{"id":432179,"date":"2026-05-17T15:39:30","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T15:39:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/432179\/"},"modified":"2026-05-17T15:39:30","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T15:39:30","slug":"the-case-for-clean-energy-abundance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/432179\/","title":{"rendered":"The case for clean energy abundance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Blue Lagoon in Iceland is both an outdoor swimming pool and a geothermal power plant. (Photo by Jos\u00e9 Nicolas<\/a>)<\/p>\n

I believe contentiousness and disagreeability can play a productive role in the discourse, so I\u2019ve been meaning to say for a while that many of the people and institutions who believe that they have embraced an \u201cabundance\u201d approach to clean energy have not, in fact, done any such thing. <\/p>\n

What they\u2019ve 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. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s great! I think it\u2019s good for people to be excited about things. And the progress that\u2019s been made in driving down the cost of batteries in particular is wonderful for the world. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s even possible that this kind of solar cheerleading could be a gateway that leads to a genuine clean-energy-abundance mindset. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

But it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In 1954, Atomic Energy Commission Chair Lewis Strauss spoke of his aspiration to use nuclear reactors to generate electricity that was \u201ctoo cheap to meter.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s abundance: a desire to create so much electricity that nobody\u2019s bothering to conserve electricity. <\/p>\n

The organization Rewiring America says that it\u2019s \u201cforging a path to limitless clean energy for everyone<\/a>.\u201d That\u2019s a great slogan for an advocacy organization whose mission centers clean energy abundance. But they recently put out a report<\/a> with a bunch of policy proposals that in turn are downstream of some efforts to model around incredible levels of uncertainty<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cefficiency\u201d 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. <\/p>\n

The report claims that this is good because \u201caggregating household-based energy resources is a faster, lower-cost way to meet rising electricity demand than building new power plants.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in a world of limitless clean energy for everyone, we would not be fussing around with \u201caggregating household-based energy resources\u201d or bragging that \u201cefficiency avoids unnecessary capital investment.\u201d <\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

Back on May 4, a blogger who goes by Soub wrote a post arguing that Massachusetts \u201cshould assemble several large parcels of land totaling 10,000 acres and make it available for utility-scale solar farms<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n

I think that what\u2019s important to understand about clean energy abundance as a concept is that this is a hot take. Massachusetts is a very liberal state. It\u2019s 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\u2019t bad for labor and it\u2019s not bad for business and it\u2019s 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 \u201cfake it \u2019til you make it\u201d kind of situation. <\/p>\n

For now, though, assembling large parcels of land and making them available for utility-scale solar is not what environmentalists are about. That\u2019s because, as Soub concedes, the only way to make this work is to cut down a bunch of forest. <\/p>\n

Now Soub argues it\u2019s 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\u2019m inclined to agree. But clearly the powers that be in the environmental community \u2014 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 \u2014 disagree. <\/p>\n

Which is fine. What I don\u2019t think is fine is that lots of elected officials who like the slogan \u201cclean is cheap\u201d don\u2019t 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\u2019s effort to outline a progressive vision for energy permitting reform<\/a>, 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 \u201cthe 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\u201d and how \u201caccording 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s not that traditional environmentalists never thought of these land use issues; they\u2019re just genuinely skeptical of the energy-abundance vision. That\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

Then we have ideas like distributed energy resources<\/a> and home efficiency retrofits<\/a> to reduce the amount of new energy that we \u201cneed.\u201d <\/p>\n

But while this is all offered in good faith, I think it fundamentally underrates the merits of energy abundance. <\/p>\n

For example, despite the considerable progress that\u2019s 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<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s wildly too expensive to make jet fuel. <\/p>\n

But if electricity were abundant \u2014 too cheap to meter \u2014 then it wouldn\u2019t 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 \u201chard to decarbonize\u201d sectors would be solved. <\/p>\n

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\u2019re trying to solve, and tweaking utility regulation or getting people to use better-insulated windows can\u2019t. <\/p>\n

This is also true of the land use problem itself. <\/p>\n

By far, the biggest human footprint is not housing or commercial developments or renewable energy \u2014 it\u2019s farms and pastures. Thirty million acres<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

But beyond that, there\u2019s 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\u2019t work for anything else. <\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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\u2019ve ever heard of would be immediately solved. <\/p>\n

A lot of scientific work has been done on growing real animal protein in labs<\/a>, 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. <\/p>\n

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 \u201cto talk about climate change now.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"X<\/p>\n

Sheldon Whitehouse@SenWhitehouse<\/p>\n

Top 10 reasons why Democrats need to talk about climate change now:<\/p>\n

\ud83e\uddf5<\/p>\n

9:45 PM \u00b7 May 7, 2026 \u00b7 69.5K Views<\/p>\n

56 Replies \u00b7 68 Reposts \u00b7 252 Likes<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Read more<\/p>\n

25 days ago \u00b7 334 likes \u00b7 60 comments \u00b7 Bill McKibben<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

I also agree that hushing is a non-optimal strategy. That said, it is a much better strategy than Whitehouse\u2019s plan to make it harder for Mary Peltola and James Talarico and Sherrod Brown to win elections in states that have fossil-fuel industries. <\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s pretty scandalous that Whitehouse wants to sacrifice the interests of low-income Americans who are threatened by Trump\u2019s Medicaid cuts, women who are worried about their reproductive rights, and decent people everywhere alarmed by Trump\u2019s threats to democracy on the altar of some kind of ego trip. <\/p>\n

I also don\u2019t understand how he thinks electoral suicide will help solve climate change. <\/p>\n

Most of all, I don\u2019t really understand the Whitehouse\/McKibben view that talking about climate change will address climate change. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019t going to solve the problem either. <\/p>\n

What really can solve it \u2014 and myriad other problems facing the world \u2014 is clean energy abundance. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Clean energy abundance is identifying the barriers to deploying wind and solar and nuclear and geothermal power and breaking them down. It\u2019s about parcel assembly in the Northeast. It\u2019s about interregional transmission and interconnection. It\u2019s about Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules. It\u2019s 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\u2019s about manufacturing synthetic hydrocarbons instead of scolding people about the carbon footprint of their cookout<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Just recognize that if you embrace this vision, you\u2019re breaking in a real way with what major green groups are advocating for. <\/p>\n

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