NO LESS THAN HOUSING, CLIMATE change makes a hash of our traditional political categories. Here it is typically the right that is willing to leap into the unknown, confident that humanity can adapt to unimaginable change. Here it is largely the left that wants to conserve the climate that the entirety of human civilization has known.
But to conserve our climate requires more than mere inaction. To do nothing—to let greenhouse gas emissions accelerate as they would if we kept burning coal and oil and gas heedlessly—is to welcome warming of four or five or six degrees Celsius. These are numbers that diverge from the climate of the eighteenth century as sharply as the climate of the eighteenth century diverges from the Ice Age.1 These are numbers inside which the planetary systems that sustain us break.
To maintain the climate we have had, or anything close to it, requires us to remake the world we have built. One vision that is popular in some corners of the left is called “degrowth.” It holds that climate change reflects humanity’s thrall to an impossible dream of endless growth. Rich countries must accept stasis, shuttering or scaling down major industries, and poorer countries must grow more gently and prudently.
Degrowth is simultaneously much more and much less than an answer to the climate crisis. It is much more than an answer because it is not really about climate at all. It is an anti-materialist philosophy that holds that humanity made its fundamental errors hundreds of years ago, trading the animism of our ancestors for Christianity’s promise of dominion over nature. The problem is not simply greenhouse gas emissions or microplastics. It is Cartesian dualism and American-style capitalism and everything these systems of thought and practice have taught us to value and prize and want.
“Those who sought to pave the way for capitalism in the sixteenth century first had to destroy other, more holistic ways of seeing the world, and either convince or force people to become dualists,” writes Jason Hickel in Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. “Dualist philosophy was leveraged to cheapen life for the sake of growth; and it is responsible at a deep level for our ecological crisis.”2
Hickel compares the scale of the philosophical and economic revolution degrowth imagines to Darwin persuading the world of evolution or Copernicus spreading the knowledge that the earth revolves around the sun.3 He envisions a wholesale shift in humanity’s relationship to other living things—and to itself. But shifts of that size take decades or centuries to play out. In the case of evolution, the victory is yet only partial. We do not have decades or centuries to convince the world to act on climate change.
To the extent that degrowth has a specific climate plan, it is to shut off or scale down areas of production it deems destructive, like military investment, meat and dairy production, advertising, and fast fashion. There is some appeal to this. All of us can identify some aspect of the global production system that seems wasteful, unnecessary, or harmful. The problem is that few of us identify the same aspects of the global production system.
Take meat and dairy production. When we think of humanity’s land footprint, we mostly think of buildings and roadways. But only 2 or 3 percent of habitable land is taken up by cities. We do not primarily use land to live on. We primarily use land to feed ourselves. About half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that, three-quarters is given over to raising livestock or growing feed for livestock. It is difficult to find an environmental challenge that is not tied up in raising animals for our consumption. It is a driver of climate change. It is a driver of deforestation. It is a driver of mass extinction, as the land we turn over to cows and sheep and goats is the land that other species need to survive. It is a driver of drought and water scarcity, as it takes about 1,800 gallons of water to produce a single pound of boneless beef.
To the vegetarians and vegans among us, this is an obvious target for elimination. Humans thrive on a vegetarian diet, and the factory farms that produce most of our meat are abattoirs of unimaginable cruelty and suffering. Industrial animal agriculture is more than a climate problem. It is a moral stain upon modernity. There is probably no single change that would do more for our interlinked environmental problems than for the world to cease using cows and goats and sheep for food.
But to suggest such a thing is to court political ruin. People want to eat meat, and they want that meat to be cheap and plentiful. The right accuses the left of scheming to ban hamburgers for a reason. The left denies those accusations and leaves direct confrontation with the meat industry out of its legislation for the same reason. There is no near-term politics that will ban meat consumption or redistribute it from richer countries to poorer countries.
For all the radicalism of his book, even Hickel flinches from the task he sets for himself. He does not suggest anything akin to ridding the world of the factory farms that produce most of our beef. Instead, he proposes “to end the subsidies high-income countries give to beef farmers” and notes that “researchers are also testing proposals for a tax on red meat.”4 Fine proposals. But not the revolutionary upheaval that will cut our emissions rapidly enough to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.5 And that is even assuming you could pass a global or multinational tax on meat. Which you could not.
Degrowth criticizes other approaches as unrealistic, noting the ease with which countries slip from their climate commitments or the ways that clean energy may allow other human cruelties to persist. In a telling passage, Hickel imagines what would happen if we perfected and deployed nuclear fusion tomorrow, bringing to life the clean energy economy of green dreams. “What would we do with it?” he asks.6 “Exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, trawl more fish, mine more mountains, build more roads, expand industrial farming, and send more waste to landfill.”
In this sense, degrowth recognizes the difficulty that politics poses to climate policy. It knows people want more of what they have, and although it blames capitalism and plutocracy for these wants, it sees the challenges these wants pose to traditional climate politics. But those challenges apply to the degrowth vision with even greater force. If you cannot imagine convincing people to change their desires in the presence of energy abundance, how do you imagine convincing them to accept the rapid, collective scarcity that degrowth demands?
We know what it looks like when governments face the political fury of rising energy prices or fuel rationing. In 2022, ninety countries and territories experienced often violent protests over the rising price of fuel between January and September, according to a BBC analysis.7 In Sri Lanka—a country that Hickel holds out as a model for degrowth development—those protests led to the collapse of the ruling government.
It is not much easier in rich countries, where degrowthers insist on the most radical restrictions in energy use. In France, the 2018 “yellow vest” protests followed a modest hike in the fuel tax. In America, rising energy costs resulting from sanctions against Russia forced the Biden administration to open up domestic fossil fuel production and beg Saudi Arabia for more oil.8 Germany’s government tried to ban fossil fuel heating systems in favor of greener heat pumps; the outcry nearly split the ruling coalition and the compromised, cut-up bill that ultimately passed was a shadow of the initial proposal. In 2023, a wave of electoral defeats for the UK’s Conservative Party were blamed on high energy costs, leading Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to delay a suite of climate policies. In the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris emphasized the record levels of oil and gas production achieved under the Biden administration far more than the historic climate investments she helped pass into law.
When Erik Voeten, a political scientist, picked through the political consequences of recent climate policies, he found that “people who bear the cost of climate policies increasingly flock to the far right.”9 The only policy that seemed to blunt the backlash was directly compensating the people who suffer under green policies. But you can’t both compensate residents of rich countries for lost growth and cut growth in those same countries. Turning global politics into a zero-sum contest for allotted energy rations will not deliver a greener future.
The cost of trying and failing to implement the degrowth vision would not merely be missing our climate targets by a few tenths of a percentage point. It is to deliver a future of populist authoritarians who drill and burn their way back to a false prosperity. It is to discredit parties that care about climate change and empower strongmen who will give people what they have always wanted: the gift of abundant energy.
“Take any variable of human well-being—longevity, nutrition, income, mortality, overall population—and draw a graph of its value over time,” Charles Mann writes in The Wizard and the Prophet. “In almost every case it skitters along at a low level for thousands of years, then rises abruptly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as humans learn to wield the trapped solar power in coal, oil and natural gas.”10
Without energy, even material splendor has sharp limits. Mann notes that visitors to the Palace of Versailles in February 1695 marveled at the furs worn to dinners with the king and the ice that collected on the glassware. It was frigid in Versailles, and no treasury could warm it. A hundred years later, Thomas Jefferson had a vast wine collection and library in Monticello and the forced labor of more than a hundred slaves,11 but his ink still froze to the tip of his pen during winter.12
Today, heating is a solved problem for many. But not for all. There are few inequalities more fundamental than energy inequality. The late demographer Hans Rosling had a vivid way of framing this. In 2010, he argued that you could group humanity by the energy people had access to. At the time, roughly 2 billion people had little or no access to electricity and still cooked food and heated water by fire. About 3 billion had access to enough electricity to power electric lights. An additional billion or so had the energy and wealth for laborsaving appliances like washing machines. It’s only the richest billion people who could afford to fly, and we used around half of global energy.13 Energy is the nucleus of wealth.
Can we all be energetically wealthy? Not if we’re burning coal and oil. The stocks of fossil fuels are finite and their continued combustion is lethal. This would be true even if climate change was a hoax. Air pollution kills between 7 million and 9 million people each year; that is six or seven times the death toll from traffic accidents and hundreds of times the death toll from war or terrorism or all natural disasters combined. It is deadliest where people cook by burning wood or charcoal and farm by burning the end of the last season’s crops. That is to say, it is deadliest where people are energy poor, because where people are energy poor, they burn fuel and breathe in the byproducts.
For most of human history there was no other choice. That is why nearly every society that has become rich since the industrial revolution has seen air pollution build to crisis levels. Human beings choked on smog in London in the nineteenth century and in New York and Los Angeles in the twentieth century. A few years ago, Beijing’s air quality was an international scandal, and now the same is true for Delhi. But notice: the problem passes. Los Angeles got richer and its residents now breathe clean air. The same is true in London, where air pollution in the eighteenth century was worse than Delhi is today.14
“Environmental action is often framed as at odds with the economy,” writes Hannah Ritchie in Not the End of the World. “It’s either climate action or economic growth. Pollution versus the market. This is just wrong.”15 As societies become economically and technologically rich, they clean their air and water. Air pollution is not a problem of using too much energy or pursuing too much growth. It is a problem of using dirty energy because you do not have the money or the technology to grow another way.
The same is true for climate change. We did not always know how to power economies without using fossil fuels. We do now. This is the technological miracle of our age. The cost of solar energy fell by about 90 percent from 2010 to 2020. The cost of wind power fell by nearly 70 percent.16 Solar power does not choke the lungs. Wind power does not sting the eyes. Neither of them warms the planet. Two decades ago, it was not possible to imagine that modernity was compatible with renewable energy. Now we need not imagine it.
The world installed more solar power in 2023 than it did between 1954 and 2017. We have seen repeated periods in California and Texas of “negative energy prices”—moments where consumers are, mind-bendingly, paid to consume electricity because there is more of it than the system needs. The cost of solar is falling so fast that for much of the day it will be effectively free, in much of the world, by 2030. “I simply cannot believe where we are with solar,” Jenny Chase, the BloombergNEF analyst, told the New York Times. “And if you’d told me nearly 20 years ago what would be the case now, 20 years later, I would have just said you were crazy. I would have laughed in your face. There is genuinely a revolution happening.”17
In a thrilling paper with the very un-thrilling title “Empirically Grounded Technology Forecasts and the Energy Transition,” a team of researchers found that the price of oil, gas, and coal, after adjusting for inflation, is about what it was 140 years ago.18 But renewable energy keeps crushing expectations. The authors looked at 2,905 projections for solar costs made by the most popular forecasting models and found that solar costs were expected to fall by 2.6 percent a year and never by more than 6 percent. In reality, they fell by 15 percent per year, year after year. In 2022, the US Energy Information Administration released a report estimating life-cycle costs for new energy installations in the coming decades. Solar was already cheaper than natural gas. Wind was a dollar more. Both were about half the price of coal.19
As the climate writer and activist Bill McKibben put it, “In the place of those fires we keep lit day and night, it’s possible for us to rely on the fact that there is a fire in the sky—a great ball of burning gas about ninety-three million miles away, whose energy can be collected in photovoltaic panels, and which differentially heats the Earth, driving winds whose energy can now be harnessed with great efficiency by turbines. The electricity they produce can warm and cool our homes, cook our food, and power our cars and bikes and buses. The sun burns, so we don’t need to.”20
To this miracle one might add humanity’s harnessing of nuclear power, or our growing ability to tap the geothermal energy pulsing beneath the earth or the hydropower generated by the waves. So much clean energy is possible, and available, if we can muster the ingenuity and the will to harness it.
And so there is nothing inevitable about the pace of greenhouse gas emissions. To see this clearly does not require imagining any new energy technology; it simply requires looking at the way different countries power themselves now. America emits about 15 tons of carbon per person, per year. Canada and Australia belch out nearly the same. In Germany and Japan, it’s 8 tons. In France and the United Kingdom, it’s less than 5 tons.21 These are vast differences across similar lifestyles. A wanderer in London or Paris or Tokyo or Berlin would not notice material deprivation compared to Toronto or Sydney or Houston.
What is true across space is also true across time. In 1979, Americans pumped out 22.7 tons of CO2 per person; Canadians, 18.2; Germans, 14.3; Australians, 13.2; the UK, 11.5, France, 10.22 All these countries are richer today than they were then, and yet they emit less carbon, per person, than they did then. Nor is it the case that their emissions have simply been offshored to the developing countries that manufacture many of the goods that richer countries buy. Researchers use trading data to track the movement of manufacturing emissions. Adjusting for offshore manufacturing blunts the cuts to emissions somewhat—in the United States, a 21 percent drop becomes a 14 percent drop, while in Germany, there’s almost no difference—but it doesn’t come close to erasing it.23
What is changing, in all these countries, is the source of power. “In 1900, nearly all of the UK’s energy came from coal, and by 1950 it was still supplying over 90%,” writes Ritchie. “Now coal supplies less than 2% of our electricity, and the government has pledged to phase it out completely by 2025.”24 Indeed, the last coal-fired power station operating in the UK shuttered in September 2024.25
It is possible to power a modern economy with clean energy. It is possible to develop an economy with clean energy. And it will be possible to go beyond where any economy is today with clean energy. While we were writing this book, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory generated more energy than they used in a test of laser-ignited nuclear fusion.26 We know nuclear fusion can work: it is how stars generate power. We have never known if we can make it work here on earth—at least not affordably and at scale. But we are getting closer.
It is tempting to assume we in the United States sit at the terminus of what energy can achieve and all that is left is for the rest of the world to catch up. We do not. We are early in the story of humanity’s relationship with energy. Today’s technologies will come to seem comical, even barbaric. “In 100 or 200 years, everything will look radically different,” says Melissa Lott, the former director of research at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “Folks will look back and be blown away by how we used energy today. They’ll say, ‘Wait, you just burned it?’ ”27
Too many see clearly the costs that dirty energy can impose on the environment but do not dare imagine the possibilities clean and abundant energy unlocks for it. In a paper imagining “energy superabundance”—which they define modestly, as simply every human being having access to the energy that residents of Iceland enjoy—Austin Vernon and Eli Dourado sketch out some of the near-term possibilities. Vertical greenhouses could feed far more people while using far less land. Desalination is a major contributor to water supplies in Israel now and could supply more than half of the demand in Singapore by the middle of the century. The technology could become affordable for poorer, populous nations that need new water sources most. Directly removing carbon dioxide from the air would become more plausible, giving us a path to reversing climate change over time.
But the first step to building the clean economy of tomorrow is building the clean economy of today. That is a daunting task.
Start with the major ways that most US households warm the planet. We drive. We heat homes. We cook food. We dry clothes. These activities require millions and millions of machines, most of which now run on fossil fuels. To decarbonize, they all will need to run on electricity.
The energy analysts Sam Calisch and Saul Griffith estimate that in the next few years consumers will need to replace about one billion machines with clean alternatives.28 That means when old cars give out, they will be replaced by electric vehicles. It means when old furnaces cough their last breath, they are replaced by heat pumps. It means trading gas stoves for induction stoves and clothes dryers that run on natural gas for dryers that work off heat pumps.29
Producing all these new machines is itself a steep manufacturing challenge. It is also a persuasion challenge. People need to want these alternatives. That means the alternatives need to be excellent, which in many cases they now are. Electric cars accelerate faster and run quieter than cars powered by combustion engines. Induction stoves boil water in a fraction of the time it takes those little licks of fire. Because these advantages are not universally known—and because new technologies are more expensive than mature ones—subsidies need to be generous, and advertising needs to be everywhere. Making these replacement decisions needs to be a no-brainer, every time. But assume that challenge can be met, fully or partially. Now we have a billion more machines using more electricity than ever before. Where is all that electricity coming from?
About 60 percent of the electricity generated in the United States in 2022 came from fossil fuels.30 The precise mix varies by state. South Dakota gets 84 percent of its power from renewables, mainly wind,31 and Washington gets 74 percent from renewables,32 thanks to hydropower. But Nevada gets 56 percent of its electricity from natural gas.33 Wyoming gets 71 percent from coal.34 Florida gets only around 6 percent of its electricity from solar.35 So much for the Sunshine State.
The first task is to convert that 60 percent of energy coming from fossil fuels to something closer to 0 percent—or at least 0 percent coming from energy that releases carbon emissions into the atmosphere, which could leave a role for natural gas with carbon capture.
That would be task enough. But with one billion new machines plugging into the country’s grid, we don’t just need the electricity we generate now to be clean. We need much more of it. “One way to put that is for every fifteen years from 2020 to 2050, we need to build the entirety of our electricity grid worth of supply again,” says Jesse Jenkins, an energy expert at Princeton University.36 And we need to build it out of solar panels and wind turbines and storage batteries.
Jenkins’s team has modeled that build-out in detail. A plausible path to decarbonization sees wind and solar installations spanning up to 590,000 square kilometers. That is roughly equal to the landmass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.37 And we need to do it fast. In their 2023 paper “The Greens’ Dilemma,” J. B. Ruhl and James Salzman, professors of environmental law at Vanderbilt and UCLA, respectively, put this vividly. “Consider that the largest solar facility currently online in the United States is capable of generating 580 MW [megawatts],” they write. “To meet even a middle-road renewable energy scenario would require bringing online two new 400 MW solar power facilities—each taking up at least 2,000 acres—every week for the next 30 years.”38
Installing that much wind and solar capacity isn’t just a manufacturing challenge; it’s a political one. Wind and solar require far more land than coal or natural gas to produce the same amount of energy. Some of the viable land is open and easy to purchase. Much of it isn’t. Neighbors have fears about a wind farm rising near their homes, and communities have concerns about becoming the site of a major solar array. If the land is publicly owned, the project has to negotiate with an overlapping set of federal and state authorities. It can take years to merely get the plans and permits approved.
Once we’ve generated this electricity, we’ll have to move it. This will sometimes require sending power across vast distances. The wind blows harder in Oklahoma than in Oregon, and the sun shines brighter in Arizona than in Maine, but a fully electric economy will require these far-flung states to be connected by an integrated energy grid. The name for the infrastructure that moves electricity from one place to another is transmission lines, and we’ve never completed more than 4,100 miles of transmission lines in one year, ever.39 We’d have to build more than that, year after year, to hit these goals. Transmission projects often come in late and over budget, and many planned projects stall. A 2016 report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory looked at five major transmission projects with projected completion dates of 2021. Only one of them has been completed. Construction hasn’t even begun on the other four.40
For decades, American liberalism has measured its successes in how near it could come to the social welfare system of Denmark. Liberals fought for expansions of health insurance and paid vacation leave and paid sick days and a heftier earned-income tax credit and an expanded child tax credit and decent retirement benefits. Worthy causes, all. But those victories could be won, when they were won, largely inside the tax code and the regulatory state. Building a social insurance program does occasionally require new buildings. But it rarely requires that many of them. This was, and is, a liberalism that changed the world through the writing of new rules and the moving about of money.
The climate crisis demands something different. It demands a liberalism that builds. The Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act add up to about $450 billion in clean energy investments, subsidies, and loan guarantees. This is how the scale of such bills is normally described in Washington: by a price tag. The more money, the bigger the bill. That is an incomplete measure, at best.
If we could build faster, the numbers could rise. If we could build cheaper, the money would go further. That $450 billion is only an estimate. Many of the subsidies in these bills are open-ended. They will go to as many projects as can use them. These bills could spend trillions of dollars if we can build that infrastructure fast enough. They could spend far less than $450 billion if projects become too hard to permit. They could waste tens or hundreds of billions on projects that are never completed. What matters is not what gets spent. What matters is what gets built.
In 1982, Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill to study what it would take to build a high-speed rail system across California. Californians liked what they saw. In 1996, California formed a high-speed rail authority to plan for the construction of what would be America’s fastest rail system. Planners imagined a silver shell whistling along beams of steel, carrying millions of parents, children, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Hollywood actors, and solo travelers through America’s largest state at speeds reaching 220 miles per hour. Goodbye, traffic and pollution-choked freeways. Hello, classy dining cars and reclinable seats.
High-speed rail is not some futuristic technology like cold fusion or flying cars. France and Japan broke ground on these projects back in the 1960s. Both of us have boarded bullet trains in foreign countries, taking the TGV from Paris to Bordeaux and the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto.
Ah, but California. The years ticked by. The governors came and went. In 2008, voters approved a plan to build the first segments by 2020 for $33 billion. Then, in 2011, high-speed rail’s foremost champion returned when Brown improbably won back the governor’s mansion, almost thirty years after last leaving it. In his 2012 State of the State address, he marked high-speed rail as his signature project. “If you believe that California will continue to grow, as I do, and that millions more people will be living in our state, this is a wise investment,” he said. And California was ready to make it. “We are within weeks of a revised business plan that will enable us to begin initial construction before the year is out,” he promised.
This time, Brown had allies. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. The “Recovery” bit was obvious: A housing bubble had caused a financial crisis. A financial crisis had caused mass joblessness. The economy needed help, and it needed it now. But the administration wanted to do more than mere stimulus. They wanted a legacy. They wanted the kinds of ambitious projects upon which another century of American might and prosperity could be built. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, said. “And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”41
This was the “Reinvestment” side of the bill: hundreds of billions of dollars to build the infrastructure of the future. And high-speed rail was the glitzy, headline project at the center of it. “Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city,” Obama said in April 2009. “No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over one hundred miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination. Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America. Now, all of you know this is not some fanciful, pie-in-the-sky vision of the future. It is now. It is happening right now. It’s been happening for decades. The problem is it’s been happening elsewhere, not here.”42 Obama wanted it to happen here.
The most obvious place was California, where, Obama continued, “voters have already chosen to move forward with their own high-speed rail system, a system of new stations and 220-mile-per-hour trains that links big cities to inland towns; that alleviates crippling congestion on highways and at airports; and that makes travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles possible in two and a half hours.”
In 2009, then, this was the status of high-speed rail in California: It was a signature project of the president of the United States. A signature project of the most powerful governor California had in decades. Voters in California had set aside billions to make it real. And the federal government was adding billions more. It is hard to imagine a more favorable climate for the project. A spokesman for the California High-Speed Rail Authority joined a call-in radio show and told listeners that they’d be “able to ride that train from San Francisco to LA in the year 2020.”
But progress crawled and costs ballooned. In his final State of the State address, in 2018, Brown tried to rally Californians to the task. “Difficulties challenge us but they can’t discourage or stop us,” he said.43 The next year, Gavin Newsom, who had served as lieutenant governor, succeeded Brown. “Let’s be real,” Newsom said in his first State of the State. “The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency. Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA. I wish there were.”44
Ambitions were cut. No longer was California trying to build high-speed rail to connect the megacities of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Now it was trying to salvage something, anything: A line between the agricultural centers of Merced and Bakersfield. A line no one would have authorized if it had been the plan presented in the first place. The scaled-down plan was estimated at $22 billion.45 But even the price tag on that line has ballooned. The latest estimate is it will cost $35 billion to complete, and it won’t begin carrying passengers until sometime between 2030 and 2033.46 If all goes well.
The US has contributed as much to rail technology as any other country in the world—or more than any other country. Americans invented the air brake47 and led the world in rail construction at the end of the 1800s. California businessmen helming the Central Pacific Railroad Company built all but a few hundred miles of the western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s. The project spanned nearly 1,800 miles. It took just six years to finish. These days, six years is roughly the amount of time it takes California to realize that its bullet train needs to be pushed back by another decade. 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.48
In October 2023, one of us—okay, it was Ezra—went to Fresno, California, and toured the miles of rail infrastructure that the California High-Speed Rail Authority has built.49 The project is caught in a strange limbo between political fantasy and physical fact. The agency doesn’t have anywhere near the money or political capital it would need to complete the Los Angeles–to–San Francisco system Californians actually want. It doesn’t even have the money to complete the Bakersfield-to-Merced system that Newsom proposed. It has no line of sight on how it will get that money or that political capital. But since it has some money and some political capital, it is building anyway, in the hopes that Californians will want to finish what they started.
As Ezra walked the path of the track with the engineers who built it, he heard less about engineering problems than political problems. He stood on a patch of the 99 freeway that had been moved in order to clear the hoped-for train’s path. Not far from there had been a Derrel’s Mini Storage. In folk imagination, eminent domain is a simple process by which the state simply tells you it wants your land and then gives you some money and takes it from you. In reality, it took the High-Speed Rail Authority four separate requests for possession, and two and a half years of legal wrangling, to get the land.
That story repeated and repeated again and again. There are parts of the build that intersect with the freight rail lines. But the freight rail lines are so busy in the holiday season that some impose a construction moratorium from October to December. So in those areas no construction can happen for a large chunk of the year. Trains are cleaner than cars, but high-speed rail has had to clear every inch of its route through environmental reviews, with lawsuits lurking around every corner. The environmental review process began in 2012, and by 2024 it still wasn’t finished. “I’m always amazed the staff has been working on these segments for a decade or longer to get through the environmental process,” Brian Kelly, who served as CEO of the High-Speed Rail Authority from 2018 to 2024, says.50
What has taken so long on high-speed rail is not hammering nails or pouring concrete. It’s negotiating. Negotiating with courts, with funders, with business owners, with homeowners, with farm owners. Those negotiations cost time, which costs money. Those negotiations lead to changes in the route or the build or the design, which costs money. Those negotiations lead to public disappointment and frustration, which leads to loss of money that might otherwise have been approved if the project were speeding toward completion.
There is one school of thought that says it is worth taking the time to do these projects right. If the reviews and the negotiations and the consultations take a few more years, those are years well spent. But they carry a price tag. “Time is a killer on the estimate of a project’s cost,” Kelly said. “When you don’t have funding and can’t make decisions and can’t drive to get operational and you can’t move the ball—the cost is huge. Two to three percent a year, and in higher inflation periods, like we just had, five percent.” As delays mount, costs keep rising. The project becomes more expensive to finish. The public loses faith. The politicians begin second-guessing.
Governor Newsom knows how bad this looks. He knows how bad this is. “I watched as a mayor and then a lieutenant governor and now governor as years became decades on high-speed rail,” he says. “People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things. People look at me all the time and ask, ‘What the hell happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s?’ ”51
But it’s not just California. Democrats today are as searing in their criticisms of public sclerosis as any Republican. John Podesta, the graybeard who oversaw the rollout of the Inflation Reduction Act for Joe Biden, bemoaned that “delays are pervasive at every level of government—federal, state, and local. We got so good at stopping projects that we forgot how to build things in America.”52 Brian Deese, then the director of Biden’s National Economic Council, noted in April 2022 that the Empire State Building was completed in a little over a year and said that government needs to “demonstrate that America can build—fast, as we’ve done before, and fairly, as we’ve sometimes failed to do.”53
One response—the typical Republican response—is that government is intrinsically inefficient. But the data doesn’t bear that out. The Transit Costs Project tracks the price tags on rail projects in different countries. It’s hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison here, because different projects are, well, different, and it matters whether they include, say, a tunnel, which is expensive for all the obvious reasons.
Even so, the United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about $609 million to build a kilometer (about 0.6 miles) of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $384 million. Canada gets it done for $295 million. Japan clocks in at $267 million. Portugal is the cheapest country in the database, at $96 million. All those countries build more tunnels than we do,54 perhaps because they retain the confidence to regularly try. The better you are at building infrastructure, the more ambitious you can be when imagining infrastructure to build.
We looked into it, and it turns out that all those countries also have governments. So the problem cannot simply be government. Nor is the problem unions—another favored bugaboo of the right. Union density is higher in all those countries than it is in the United States.
Think of the technology we have today that we didn’t have in the 1970s. The new generations of power tools and computer modeling and teleconferencing and advanced machinery and prefab materials and global shipping. You’d think we could build so much more, so much faster, for so much less money, than in the past. But we can’t. Or, at least, we don’t.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, productivity in the construction sector—how much more could be done given the same number of workers and machines and the same amount of land—grew faster than productivity in the rest of the economy. Then, around 1970, it began to fall, even as economy-wide productivity kept rising. Today, a chasm yawns. A construction worker in 2020 produced less than a construction worker in 1970, at least according to the official statistics. Contrast that with the economy overall, where labor productivity rose by 290 percent between 1950 and 2020, or to the manufacturing sector, which saw a stunning ninefold increase in productivity.
In the piquantly titled “The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the U.S. Construction Sector,” Austan Goolsbee, the president of the Chicago Federal Reserve and a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, and Chad Syverson, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, set out to uncover whether this is all just a trick of statistics, and if not, what has gone wrong.
Their paper works by process of elimination. First, they look at whether there has been less capital investment in construction than elsewhere in the economy. Nope. Then they examine whether we’re mismeasuring construction—which would mean that sometime starting in the 1970s we began overestimating the labor or materials the construction industry used or underestimating how much it built with them, or both. They test this a few different ways, but the most interesting is to look at how many houses were built per worker, adjusted for square footage. There, the trend looks more flat than negative, and maybe slightly positive for single-family homes, but it’s far from bringing construction productivity anywhere near level with the rest of the economy.55
This isn’t a quirk of American recordkeeping. The slowdown is international. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development tracked construction productivity in twenty-nine countries between 1996 and 2019. In 55 percent of them, productivity fell during that time. The only countries in which productivity rose at more than 2 percentage points per year were the Slovak Republic, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania—poorer countries rebuilding after the crackup of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc.56
So if it’s not underinvestment and it’s not a statistical illusion, what is it? Here, Goolsbee and Syverson seem stumped. The Wharton School, for example, tracks building regulations across cities, and Goolsbee and Syverson tested regulatory burden against construction productivity. There was a slight relationship, but nothing impressive. They looked at which states saw the highest and lowest rates of productivity increases. The worst performers, Syverson said, were Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming, Delaware, and Michigan. The relative stars were Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Colorado. That doesn’t lend itself to a clean story of red states and blue states or urban states and rural states.
Syverson, for one, is skeptical that there’s any single answer. “I don’t know how you get 50 years of decline without having multiple problems,” he said. “Everyone has their pet theory. But everyone has a different pet.”57
But Goolsbee and Syverson are economists. Maybe the cause is obvious to industry insiders. Ed Zarenski worked in construction, largely as an estimator, for more than forty years and now runs the market analysis firm Construction Analytics. Zarenski, who tracks construction costs and business volume closely, agrees that there has been a slowdown. And he agrees that there is no single cause for it. But when he thinks back on what the construction industry looked like when he began his career, and what it looks like now, the anecdotes tumble out.
“When I first started back in the ’70s, you did one estimate on a project,” he said. “You put it in, you got your bid, and if you won, you began construction. By the time I left in 2014, you did three estimates for every job before you even put the bid in. That becomes part of the cost of the job.”
Or take the job site, he said. “The safety features on jobs when I started in the industry were not even noticeable. Safety on a job today is incredibly different. You don’t walk across a beam; you walk around on a pathway marked for you to stay safe so you don’t fall off the side of the building. By the time I retired, one thing that took place every day, on every job site, was a mandatory 15 minutes of calisthenics before you start your workday. That’s totally nonproductive, but it led to fewer work site injuries during the day.”
And behind all that is paperwork, and paperwork, and more paperwork. “The work we do today takes hundreds more people in the office to track and bring to completion,” he said. “The level of reporting that you have to send to the government, to the insurance companies, to the owner, to show you’re meeting all the requirements on the job site, all of that has increased. And so the number of people you need to produce that has increased.”58
The economist Mancur Olson’s famous 1982 book The Rise and Decline of Nations begins with its own productivity mystery: After World War II, Germany’s and Japan’s cities were bombed out, their people dispirited, their economies wrecked. The question of the age, Olson writes, was “whether these abjectly defeated societies would be able to provide themselves with even the rudiments of survival.”59 Instead, West Germany and Japan thrived, growing far faster in that era than Britain, which had emerged victorious from the war.
Olson was known for seminal work on how groups cooperate—and why, so often, they don’t. In The Rise and Decline of Nations, he developed a deeper theory of why nations often stagnate amid affluence yet thrive in the aftermath of chaos. His key insight is that groups capable of collective action—imagine the Sierra Club or the Chamber of Commerce—are slow to build but powerful and persistent when they coalesce. America has long had seniors, but the emergence of the AARP gave them a new level of political power. Workers become far stronger once they organize into unions. Forming these groups is difficult, but power creates persistence: once a group is successfully organized, it can fight for its own survival and invest in its future strength. And so, Olson suggests, “if organizations and collusions for collective action usually emerge only in favorable circumstances and develop strength over time, a stable society will see more organization for collective action as time passes.”60
The more organized groups you have, Olson says, the more fights over distribution you’ll have, the more lobbying you’ll have, the more complex regulations you’ll have, the more bargaining you’ll get between groups, and the harder it will be to get complex projects done. Affluent, stable societies have more negotiations. And that means they have more negotiators. There’s great good in that. It means people’s concerns can be voiced, their needs can be met, their ideas can be integrated, their insights can be shared. It also means that it becomes difficult to get much of anything done. This is why China can build tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail in the time it takes California to fail to build hundreds of miles of high-speed rail. China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to high-speed rail.
The Rise and Decline of Nations is a classic economics text. But time has exposed gaps in the theory. Japan has gone from economic poster child to growth laggard. Olson’s argument would seem to imply that the United States, with its geographic protection against invasion and its long history of continuity, would be far more sclerotic than Germany, but it isn’t. And Olson has no real answer for why so few countries that fall into crisis subsequently grow into affluence.
Olson’s biggest error is his assumption that groups organize around redistribution. Olson almost completely missed the post-materialist turn in the politics of affluent countries. Some groups seek to fill their coffers, but others organize to protect the environment, to increase safety standards, to preserve the feel of their communities, or to express their values. These kinds of groups have been engines of social progress. Their existence is a gift of affluence, not a disease of affluence.
But Olson, who died in 1998, was right when he said that affluence is a gift that comes with costs. And those costs concentrate in the areas of the economy in which the number of groups that have to be consulted mounts. From this perspective, the productivity woes in the construction industry don’t seem so puzzling. It’s relatively easy to build inside the confines of computer code. It’s harder, but manageable, to manipulate matter within the four walls of a factory. When you construct a new building or subway tunnel or highway, you have to navigate neighbors and communities and existing roads and emergency access vehicles and politicians and beloved views of the park and the possibility of earthquakes and on and on. Construction may well be the industry with the most exposure to Olson’s thesis. And construction of public projects, like high-speed rail, is almost uniquely vulnerable. It is the government’s job, after all, to balance society’s many competing perspectives. They need to do more than turn a profit or satisfy shareholders.
Zarenski’s experience often felt like a narrativization of Olson’s thesis. “There are so many people who want to have some say over a project,” he said. “You have to meet so many parking spaces, per unit. It needs to be this far back from the sight lines. You have to use this much reclaimed water. You didn’t have 30 people sitting in a hearing room for the approval of a permit 40 years ago.”61
Syverson told a similar story. “There are a million veto points,” he said. “There are a lot of mouths at the trough that need to be fed to get anything started or done. So many people can gum up the works.”62 That’s particularly true in richer areas. There’s a reason so much of the housing construction in Washington, DC, since 2000 has happened in the city’s Southwest, rather than in Georgetown. When richer residents want something stopped, they know how to organize—and they often already have the organizations, to say nothing of the lobbyists and access, needed to stop it.
These dynamics help explain the curious finding that ends Syverson and Goolsbee’s paper. After looking at the states with the highest construction productivity, they note that the more productive states don’t seem to gain market share in the construction industry. That doesn’t make much sense if you assume that the difficulties of construction are primarily the organization of manpower and materials. It makes more sense if you assume that the frictions are in navigating local regulations, community considerations, neighbors’ qualms, and politicians’ interests. Developers are often fixtures in the local political scene. They have to be.
“My feeling is the guys that know the system have a much easier time getting through the system,” Zarenski said. “They know ahead of time what they have to come into the party with and how to speak to those people and how to satisfy them, and so it goes a lot smoother for them.”63 But a thorough knowledge of one city or state, and establishing relationships with its decision-makers, won’t necessarily translate to success in another.
In a separate paper, Ed Glaeser and four coauthors add to this story.64 They begin with an astonishing fact: from 1935 to 1970, the number of homes produced per construction worker increased at the same pace as, and sometimes even faster than, the number of cars produced per automobile industry worker or the total manufactured output per industrial worker.65 The world we live in—where manufacturing productivity rises and rises even as construction productivity falls—is a new phenomenon, not a historical inevitability.
Glaeser and his colleagues go on to look at the size of the firms involved. It turns out that big home construction companies are much more efficient than small home construction companies. No surprise there. But the market in home construction is dominated by small firms: more than 60 percent of employment in single-family home construction is in firms with fewer than 10 employees; in manufacturing, most employees work in firms of more than 500 people.66
Why is home construction in America dominated by such small firms? The researchers pick through the data and find that firms are allowed to build on less and less land, and are subject to more and more land use regulations, in ways that choke off their ability to grow and scale their work across cities and states. A manufacturing plant can locate in one place and sell everywhere. Builders have to negotiate through the regulations and interest groups and political relationships of each parcel of land they work on individually.
One of Olson’s insights is that a complex society begins to reward those who can best navigate complexity. That creates an incentive for its best and brightest to become navigators of complexity and perhaps creators of further complexity. “Every society, whatever its institutions and governing ideology, gives greater rewards to the fittest—the fittest for that society,” Olson writes.67 A young country that is still in its building phase creates opportunities for engineers and architects. A mature country that has entered its negotiations phase creates opportunities for lawyers and management consultants.
Then there’s the incentive to avoid bureaucracy and its attendant frustrations. Patrick Collison, the CEO of the online payments behemoth Stripe, was once asked whether too much talent was flowing into Silicon Valley. “I don’t think that the ambitious upstarts who go into high-speed rail (in America, anyway) are going to have a great time or have much success in convincing their friends to follow them. And I suspect that, for various reasons, too many domains look somewhat like high-speed rail.… There’s a view that the internet is a frontier-of-last-resort and I don’t think it’s totally wrong.”68
America’s postwar politics are often shorthanded as the rise of New Deal liberalism and then the backlash of small-government conservatism. But it wasn’t just conservatives who came to think the government reckless and dangerous and in need of new rules and strictures. Liberals did, too.
After World War II, as highway construction grew, vehicle sales soared. So did road deaths. Motor vehicle fatalities rose from about 30,000 in 1946 to more than 50,000 in the late 1960s. In 1965, a lawyer named Ralph Nader published the book Unsafe at Any Speed, a blistering exposé of car manufacturers resisting safety improvements while blaming individual drivers for rising fatalities. The book was a sensation. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act, which mandated a new set of auto safety standards.69 Nader soon became one of the most famous lawyers in America.
To replicate his success, he recruited teams of young activists to join the cause of bird-dogging government and big business on behalf of consumers. His disciples, known as Nader’s Raiders, transformed politics, with their blend of expertise and advocacy.70 “So far as anyone can remember, nothing quite like this has happened in Washington before,” a Christian Science Monitor reporter wrote in 1969. “A group of unofficial but informed outsiders… as a sort of civilian posse, has descended on a rather stuffy government commission, poked under sofas, and asked some rough questions.”71
As the historian Paul Sabin writes in his book Public Citizens, reformers like Ralph Nader were right to concentrate their fury on government and its safety record in the 1960s. “The government was allowing strip mines to ravage the Appalachian Mountains and leaving coal miners to suffer from black lung disease with little compensation,” he writes. “Government policies were permitting oil refineries to freely dump toxic emissions into low-income communities of color, and letting oil spills pollute the nation’s waterways and coasts.”72
Nader didn’t just criticize the government. He launched a movement to tame it. His Raiders contributed to some of the most important environmental laws in history, including the Clean Water Act. With each win, they made it easier for more citizens and groups to sue the government for wrongdoing. But what they were building was an arm of liberalism—with associated institutions, laws, and leaders—designed to relentlessly sue the government itself, and that would go on to fight for more bills and rules that would widen the opportunities to sue the government. Sabin writes:
Litigation by leading public interest environmental law firms in the early 1970s almost exclusively targeted the government for legal action. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund boasted of seventy-seven legal accomplishments between 1971 and 1973. Approximately seventy sought to block government actions, or to intervene in public proceedings to influence government regulatory and permitting practices. The Environmental Defense Fund similarly began its 1972 case summary with a list of acronyms for the ten federal agencies named in its legal interventions. In more than sixty of its sixty-five listed legal actions, the Environmental Defense Fund either intervened in public proceedings, such as government permitting processes for private projects, or directly assailed a government-led initiative. Fewer than five of EDF’s legal actions directly targeted companies or private parties. Similarly, only three out of twenty-nine of NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council]’s legal action initiatives from its first seven months directly named a corporate defendant.73
The environmentalist movement succeeded brilliantly. Between 1970 and 2020, the combined emissions of the six most common pollutants—which include lead, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide—dropped by roughly 80 percent. New cars, SUVs, and trucks that run on gas today are more than 99 percent cleaner than in 1970.74 The benefits of the Clean Air Act, which was amended in 1977 and 1990, have prevented between 400,000 and several million premature deaths in the last fifty years.75 The reduction in lead furthermore saved tens of thousands from senseless poisoning and saved millions of IQ points. The number of “very unhealthy or hazardous air days” in Los Angeles fell from 160 in 1981 to an average of 2 in the 2010s.76
But behind these victories, Nader’s revolution created a new layer of government: democracy by lawsuit. The number of lawyers and cases soared in the 1970s and 1980s. The result, Sabin argues, was a new kind of liberalism, which regarded government not as a partner in the solution of societal problems but rather as the source of those very problems.77
When the PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer asked Nader why he was qualified to be president in 2000, Nader told him, “I don’t know anybody who has sued more [agencies and departments].”78 Nader and his Raiders believed in government. They defended it from conservative assault. When they criticized it—when they fought it, sued it, restrained it—they did so to try to make it better. But those same laws and processes were available for anyone else to use, too. You can bog clean energy projects down in environmental reviews. You can use a process meant to stop the government from building a highway through your town to keep a nonprofit developer from building affordable housing down the block. “It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again,” Sabin writes.79
Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan, has seen the broken bicycle up close. When he served as Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s chief legal counsel, he noticed that Republicans were consistent in the way they tried to weaken the government. They would bury it in paperwork and procedure and hearings and disclosure demands and lawsuits. It was as if the right had studied the tactics of Nader’s Raiders and adopted them for their own purposes.
The 2017 Regulatory Accountability Act, which Republicans proposed but couldn’t pass,80 was a good example. For every major regulation, it would have forced the government to open a period of comment and solicit alternative approaches from the public, given those affected the opportunity to cross-examine the agency proposing the rule at an oral hearing, forced the publication of ongoing frameworks for evaluation, and much more. Some of these ideas sound fine in theory but multiplied across the entire swath of major regulations the government proposes or carries out, the burden of compliance would become overwhelming.
Democrats would defend the government against these salvos, but they didn’t seem to notice what the defenses implied. If Republicans were proposing more paperwork and process to make the government less effective, wasn’t it likely that less paperwork and process would make government more effective? Or as Bagley asked, “If new administrative procedures can be used to advance a libertarian agenda, might not relaxing existing administrative constraints advance progressive ones?”81
In 2019, Bagley published an incendiary article in the Michigan Law Review, which he later turned into a policy paper for the Niskanen Center. “The Procedure Fetish” argued that something had gone wrong inside government, inside liberalism, inside Bagley’s own profession. Liberal legalism—and through it, liberal government—had become process-obsessed rather than outcomes-oriented. It had convinced itself that the state’s legitimacy would be earned through compliance with an endless catalog of rules and restraints rather than through getting things done for the people it claimed to serve.
“Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state,” Bagley wrote. “The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rulemaking, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions—the list goes on and on. Collectively, these procedures frustrate the very government action that progressives demand to address the urgent problems that now confront us.”82
Behind these procedures, Bagley suggested, were two very real concerns: legitimacy and accountability. How can a government as powerful and vast as that of the United States maintain legitimacy? How could it maintain accountability to citizens?
These fears reflect, in part, the age in which the rules were written. The 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, which governs much of the federal government’s bureaucratic workings, was adopted “to soothe the jangled nerves of legal and business communities alarmed by the New Deal and the muscular wartime exercise of state power.”83 Then came the buildup of procedural architecture in the ’70s, when liberal lawyers, inspired by the courtroom heroics of the civil rights movement, turned to the legal system to make sure that the government actually worked on behalf of the people.
The system we developed is unique. Decisions that are often made by bureaucracies in other countries are made by judges in our country. Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, calls it adversarial legalism. “It is only a slight oversimplification to say that in the United States, lawyers, legal rights, judges, and lawsuits become functional equivalents for the large central bureaucracies that dominate governance in the activist states of Western Europe,” he writes.84
There’s a reason, Kagan thinks, that America has ended up with the system we have. Americans have always mistrusted the government. They’ve particularly mistrusted centralized power. But they also need a government able to wield power. They want the good a government can do. The tension became unbearable after the New Deal and the Great Society. “Between 1965 and 1977, responding to the new political movements, Congress passed 25 major environmental and civil rights acts, plus far-reaching statutes regulating workplace safety, consumer lending, product safety, private pension funds, and local public education,” Kagan writes. “It created federal regulatory agencies or bureaus to issue implementing regulations, binding on millions of business firms. But to enforce those laws and regulations, Congress was compelled to bow to the inherited demands for decentralization of government.”85
Americans were asking the government to do more than it ever had but they were not willing to give the government the trust and authority it needed to do it. But reformers could not simply devolve power to state and local governments. Liberals had just seen, in the fight against Jim Crow, that you could not trust the states, much less the localities, to do what the federal government asked. And so they turned to the courts, which had, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, become newly beloved by liberals. Adversarial legalism was a way of reconciling the government we wanted with the suspicions we harbored.
America is unusually legalistic. It always has been. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”86 What was true then is truer now. America has twice as many lawyers per capita as Germany and four times as many as France. Much of this energy is now devoted to suing the government. In 1967, there were 3 cases per 100,000 Americans directed at enforcing federal laws. By 1976, there were 13. By 2014, there were 40.87
The prevalence of lawyers in American life is unusual. But their dominance at the top of American politics is startling. “Though they make up less than 1 percent of the population, lawyers currently constitute more than one-third of the House of Representatives and more than half the Senate. Fully half of the last ten presidents were lawyers, as are more than a third of the officials now serving in the states as governor, lieutenant governor, and secretary of state,” Bagley writes.88 In the Democratic Party, every presidential and vice presidential nominee from Walter Mondale to Kamala Harris attended law school (Tim Walz, in this respect, was an almost radical break with tradition). When you make legal training the default training for a political career, you make legal thinking the default thinking in politics. And legal thinking centers around statutory language and commitment to process, not results and outcomes.
Olson predicted that a thriving, successful society would become more complex to navigate over time. There would be more groups and voices and laws and processes. Those who succeeded would be those best suited to operating at the nexus of that complexity. In the economy, that might be management consultants and financiers. In politics, it will be lawyers. There is nothing wrong with lawyers. There might be something wrong with a country or a political system that needs so many of them and that makes them so central to its operations. That might be a system so consumed trying to balance its manifold interests that it can no longer perceive what is in the public’s interest.
“Legitimacy is not solely—not even primarily—a product of the procedures that agencies follow,” Bagley writes. “Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive, and fair.”89 And that is where government is failing. California’s High-Speed Rail Authority has been scrupulous in following the law but has been unable to deliver a train. The result is less, not more, faith in government.
The Pew Research Center has aggregated decades of polls tracking the public’s trust in government. The high mark on the chart is in 1964, when 77 percent of the public believed that the government would do the right thing all or most of the time. Confidence plummets from there. In the ’70s, after Watergate, it sits in the 30s. It rebounds into the 40s in the ’80s and briefly brushes the 60s after 9/11, but the downward trend is undeniable. By 2023 it sat at 16 percent.90 This is not, in our view, attributable solely or even mainly to cumbersome government processes. But the collapse in trust across the same decades that so many processes were being built to affirm that government could be trusted should make us question whether we have yoked the state to a failed theory of legitimacy.
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 to allow it.91
In 2020, J. B. Ruhl and James Salzman published a paper titled “What Happens When the New Green Deal Meets the Old Green Laws?” They began by imagining a presidential debate in which two opposing candidates describe their vision for remaking America’s energy infrastructure. One candidate proposes doubling down on oil and gas production, building more freeways, and crisscrossing the country in natural gas pipelines. The other candidate imagines an all-out race to an economy built atop renewables, with electric vehicle chargers everywhere and a national high-speed rail system anchoring American transit. “These two infrastructure agendas could not be more different in vision, but they are very much alike in one key respect,” Ruhl and Salzman noted. “Each is an environmental impact assessment and project permitting nightmare.”92
The problem, Ruhl and Salzman argued, is that “the Green New Deal must undertake multiple national-scale infrastructure initiatives of magnitudes never before processed through existing siting and environmental law standards and procedures.” There was little reason to believe that was possible. Examples were piling up of renewable projects being stalled or killed by coalitions akin to those that formed against dirty energy projects, and deploying the same environmental laws and rules. “Most people do not like the idea of an oil pipeline or electric transmission line running through their backyard,” write Ruhl and Salzman. “Guess what—they do not like the idea of wind turbines or solar panels in their backyard, either.”93
In their follow-up, “The Greens’ Dilemma,” Ruhl and Salzman tried to diagnose the problem more precisely. The raft of environmental laws in the 1970s, they said, represented a “Grand Bargain” of sorts.94 “The quid pro quo for a cleaner environment was that development would become slower and more expensive due both to permitting and to the litigation that often ensued. In many respects, this has turned out to be a good deal. Apart from greenhouse gases, which effectively have been unregulated, every major air pollutant has decreased significantly over the past five decades, from carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide to airborne lead and others. Surface water quality has similarly improved substantially since the 1970s.”95
But that bargain has broken down. 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. And this is not just the view of a few law professors.
“The environmentalist movement evolved to stop bad people from destroying the world, and so we have perfected the art of saying no,” says Larry Selzer, the president and CEO of the Conservation Fund. “But we can’t ‘no’ our way to the kind of growth we need. The Interstate Highway System is forty-nine thousand miles of road. The interstate clean-energy system—the solar farms, the wind turbines, the geothermal land, the transmission lines, the pipes—will touch more than five hundred thousand miles of land. This will be an enormous project. We have to build, and build, and build.”96
Ruhl and Salzman, for their part, believe we need new laws. The problem with the laws we have is that they are indiscriminate. It is as easy to obstruct an oil refinery as a wind farm. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) gets much of the attention here, but the problem is really the profusion of different, overlapping policies and authorities. Beyond NEPA, Ruhl and Salman note the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Clean Water Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the National Forest Management Act. “All told,” they write, “over sixty federal permitting programs operate in the infrastructure approval regime. And that is just the federal system—state and local approvals and impact assessments could also apply to any project.”97
The Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project, which is intended for federal land in Wyoming, would be the largest wind farm in US history. Building it has meant navigating a morass of federal, state, and local permitting and siting authorities, as well as environmental challenges. If all goes well from here, it will be completed in 2026—eighteen years after it was proposed, Ruhl and Salzman note. Timetables like that will not meet the climate emergency we now face. Either we build faster or we accept catastrophe. There is no third option.
In his paper “Getting Infrastructure Built: The Law and Economics of Permitting,” Zachary Liscow notes that the United States performs below the average of OECD states in environmental quality but also performs below average in confidence in government. “So, despite its participatory ethos, the United States does not succeed in producing more trust.”98
What we are leaders in is the cost of public construction. In separate work with Leah Brooks, Liscow has found the cost of building a mile of interstate highway tripled in the back half of the twentieth century. “Though the data are fairly sparse, available data show that the U.S. Interstates built in the 1980s and 1990s were more expensive (in real terms) than any projects built elsewhere at any time—and that the highways built since 2010 are far more expensive than highway projects elsewhere in the world,” he writes.99
To many environmentalists, that’s a victory. It should be harder to build highways. But that same architecture of law affects the infrastructure they care about, too. “It is important to keep in mind what is actually expected to be permitted in the coming decades,” Liscow continues. “Among projects seeking to connect to the grid (which is one indicator—though an imperfect one—of what will ultimately be built), 95% of the capacity is solar, battery storage, or wind.” That’s a dramatic change from 1969, “when 81% of the electricity supply was petrochemical and only 19% was zero-emission.”100
New problems and new solutions require new laws. Ruhl and Salzman favor past models by which certain kinds of projects have been fast-tracked past environmental and legal challenges. A 1996 law offered this favoritism to border security, and the Trump administration used it to great effect in constructing parts of their border wall. In another example, Congress recognized that we had too many military bases after the Cold War and that closing them through the normal congressional process would be politically impossible. So they created an independent base-closing commission that received recommendations from the Department of Defense, proposed plans for closure based on those recommendations, and ensured those plans got simple and fast up-and-down votes. In October 2024, President Biden signed legislation exempting semiconductor-manufacturing facilities receiving subsidies under the CHIPS and Science Act from environmental review.101
Something similar could be created for green infrastructure, Ruhl and Salzman suggest, with projects deemed important to our climate goals fast-tracked past a slew of normal hurdles. Something akin to this system would, in their thinking, update our environmental laws for a new age, tuning them to meet the challenge of today rather than the challenge of yesteryear.
But no individual law will address this many different blockages at this many points in the system. What is needed here is a change in political culture, not just a change in legislation. Liberalism acted across many different levels and branches of government in the 1970s to slow the system down so the instances of abuse could be seen and stopped. Now it will need to act across many different levels and branches of government to speed up the system. It needs to see the problem in what it has been taught to see as the solution. Nothing about this is easy, and it is not always clear how to strike the right balance. But a balance that does not allow us to meet our climate goals has to be the wrong one.