As Amanda Litman says, these voters “do not have cohesive ideologies.” They have real problems that they want solved.

So to that end, shmoderate politicians should probably reject ideas like “centrism” and instead form something like a problem solvers’ caucus. In fact, one such caucus already exists in the House of Representatives, and is co-chaired by Representative Brian Fitzpatrick on the Republican side and Representative Tom Suozzi on the Democratic side. Both of these shmoderate problem solvers are strong electoral performers who’ve won tough seats.

What does a problem-solving shmoderate like Suozzi do?

Well, he’s eclectic. He votes with Democrats most of the time, but he has also criticized the party’s take on the use of gender self-identification for assignment to school sports teams, and he voted for the Laken Riley Act. And of course, as a guy who’s focused on solving problems, he does things like respond to Trump’s election by calling on Democrats to find ways to cooperate with him rather than engage in root-and-branch opposition. And faced with a politician like Zohran Mamdani who does identify himself in strident ideological terms, Suozzi says thanks, but no thanks.

When people diss moderation and dismiss the relevance of ideology, it’s candidates like this — strong shmoderates — they mean to elevate, right?

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Shmoderation everywhere you look

One of the favorite voices of the moderation skeptics is G. Elliott Morris, who recently wrote an insightful piece about how Republican members of Congress decline to break with Trump over anything even though he’s become deeply unpopular. As he points out, this badly jeopardizes the G.O.P.’s ability to hold the House. But it can still be rational for individual members of Congress, because they need to be able to win primaries. Breaking with the pack would jeopardize their ability to do that.

I might add that even if a Republican member does break with Trump and overperforms, they still might lose. And if they lose as a party loyalist, they can get other gigs. But if they lose as a shmoderate who assembles an eclectic voting record and demonstrates independence from the party’s unpopular leader, they might not.

Lakshya Jain recently wrote a piece noting that the share of the public that says they will vote for Democrats in the midterms is a lot lower than the share of the public that says they disapprove of Trump.

His interpretation is that Democrats are being weighed down by unpopular left-wing views. Morris disagrees and says no one should expect Democrats to do well with these voters, because “Two-thirds of the Trump disapprovers who aren’t supporting Democrats for the midterms are actually just closeted Republicans.”

But what distinguishes a closeted, Trump-disapproving Republican from a normal one?

Well, it’s probably that in a political party that’s increasingly defined by conformity to Trump’s will, these closeted Republicans have more eclectic preferences. You can’t stick them in a box, and most of their views are probably in line with normal Republican ideas (that’s why they’re Republicans), but they clearly have some other views that cut the other way.

They are, in other words, shmoderates. And they’d probably be more likely to vote for a shmoderate Democratic candidate, especially if the party had an overall more shmoderate image thanks to having recruited and supported a broad array of shmoderate figures.

What are we talking about here?

Of course policy positions and ideology aren’t the only things in politics that matter. Jared Golden and Vicente Gonzalez are both strong electoral performers, but if you dropped Golden into South Texas and Gonzalez into northern Maine, neither would play very well.

That said, I often see people downplaying the role of ideology in favor of emphasizing candidates’ vibes or their authenticity or how they’re outsiders and want to fight the gerontocracy, but in practice this praise is only directed toward more left-wing candidates.

They’re supporting Graham Platner, in other words, but they’re not backing Seth Moulton or Matt Mahan as younger candidates who are taking on the party establishment. It’s not that the candidates they’re supporting are all exactly the same. Platner and Abdul El-Sayed are very different kinds of candidates on a vibes level, just like Golden and Gonzalez.

But it’s not confusing or mysterious that there are Platner/Sayed crossover fans who also really like billionaire investor Tom Steyer’s progressive rebrand. These are people who care about ideology.

But if you, as a progressive, care about issues and ideology, I’d encourage you to open your heart to the possibility that other people do too; they just have different issue priorities or ideological views.

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It’s true that most people don’t have a “cohesive” ideology and that most cross-pressured voters hold a kind of mishmash of views. But the mishmashes aren’t random or totally unpredictable. There are way more people who align with Democrats on health care and Republicans on crime than vice versa. There’s almost nobody who wants to ban abortion but is fine letting trans women self-identify into women’s sports leagues, while there are lots of people who have the opposite view. Ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage routinely win in red states while affirmative action initiatives fail in California.

If people want to call this brand of politics shmoderate rather than moderate, I don’t really care. But it seems kind of obfuscatory to me.

My suspicion is that the sticky wicket here is in fact authenticity, which does matter in politics.

A lot of sincerely left-wing progressives do see the tactical case for shmoderation. But they wouldn’t want a political party full of authentic shmoderates with lots of staffers who sincerely rate Golden and Gonzalez and Suozzi and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez as their favorite politicians and media figures who celebrate them with Mamdani/A.O.C.-scale coverage.

So to prevent that outcome, it’s helpful to discuss the electoral dynamics in a somewhat obfuscatory way: as if there’s nothing anyone can really clearly say about what voters think or what kinds of politicians are good at winning their votes or what specific moves to the center would be more efficacious.

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