The fight over permitting reform, explained

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: - One question that I think Chuck Schumer should ask himself. Am I 100% full of about my midterm campaigning? Or am I trying to advance affordability? If the answer is he's trying to advance affordability for the American people, he should get on the phone with illegal conservation voters. And he should say, "There's pros and cons from your standpoint. It's all very complicated." But from an affordability standpoint, it's actually not complicated. So we're gonna do the bill. [00:00:26] Speaker 2: - Hi, I'm Jerusalem Demsis. [00:00:27] Speaker 1: - I'm Matthew Iglesias. [00:00:28] Speaker 2: - And this is "The Argument" and today we are talking about the Baja Blast. [00:00:32] Speaker 1: - The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act. A delightful acronym. [00:00:38] Speaker 2: - It really crammed in a lot of words. American for the Patriots, affordability for all people. [00:00:43] Speaker 1: - It's bipartisan. - Jobs for workers. - So this bill is about something that has long been rumored in Washington, D.C. and that is called permitting reform. I think that this is the kind of topic where a lot of us have done takes on permitting reform over the years. - Yeah. - A lot of that discussion abstracts away from what is the specific content. But I think it's worth explaining a little bit about it. I think that a big part of the opposition to permitting reform as a construct comes from doing a little bit of ball hiding about what it is they are objecting to exactly and why. [00:01:24] Speaker 2: - One of the things that people are most excited about when it comes to this bill is what it does for transmission lines, which is like basically like these lines that get power from parts of the country across to other parts of the country. So like literally carrying electricity across the country, often across different utility regions because the whole nation is kind of divided up into these regions of the country. And so like there's not like one central place. And so what the problem is that like utilities themselves often have this incentive to want to just build local infrastructure. And so there's this big problem where utilities are repeatedly not solving this interregional transmission problem. This is like one of the biggest bottlenecks for even when there is a renewable energy project or an energy product put on the grid. Like you can't actually get it to consumers. [00:02:03] Speaker 1: - Well, so two aspects of it are important for renewables, right? One is just utilities. Sometimes just they don't like interregional transmission because they would rather pad their own thing. The other thing is that renewables in particular tend to be location specific. It is much more cost effective to build a solar plant in a place that's very sunny. It's much more effective to build a wind plant in a place that's very windy. And then you need to move- - Like geothermal activity [00:02:31] Speaker 2: isn't a place where there's geothermal activity. [00:02:33] Speaker 1: - Right, so you then need to move the electricity to where the demand is. So it's both an economic policy problem for America that we don't have enough interregional transmission, but also it's a specific handicap for renewables. - Yes. - So this is the part that Democrats mostly are all excited about, right? And there's a world in which there would just be a standalone transmission bill. And I think progressives would generally be thrilled. - Are you thrilled about that? [00:03:06] Speaker 2: - I don't know. I think there would probably be some consternation here. I mean, like often right now, so there is this, in 2011, FERC, which is kind of like the- [00:03:14] Speaker 1: - The Federal Electricity Regulatory Commission? [00:03:17] Speaker 2: - Well, I wasn't giving, yes. The Federal Electricity Regulatory Commission. But they basically like oversee the whole country. And they created a new, in 2011 it was new, a new system to try to get regions to cooperate and build high-voltage transmission lines. And exactly zero high-voltage transmission lines, interregional transmission lines have been built through this process. Like it is like a big problem. Now you might've heard of regional transmission lines being built and those are being done by outside private developers, they're able to like, it's called, I think they're called like merchant transmission lines. And so they basically being done outside of any kind of like planned regulatory process, which like could totally be fine, but they're also really disadvantaged by the permitting process too, because they have to also assemble all these permits. They also don't have like the political clout of these utilities behind them in the same way. So like, this is a big problem. And I think that like, I mean, Republicans aren't like gung-ho about this because you're right, there are some like, you know, more asymmetrical benefit that transmission offers for renewables. But I think they're like pretty, like whatever about that. I think the things that are more controversial for Republicans have to do with privileging at all renewable energy in particular. [00:04:22] Speaker 1: - Sure, but I just mean to say, I think if you want to understand the, I want to shout out my uncle Paul, who anytime I say anything about electricity transmission, sends me an email to say, it's more complicated than that. It is very complicated. But politically speaking, right? Like all the Democrats, the Democrats who are hostile to this bill say, oh, but the transmission is good. - Yeah. - Right? Republicans seem willing to take steps on transmission, although utility lobbyists don't want them to. - Yeah. - The heat, the juice, what makes Republicans want to do the bill, but also gives a lot of progressive Democrats pause, is other stuff mostly. - Yeah. - And in particular, changes to NEPA and some associated provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act and the Endangered Species Act. And this gets very, very in the weeds, very technical in some ways. - I think it's kind of important stepping back to understand that NEPA is a very important environmental law. Like it's very consequential in terms of its impact on the real world. And it has environmental policy, like right there in the name, and will be characterized sometimes as like bedrock environmental protections, et cetera. And so it's important to understand that NEPA does not require any kind of like outcomes with regard to the environment. [00:06:00] Speaker 2: - No, it's a process law. [00:06:01] Speaker 1: - Yes, it's a law which requires projects to which NEPA applies to do a lot of paperwork to say that they have assessed. [00:06:14] Speaker 2: - I mean, that's very, that's pejorative. I mean, in an ideal world, the government would be studying to find out whether this project is good or bad for the people. - Right. - And like the thing it actually prescribes is like you have to produce this kind of like report. And like over the years, litigation and judges have expanded what is expected from this report. And now it's like 1,700 pages and it takes four and a half years to assemble some of these larger reports. [00:06:39] Speaker 1: - But it's a law about reports. - Yes. - Which, I mean, I think that that's important here because a lot of the angst about this bill from people on the left is that the bill will facilitate more fossil fuel infrastructure. - Yeah. - Like which is true, factually speaking. But the bill does not do anything to alter like the Clean Air Act, right? Like the main reason that people have concerns about fossil fuels is that if you've ever been near a fire or a gasoline exhaust, right? Like it puts pollution into the air and the government regulates that, right? To a variety of means. And this doesn't change any of that, right? - NEPA is not the substantive regulation of the air pollution that is caused by burning fossil fuels. It is a requirement that all kinds of projects, but including fossil fuel projects, do this assessment process. I used the phrase pretextual litigation when I was talking about this, which the reason why people at Public Citizen or wherever else, NRDC, like to be able to sue for NEPA violations is not that they as individuals are passionate about environmental impact studies. It's that they object to the substantive outcomes of certain things. And so they try to find litigation hooks. I think Endangered Species Act is in some ways the best example of this, in part because lots of people's concern with endangered species is not pretextual, right? Like if you go to the zoo, we've got pandas there. People love to see pandas. They talk a lot at the panda exhibit about programs to do panda conservation. And they'd like invite you to put money in the little box and support panda conservation. And lots and lots of people do that. Nobody is putting dollars in the box to do snail darter conservation. This is a famous thing where the Tennessee Valley Authority wanted to build a dam. And there were various people who didn't want the dam to be built. The reason they didn't want the dam to be built, I mean, not to be stigmatizing to them or straw manning them, like it's like a huge impact on the landscape when you build a dam and you create a reservoir. [00:09:09] Speaker 2: And it's possible they had like broad concerns about biological diversity being impacted by these. I'm sure they had many, many concerns. [00:09:16] Speaker 1: But the idea is you have your goal, which is I want to block the dam. And now you need to find a mechanism through which you can block the dam. One mechanism could be to like win enough elections so that your appointees control the Tennessee Valley Authority, and they don't want to build dams. But they failed at that. What they came up with was the idea that a particular fish was a different species from other similar fish living in other bodies of water. And that, therefore, it was endangered fish. So it's not just, well, some random fish will die, but a whole species of fish will die. And so it's a litigation hook that let them block the dam. And then there was a law passed, right? So that's pretextual litigation, right? You want outcomes that you cannot achieve through the normal give and take of the electoral process or the legislative process. And so you are taking advantage of other statutes that are out there. [00:10:16] Speaker 2: That's what I will say here is I don't think this is, as someone who has been a big hater of this type of litigation, lots of times the electoral process fails at producing what we would consider, like, liberal democratic outcomes. [00:10:29] Speaker ?: Mm-hmm. [00:10:29] Speaker 2: And we have the courts because sometimes the electorate wants bad things. Sometimes it's a confusing message. Sometimes it's something that's so low salience, like snail darters or the way that the government should decide whether to permit renewable energy that, like, there's no way for anyone to claim that there's a real mandate of the people for, like, exactly how to write an EIS or environmental impact statement or something like that. And so, like, you have to have, like, sort of, like, administrative courts and administrative processes. And also, like, it was really bad when the government didn't have to explain why it made certain decisions and there was, like, no, like, oversight about, like, hey, like, why did you choose to do this versus that? Did you just do it because your friend asked you for a contract and so you gave them this contract? Did you do it because you wanted to give this specific area of the country a political benefit because you wanted to run for office? And so we created something called the APA, the Administrative Procedure Act, in order to make sure that the government had to be legible and that if it made some decisions and the reasons it gave were either were arbitrary or capricious and that the, you know, judges could decide, like, okay, you're telling me, Trump administration, that you're canceling these wind projects because you're concerned for national security. Mm-hmm. You're concerned that there's a national security concern with building wind turbines. And, like, that's obviously ridiculous. And so you don't get to just do something because you were elected president and you appointed people. You have to have, like, a reason that is legible, that makes sense, that doesn't obviously fly in the face of other laws. And so when it comes back to this, like, yes, it is the case that, like, people, when they see that they want, you know, that the outcomes that they want aren't coming about. Like, environmentalists don't want massive dams and hydropower because it has biological diversity concerns or unknown impacts or whatever. And so they look for ways that the government may have conducted itself not in accordance with laws in order to get this other thing done. And, like, I actually think that that's, like, not unreasonable. I think the problem is then, like, we need to, like, decide as a society, like, do we want the government to be handicapped in this way? Like, is it producing good outcomes? Because if they were finding that the government had actually, I don't know, done something super corrupt and they were able to stop a pipeline because they saw that, like, somewhere in the, you know, in the procurement process, there had been, like, a major fraud. I think we'd all be like, yeah, that's fine. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you have to be able to stop corruption. Sure, right. Like, the problem is we think that the thing that's actually happened, like, the EIS is stupid. Like, it's not actually doing anything. It has no value. [00:12:59] Speaker 1: Well, no. I mean, I want to say two things about this, right? Like, pretextual action can be fine. Yeah. You know, there is, I believe, NEPA litigation about the Alligator Alcatraz. Yeah. You know, immigration prison, which I just think is an unusually clear-cut case, right? Clearly, the people bringing that lawsuit are not actually worried about the environmental impact of the detention facility as their prime thing. They are definitely not primarily worried about the quality of the environmental impact statement that was written before the prison was developed. [00:13:36] Speaker 2: And this happened with border wall in both directions, both building it and bringing it down. It happened. Yeah. [00:13:41] Speaker 1: Part of our common law tradition is that everybody who wants something gets to hire a lawyer to try to give them advice on how to get what you want. And, like, it's all in the game and it's all completely fair. I just think in terms of characterizing what is happening in Baja, right? Because people are saying, these are Democrats. I mostly listen to Democrats. And they're saying, okay, we have this good stuff on transmission that will facilitate renewables, but we have this bad stuff that's going to create more fossil fuels. And it's just, it's important to understand what it is that, quote unquote, bad stuff is. I think that they, environmentalists, are frustrated that they have, because this is not a low salience thing, but they have throughout the 21st century failed to create durable bipartisan consensus around stricter carbon dioxide emissions rules. You know, they have tried in the Waxman-Markey bill. They maybe were going to take another stab at the Clean Power Plan with Obama, which is going to be a regulatory effort. [00:14:55] Speaker 2: Well, that happened and then it got repealed. [00:14:57] Speaker 1: No, he got thrown out in the courts. [00:14:59] Speaker 2: Didn't? I thought Trump undid that. [00:15:01] Speaker 1: Well, he, Trump, undid it anyway, but it was on stay. Then, you know, the Biden administration was going to create these much stricter auto emissions rules. And then Trump won and he got rid of them. And also, it's not like Trump got rid of those auto emission standards under cover of darkness. That was something he did quite proudly. Now, again, you know, I'm not a totally naive, you know, democracy uber alice kind of person about these things. There's still such a thing as right or wrong. But I just want to clarify, like, I think Democrats should be clear amongst themselves that what is going on here is that environmentalists want the country to adopt very strict carbon dioxide emissions rules. And the voters don't, you know, and like you see it in the polls, you see it everywhere. [00:15:53] Speaker 2: Well, I think voters want competing things. Like, I agree with you that voters do not want to raise their electricity bill to go up. They don't want to see their gas prices go up. All of that is true. They don't want to see the price of the cars go up. That's all true. And I think parts of this are very popular. Clean water, clean air are, like, incredibly popular. Anti-pollution stuff, very, very popular. Specific things that, like, you know, I think people would find it very, very bad if smog was suddenly filling the air in Washington, D.C. Absolutely. And I think that the other part of this— [00:16:18] Speaker 1: But again, that's just to note, there is a limit to how far Republicans roll this stuff back. You know, like, the Democratic process, there's a difference between a total failure of democracy and just a failure to get what you want out of democracy. And, like, Trump isn't getting rid of catalytic converters. Yeah. You know, like, you sort of have to give—this is all just to say, to, like, put what is on the table here. If this passes, nothing is stopping future administration from enacting emissions regulations that everybody loves and become as politically untouchable as the catalytic converters or whatever else. [00:17:04] Speaker 2: Well, I think it's worth dwelling on what progressives are really mad about regarding this bill, which is, like, it is true that it will become harder to do things like block the Keystone XL pipeline. It is true that permitting certainty, making it difficult for future administrations to revoke permits, as Trump is doing now with wind, as we just mentioned, like, that will mean that LNG terminals, fossil fuel infrastructure in general, can get locked in. And it's also true that, like, in general, I would say it takes longer to bring online transmission lines, even under the best permitting regime, than it will to, like, build an LNG terminal or other types of fossil fuel infrastructure. As a result, like, in the short run, I wouldn't be shocked if the emissions effect of this bill in the short run is, like, neutral to slightly negative for emissions. I think it's pretty clear from this bill that in the medium to long term, that's not true. And I think it's even—I might be even, like, overstating it, but I'm saying, I don't think it's insane for someone to look at this bill and go, like, well, in the short run, there's going to be some emissions harms. [00:18:13] Speaker 1: OK, I actually would be shocked by that, and so I think we should take a break, and I want to explain why. "The Argument" is brought to you by Understood.org. I'm going to tell you about Zero Reject. This is a new investigative podcast series. It's all about the inner workings of America's special education system. It's produced by Understood.org, a nonprofit helping millions of people navigate neurodivergence. Host Anya Kamenetz is an education journalist who I've followed for years. I've read her work for a long time. It's really exciting to hear on this show where she examines what families go through to secure special education for neurodivergent children. 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Okay, this is the thing that has actually driven me crazy about the opposition to the bill, which is if you take the things that relate to more fossil fuel infrastructure and you just focus on that, you ignore transmission, you ignore the geothermal provisions, you ignore everything that is good for renewables. What you're basically talking about is more infrastructure for extraction and distribution of natural gas, which is going to make more gas fired power plants and more electricity. And so electricity will get cheaper. It's especially going to get cheaper in the northeastern United States where our gas pipeline infrastructure is quite constrained. We have a lot of gas coming in on boats and it makes things very expensive. We still burn a non-trivial amount of coal to generate electricity in the United States. The gas will partly crowd out that coal, which will bring emissions down. More to the point, we use tons of gasoline and we use lots of heating oil and we use lots of gas furnaces in individual homes. And you ask everybody in the climate movement, like, what's going on? And they say, well, we're going to electrify everything. And then they say, yes, and then we're going to make the electricity 100% renewable. This is not going to make electricity 100% renewable, but it's going to greatly accelerate the pace of electrification. I own a house in Maine. We have oil heat there, as do most Mainers. It is very expensive. It's quite polluting. It is bad. And yet, if you talk about switching to a heat pump in a place that has some of the most expensive electricity in the country and some of the coldest winters in the country, I mean, that's the general state of New England. They're using a lot of heating oil. It's quite expensive. But switching to electricity is cost prohibitive because the efficiency of heat pumps goes down in the coldest days, which is not to say there's a there's like a heat pumps don't work myth. And then there's like myth busters. They work totally fine. They just require a lot of electricity. And it is way cleaner to have combined cycle natural gas plants generating electricity. And then that electricity goes to our homes and it powers heat pumps and it powers electric cars. What's 100% true is that what I am outlining is a deviation from net zero by 2050. [00:22:57] Speaker 2: Yes. Right. [00:22:57] Speaker 1: If you draw up a plan to get America to net zero by 2050, you can't build any more fossil fuel infrastructure. Yeah, that's true. That is correct. When environmentalists say, I don't like this bill because it is inconsistent with net zero 2050, I think they're completely like a thousand percent right. [00:23:16] Speaker 2: Yeah. [00:23:16] Speaker 1: But not passing the bill also doesn't get us net zero 2050. Like the reason we're not getting net zero 2050. Yeah, I mean, I think this is like I just like I really want to emphasize this because almost every environmental organization that I'm familiar with seems politically and psychologically anchored on hitting these emissions targets. And so they will object to anything that is inconsistent with hitting the emissions targets, but we're not going to hit the emissions targets, you know. And so what I want to say is this bill is going to make emissions lower than if we don't pass the bill. [00:23:57] Speaker 2: I mean, to be clear, I think I misspoke here, too. It's not whether or not emissions will be lower. I think that if you have a theory of change around no longer about about fossil fuel infrastructure, like I think in the short run, it is plausible to me that there's more fossil fuel infrastructure than there is clean energy or transmission infrastructure being built. Yes. And I think that like also these are global markets. The U.S. is not the only actor in all of this. And but I also think that there is a so my own position that this is a good bill and that people should vote for it. I think that the problem here is that people are not arguing at the level of theory of change. They're arguing at the level of like the specific provisions, like what will they do? Will they not do whatever? And versus like, hey, like your goal here to like reduce emissions as much as possible, like your theory of change here is like not actually going to happen because it would require you to be OK with like way higher electricity prices. Right. And no one really wants. I mean, that's again, like that's why affordability is the name of this bill or whatever. Like environmentalists are very, very bought in on this idea that like clean energy is better for consumers. And like there are many, many ways in which that is true. But like. I actually think that should make them more certain that bills like this, which give permitting certainty and make it hard for anyone to revoke their permits, like if you're just saying on a free competition, the open market, renewable energy would just win, then like you should try to get us closer to that. And like Republicans don't believe that, like they're clearly think that this bill is going to pass and there's going to be a bunch of fossil fuel infrastructure being built. Like the reason why they are in favor of it is because they don't really buy that this is better for clean energy than it is for fossil fuel infrastructure. [00:25:32] Speaker 1: So I think there's sort of two cruxes around this bill. One is are we trying to are we from an environmental standpoint trying to reduce emissions relative to baseline or are we trying to conform with like a crash decarbonization program? Yeah. Right. And like that's one disagreement. The other is to what extent do we I shouldn't say we, but to what extent does the renewables community believe its own line about this? Right. If you if you log on to Energy Twitter on any given day, you have one group of people arguing what happens when the sun doesn't shine, what happens when the wind doesn't blow, you know, we we need our energy dense, highly transportable fossil fuel heroes. And you have another group of people who are showing lines on graphs and the price of solar panels going down, the price of batteries going down. They've got all these charts from Ember. They say wires are eating pipelines, et cetera, et cetera. Now, if you believe what the solar bulls say they believe, then this bill just seems great. Right. Because it will eliminate the logistical impediments to deploying solar max utility to solar maxing. I think it is really striking that like Bill McKibben, who is the number one solar maxer, is like virulently opposed to this bill. I think it's not that Republicans, per se, even care about this. The American Petroleum Institute, though, which is like fired up about this bill, like they clearly are not that worried about being driven out of business by solar and batteries. They believe their own line, right, that like fossil fuels have unique physical and economic properties that will make them invaluable and that unless you like stop the market from using oil and gas, oil and gas will prosper for the foreseeable future. And I have heard from many people on the left that the fact that the fossil fuel industry is excited about this bill, like must prove that the bill is bad. Your mileage may vary on that. I think it proves that the fossil fuel industry is more confident in their own assessment of the landscape than the environmentalists are and their assessment of the landscape that that the people who, you know, a year ago when I published an op ed in The New York Times and I said like Democrats should embrace American fossil fuel production. And something I heard from Democratic elected officials was, you know, I'm with you on the level of I really want Mary Peltola to win her Senate race, but the line we got to go with, you know, like clean is cheap. It's the cheapest option out there. And I was like, you know, I mean, if it's so cheap, then you don't need to make the alternative illegal. I'm not sure. [00:28:36] Speaker 2: I mean, that takes a little far. It's like very possible for to have like lock in of certain infrastructure types so that like it propagates itself, even if like the like wind would be cheaper now if you were head to head new versus new infrastructure. But like ongoing, like for instance, like if you put a if you build a bunch of natural glass infrastructure today and then five years from now, like wind gets way cheaper. Replacing that fossil fuel infrastructure with wind is like extremely expensive. Sure, sure, sure. So you've locked in fossil fuel infrastructure for like 40 years. [00:29:07] Speaker 1: I just guess I think the locked in concept is- [00:29:10] Speaker 2: I mean, that's like not crazy. That's what we do with infrastructure all the time. We have infrastructure that's like way inefficient, but like we keep it because replacing it's so difficult. Well, I think- Like we do it with roads, bridges. [00:29:21] Speaker 1: Yes, I mean, but I think it's a slightly odd jargon concept. You know, look, of course, private investors may make a mistake, you know, and they may finance a natural gas plant that ex post they shouldn't have built. But since it was built, it makes sense to keep using it. But the idea that the basis of our national energy policy should be second guessing private investors about the long term- [00:29:47] Speaker 2: I mean, it's not a free market in the way that you would- [00:29:49] Speaker 1: No, it isn't a free market, but Baja makes it a leveler playing field. Yes. And again, I'm not saying that this is wrong. Like I try really hard to not develop this kind of quasi-religious affection for different forms of energy sources that comes out there and just think about the fundamentals. And what I just do want to keep coming back to is nothing in this legislation prevents Clean Air Act regulation of carbon dioxide emissions. Nothing in this legislation prevents future Congresses from enacting carbon pricing, you know, to the extent that the voters want to price the externality of climate change. Like you can do that. You should do that. Like I am, I think in many ways, like way more of a true believer in the climate cause than any of the people in the climate space, because I think you should price the externality of this stuff. What I don't think you should do is all these odd lemmas that they invoke. [00:30:54] Speaker 2: I mean, they're accepting that it's democratically unpopular. It's find other ways to enact their objectives. Like, I mean, I think- [00:31:00] Speaker 1: Kind of, but then they won't ever say that. [00:31:02] Speaker 2: Well, yeah, because that would be extremely unpopular. Hey, like we know the people hate this, but we're going to do it anyway. It's not, I think- [00:31:08] Speaker 1: But I know, I actually think this is a unique pathology of the environmental people. That if I talk to foreign aid advocates in the wake of Doge's dismantling of USAID, they say to me, I'm really sad about the people suffering as a result of this. And I am hoping to find pragmatic ways to get this changed. And they don't lie and be like, oh, the voters desperately want to give money to PEPFAR. You know, they try to do pragmatic politics. Somebody told me that the harms of Doge on foreign aid had been overstated because Marco Rubio actually went back and undid some of the worst stuff that Elon Musk had done. And I said, oh, should I write about that? And they were like, like, I kind of don't want you to write about it. [00:31:58] Speaker 2: And now you're saying it on the podcast. [00:32:00] Speaker 1: Yeah, but you know, nobody listens. No, it's enough in the past. I mean, I'm a journalist. I'm not going to lie having received this information. But just to say they are negotiating a realistic political situation. I want people tell me that I'm too mean about the green groups, but I think like nobody is nearly mean enough. And they just over and above substantive questions have this incredibly childish view that like they have to get their way on everything all the time and that you can't just say you have to do politics the same as everybody else does. We here, you and I, have just had a whole long discussion just about the environmental impact of the bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act. Look at any campaign that anybody is running in America right now. They say that their number one objective is affordability. And I just don't think there's any argument that this bill isn't good for affordability. Yeah. Right. So like one question that I think Chuck Schumer should ask himself is to just wake up, go. Look in the mirror and say like, am I 100 percent full of shit about my midterm campaigning? Or am I trying to advance affordability for the American people? And like if the answer is he's trying to advance affordability for the American people, he should get on the phone with the legal conservation voters and he should say, I totally hear what you're saying. I respect you. I see, you know, there's pros and cons from your standpoint. It's all very complicated. But from an affordability standpoint, it's actually not complicated. So we're going to do the bill. [00:33:34] Speaker 2: So I want to talk about a couple other pieces of the bill that I thought were really good. And then I want to talk about abundance here because I think like this is. [00:33:41] Speaker 1: Can I talk about the unfair persecution of data centers? [00:33:44] Speaker 2: You can talk about whatever you like, Matthew, free speech. Yeah, I mean, like one thing is, I think, you know, you were mentioning earlier that renewables have this intermittency problem. Like, you know, sometimes the sun isn't shining, sometimes the wind isn't blowing. And one of the solutions to this is, of course, nuclear, which everyone hates for other reasons. But the other solution that's recently been seeing a lot more technological optimism is geothermal. Geothermal has this problem where, like, the most promising sites tend to cluster on federal lands where permitting is difficult. I mean, in some ways, you should think that should be easier because then the federal government could decide whether or not it wants to permit geothermal. But instead, it's actually quite difficult. This bill does a lot of good stuff. It basically gives geothermal parity with oil and gas in how it's called a categorical exclusion from the NIPA process. And I think that, like, it also— [00:34:40] Speaker 1: This is actually crazy enough that it's worth spelling out. What? Okay. Right? So if you want to mine—people don't understand federal lands, for starters, right? At least I don't. And nobody on the East Coast understands this. But, like, in the West, most of the land is owned by the federal government. Yes. And it is mostly not parks or nature preserves or anything like that. It's exploited for economic purposes. [00:35:05] Speaker 2: Like agriculture, like mining, whatever. [00:35:08] Speaker 1: Right. But then it's weird because, like, you can't say, oh, I'm going to build houses here. You have to use it for grazing, for timber, for mining, stuff like that. So it's, like, it's a very weird idea. But then there's a lot of procedural regulation around that. It's not just, like, private land, but it's the president's. Yes. So he can do what he wants on it. [00:35:35] Speaker 2: Which, again, because it's the public's land. Sure. It's not the president's land. [00:35:38] Speaker 1: But so then you might think that because there's all these encumbrances and all this pretextual regulation, that one of the things that would be really hard to do on federal land would be oil drilling. [00:35:49] Speaker 2: No. [00:35:49] Speaker 1: But no, it's incredibly easy to drill for oil on federal land for environment. I don't know why. Well, we know why. I mean, yes, I do know why. But, I mean, there's no overarching logic to this. No. There's just a set of things that it's easy to do on federal land, which is everything from it could be a hiking trail or it could be an oil extraction. But, like, it can't be a house. Definitely not a house. Certainly not. Possibly a cow. But right now, you can drill for oil, but you can't drill for geothermal. Yes. [00:36:23] Speaker 2: And, I mean, geothermal is, like, a relatively new technology. And so, in many ways, like, regulators don't actually know how to deal with it. And so, it uses a lot of infrastructure that, you know, fracking does. And a lot of the people who worked in fracking are now in geothermal. And, like, so, like, the U.S. is, like, I think the U.S. is, like, very poised to, like, push geothermal technology forward because, A, it has all this potential geothermal activity. It has all the fracking infrastructure and workforce and training that exists here. And so, those people can be ported over into geothermal versus, I think, a lot of other countries don't have a lot of the same benefits that we've already built up. And so, like, advancing geothermal as a not intermittent, stable energy source is, like, not just, oh, that's good because it's, like, carbon-free. It's, like, oh, you're advancing this technology that could maybe be exported to other places in the world, could have, like, massive impacts globally for emissions. And we should feel, like, really good that, like, I mean, it's funny, like, I think both Republicans and Democrats, like, view geothermal as kind of, like, in their vein. Like, it is carbon-free energy source, but at the same time, it's, like, using this fracking thing and they talk about the, like, geothermal wells or whatever. And so, it's, like, it has, like, kind of, like, a fossil fuel vibe for people. So, like, everyone's, like, cool with geothermal kind of advancing. You know, I think there's still some technical problems and hurdles in the way of whether or not this could actually, like, explode as an energy source. But this seems really good to me. I think also, in general, the fact that now you can't just do judge shopping after you get smacked down by a judge after you do a lawsuit. It seems good to me. Another big thing that I think is different is it used to be that if you get sued, if the government gets sued to, like, no longer issue a permit or that it's not fulfilling its obligations under NEPA or whatever, that the judge could do, like, this injunction. So, it was not just that, like, okay, we need to figure out whether or not we failed this procedural hurdle and then, like, go back and fix that. It's, like, all work has to stop even if the permit has already been granted. And, like, that's, like, really, really bad. And, like, one thing I think people often don't think about is that when they're doing these analyses of what kinds of energy projects or transmission lines have come online or not and how they've been sued and how they've been stopped or whatever it is, they look at the universe of things that has been proposed and they ignore, like, the universe of things that never even got proposed because they looked at the process and they're like, this is too hard. Like, a developer who's like, maybe I would build a transmission line. Like, maybe I would build, get into renewable energy. Or an investor who's like, maybe I would move money into this space, but I see the regulatory hurdles and so I'm not even going to attempt this sort of thing. Like, that's invisible to, like, any sort of, like, you know, economic analysis of whether or not the impacts of NEPA have been positive or negative for climate or for affordability. [00:39:08] Speaker 1: I think the housing heads will appreciate this, right? Which is, you can't look at, you know, the zoning adjustment board of any given city and then just say, oh, well, here's some neighborhood where no one has ever been denied a zoning adjustment. That means the zoning isn't binding. [00:39:28] Speaker 2: Yeah. [00:39:28] Speaker 1: That's just... People do say that. Yeah. I mean, people say all kinds of things. But, I mean, I would say the housing discourse space is better developed than the energy discourse space. Yeah. And people, argument, readers, listeners, you know, will be sophisticated about these kinds of things. And that we understand in any given city that some neighborhoods are just so out of reach that nobody bothers, right? And then there's other places. There's usually, like, a gentrification frontier in a given city where it may be challenging to get through the process to get your building permitted, but it's feasible. Yes. But there's just big no-go zones. And that's definitely the case for infrastructure projects. There's all kinds of things that just don't get proposed. I also wanted to talk about the data center title of this bill because data centers is a big political flashpoint. The data center industry seems fairly favorable to this bill, basically because data centers use a lot of electricity. And this will create more electricity. I think they favor this bill for roughly the same reason that I think this bill will reduce short-term emissions, which is electricity abundance is good for electricity users. It has these specific data center provisions that are quite bad for the data center industry. It creates a federal price floor, right, to prevent – there's a reasonable concern that there's been sort of forum shopping by data center builders and a race to the bottom to get the best sweetheart deal out of utilities. So this will create a federal floor where you have to fully pay for not just the electricity use. [00:41:18] Speaker 2: Yeah, because I mean, just imagine right now you're like a local town that has never had to deal with negotiating with, you know, this incredibly well-resourced, highly leveraged lawyers, and they're coming to you and they're saying like, oh yeah, like we'll give you like a thousand dollars to let us put our data center here. But like someone who was in the know is like, you could get millions for this. And so the federal government is trying to prevent data centers from being able to take advantage of local communities. [00:41:39] Speaker 1: Yes. Well, and also just preventing data center builders and utilities from sort of teaming up to generate spurious infrastructure that they can then offload onto everybody. In addition to setting this floor, it allows states to levy extra fees on top of that. I think I agree there was a Cato Institute, all the more political people like Third Way and Breakthrough and Searchlight, everybody who wants this to pass has been like, this is really good. We're cracking down on data centers and data center abuses. Technically, I think that this is unfair to the data center industry to create this floor but no ceiling framework that applies to them and to no other users of electricity. I'm not particularly interested in sobbing on their behalf. Please. But I do think that there's a bit of a hysteria about data centers running through the political system at the moment. [00:42:45] Speaker 2: I mean, I just, I listened to Daniel Palkin, who is at Arnold Ventures, which is an investor in the argument. So that's that disclosure there. But he, he had a really good point that like charging extra. So basically this, the bill is charging them for both new upgrades and the existing grid. But that charging extra above what you might be able to like literally allocate to the data centers coming on online makes sense because they can drive up costs in unforeseen ways. So like electricity prices, of course, I mean, people have talked about a lot, but capacity costs, prices for equipment and materials. These are things that are very difficult to attribute properly. And like, I don't even, I don't really think about like this as being a punishment or a benefit to data centers. I'm just sort of like, what is effective ways to raise taxes and to allow industry to move forward without abrogating anyone's like rights or whatever. And like, I think that, I mean, I haven't talked to any data center developers about this, but I'm just like, I could imagine that they would love a lot of certainty about what to expect. It would be great for investors to know, hey, how much is it going to cost me and this data center? And like, you know, some people, I was listening to this on the David Roberts's Volts podcast, which is, which is a, it is a good podcast, despite David's inability to bring his rational podcasting hosting to his public persona and other situations. But it's a great podcast and we'll put in the show notes. And he, he, like, he raises this concern that it could incentivize data centers to build their own local power plants. [00:44:12] Speaker 1: Yeah, to build power plants off the grid. [00:44:14] Speaker 2: Yes. And to like, just power the data centers with that. Tolkien seems very like bearish on this because like the costs are like so high of doing that. But you know, that could be a bad thing. [00:44:24] Speaker 1: I've, I've tried to do, I've tried to do journalism on this and ask people, uh, opinions vary as to, to what extent this is going to happen. Also to what extent that's bad. [00:44:35] Speaker 2: If they're building off grid. I mean, it's hard because if your goal is to reduce costs to the consumers and like, then it's fine. [00:44:40] Speaker 1: But if you're like, they're building it's not necessarily fine, you know, because there's all this focus about the impact on the utility infrastructure, but for gas, right? The actual price of the gas is an important aspect of the price. So using it one way or the other is bad. The other thing is that at one point in time, people were saying, uh, renewables boosters were saying, well, there's such a backlog for natural gas turbines that the only way to add capacity is going to be able to do renewables. It turns out that if you want to use really bad turbines, you can get those, um, the backlog is only for the good high efficiency ones. So there's something of a trend toward creating off grid, low efficiency gas turbines, which I don't think is a desirable outcome. [00:45:39] Speaker 2: So I mean, one thing I'll say about all of this though, is that there's a lot of attempts from like very smart people to try to model the impacts of bills like this. Which I think are like, I'm glad people try to do that. I think it's good to try to model things and try to figure out inputs. And then you can like refine your model over time when things change and that that's all great. But I think that often because it's a very complicated effort to model something, it like communicates more certainty than even the modelers themselves would like to convey. And it's just like, there's like massive error bands around this. Like how did data centers choose to react to this? What will happen? Natural gas prices. Do we go to war with Iran for like another 10 years? Like, you know, it's just like, it could change everything. [00:46:16] Speaker 1: Also, you know, the Super Bowl case for behind the meter for off grid is, okay, Google or Microsoft or whoever will contract with a nuclear microreactor company and we're going to solve the first of n problem because they're actually going to need a run of 50 microreactors. And because it's all going to be off grid, they're not going to need to worry about all this complicated utility pricing, you know, and we'll enter data center utopia. That's, you know, Ted Nordhaus, who always wants to find a way to enter a nuclear utopia. He's like, thinks we'll do this. Maybe. I think I don't want to get too sucked into the data center provisions of this bill, but I do think it's worth everybody asking themselves, what is their policy goal with regard to data centers? This bill is very focused on the policy goal of giving us an incredibly high level of certainty that data center construction will not secretly shift costs to electricity consumers. I think that that is what is on the American people's mind. And so that makes a lot of sense as a legislative priority for the current United States Congress. I am not sure it clearly at the margin does encourage off grid data center power. And I'm not sure that that is a good idea fundamentally. Something I want politicians to think about is that everybody knows that carbon pricing is unpopular. And everybody also knows that data centers are unpopular. So what if you impose the hated carbon price on the data center structure? I think if you're going to create a discriminatory tax regime for data centers. [00:48:06] Speaker 2: At least make it efficient. Yeah. [00:48:09] Speaker 1: I mean, so in Canada, a lot of people believe that Mark Carney abolished Trudeau-era carbon pricing. What he actually did was he eliminated carbon pricing on consumers, but he kept carbon pricing on industrial users, which was a majority of the emissions benefit. [00:48:25] Speaker 2: And sorry, there's no pass-through on effects of that. What would it even mean to eliminate on consumers but keep it on industrial? It's like a meaningless thing to say. [00:48:34] Speaker 1: No, because there's trade. I don't know. It doesn't sound like a great idea. I mean, it's better than not having any carbon price. But he retained a majority of the emissions benefit of the Trudeau policy. Of course it did. While eliminating most of the political angst. So I think looking at sector-specific carbon pricing is an underrated climate and revenue option that we should all consider. [00:48:57] Speaker 2: Matt and I are the last two people alive who want a carbon tax, but let's talk about- [00:49:00] Speaker 1: No. But you don't want to talk about abundance. [00:49:02] Speaker 2: I want to talk about abundance. That's what I'm trying to say. I feel- [00:49:05] Speaker 1: Which has failed. Abundance has failed. [00:49:07] Speaker 2: I think, okay, so there is this kind of meta discourse about how abundance as a movement has like utterly failed because I guess people aren't calling themselves abundance heads on the campaign trail or something like that. And they're not constantly talking about permitting reform as they stump in Dearborn. But to me, abundance was always an effort to get more people to care about the procedural constraints to building big things. Whether it's housing developments, whether it's energy, whether it's transit, whatever it is. Like, how do we get people to care more about this? And like two of the most significant pieces of legislation, one that has already passed, which is the Road to Housing Act. And then this one, Baja, like this is like just pure abundance thought. And I think it's like underrated as, I mean, this isn't just like spike the football or whatever, because I think there's a lot that hasn't been done that is really important. And I think that we're really far away from like housing abundance and energy abundance or whatever. But I think it like is underrated just how politically successful it has been for YIMBY movements and for abundance movements to take very seriously. Like, how can we move the ball forward in our priorities in like marginal ways in every level of government? Like, how can we work at the state level? How can we work at the local level, et cetera? And like try to convince people of these arguments and then move the ball forward that way, rather than doing kind of what I view as like most of what activism has seemed like in my lifetime, which is like astroturfing support for your movement's goals and not trying to win arguments on the merits at all. [00:50:47] Speaker 1: Activism is terrible. I mean, in general. [00:50:49] Speaker 2: I don't think that's true. [00:50:51] Speaker 1: I absolutely do. And I agree with that. But I think it's a little bit tangential to the abundance. What do you mean? I think it is both true that the ideas associated with abundance continue to make a lot of forward progress. And in particular, they are making forward progress. I characterized abundance as a half-drawn horse. And I said that the really well-fleshed out part was housing. And the next was energy. And then things started to get very fuzzy after that. And you actually see those legislative priorities moving in that order. And I think it is underrated. You know, it is true that a lot of left-wing populists won primaries in the Democratic Party. It is true that mass opinion is highly in favor of, like, slop economics that will destroy the country if implemented. Yeah. But it is also true that bipartisan progress is made on abundance priorities. I do think, you know, Ezra and Derek, I'm quite sure, if we could put them on camera right now, would deny it. But it is unquestionably true that some people associated with abundance, if not the authors of the book Abundance, per se, you know, are looking for ideas that will be animating and motivating and will address the boringness critique of moderate Democrats. Right. And I do think that abundance has failed at that. [00:52:26] Speaker 2: I mean, I guess I never thought of abundance as a moderate. I mean, this is a difference between you and me. Like, I thought that, like, I've always seen abundance as, like, not living in the moderate lane. [00:52:35] Speaker 1: These are just differences between many people. There are, like, many realms of differences. But, like, it is true that the drift of the Democratic Party toward insane leftist economic ideas has continued unabated, I think, during this period. And it is also true. [00:52:53] Speaker 2: Except for tariffs. We're getting DSA-aligned voters to be pro-free trade. [00:52:57] Speaker 1: Yes, maybe so. It is also true that this bill embodies the substance of abundance. But nobody who's for it on the Hill seems to want to say that. [00:53:15] Speaker 2: To say, I like abundance, that's why I'm doing this bill? [00:53:18] Speaker 1: No, no, no, no. I mean, not the word abundance. [00:53:20] Speaker 2: Yeah. [00:53:20] Speaker 1: But to admit that the environmentalists are right, that this bill is a break with them and with their ideas. I think sometimes, like, I don't know, like. And, like, I don't want to tell. I just mean, like, I just think it's like. Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich to not advocate for the bill that they negotiated. Because, God bless, they did a great job. Yeah. But every conversation that I've had with Democrats who are working on this is all about their behind-the-scenes efforts to lobby major environmental groups to not oppose the bill or to, if they oppose it, like, not score it, you know, and, like, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, right? And, like, these are the people who are for the bill. [00:54:08] Speaker 2: I just think that, like, political change doesn't really happen with someone going, hey, this whole thing that we were all enthralled to for 30 years was totally wrong and embarrassing. Like, no one, like, does that. That's not, like, a real. [00:54:19] Speaker 1: I mean, Donald Trump did it. [00:54:21] Speaker 2: No. He said, you guys were all. I wasn't a part of this. Sure. And you guys were all wrong. No one goes, like, I've been wrong for 40 years and, like, it's a really big problem. They, like, redefine what they're doing. And, again, to be clear, as someone who cares a lot about climate change and thinks it's, like, a real problem that we need to address. Learning new facts about how clean energy works, about the source of carbon emissions over the course of my lifetime, changed my views on what the most effective climate actions were. And so it's not like someone has to get up and be like, actually, I've been a fucking idiot for, like, 70 years. They just have to say, like, oh, like, this is, I think, the most effective way to fight climate change is by passing this bill. And I think that's totally consistent with what abundance is trying to do. [00:55:01] Speaker 1: Right, but it's not the most effective way to fight climate change. [00:55:06] Speaker 2: I think passing permitting reform is a part of any effective way of fighting climate change. [00:55:12] Speaker 1: With the constraint that economic growth and human prosperity matter. [00:55:16] Speaker 2: It's important, yes. But, I mean, I think implicitly environmentalists accept this, right? I don't think they do at all. No environmentalist is cheering the Iran war, right? Despite the fact that it has done great stuff for carbon emissions. Because they care about the fact that, like, the war is, like, killing people. It's, like, illegal. It, like, causes all these problems that are, like, no environmentalist is, like, I'm super happy that COVID happened because it reduced emissions for this period of time. Like, no one says that. The thing that they dispute is, are the economic gains, and I think they're completely wrong about this, they dispute that the economic gains from investing in fossil fuel infrastructure would lead to the economic benefits that are worth locking in that fossil fuel infrastructure. And I think they're wrong. I think they're obviously incorrect. I think they're people who have, like, no heating whatsoever. And, like, even a coal plant would make their lives, like, 50x better. And, like, that is worth the tradeoff of the carbon emissions that would result from that coal plant if you live in, like, sub-Saharan Africa or whatever it is. [00:56:09] Speaker 1: But I think across the, you look at the data center dispute, you can just look at this question of, is building more gas-fired power plants in order to make electricity cheaper so that more people can get heat pumps acceptable? Yeah. Right? Versus, do we need to be anchored on net zero? Even this Iran war thing, I mean, yes, they don't cheerlead for the Iran war. And they're thrilled to take advantage of the political harm that expensive gasoline is doing to Donald Trump. But, like, the Biden administration tried to, instead of closing the Strait of Hormuz, like, do it to America. [00:56:47] Speaker 2: Yeah. [00:56:48] Speaker 1: You know, and then they lost in court. [00:56:49] Speaker 2: Yeah. [00:56:50] Speaker 1: So good for them. And oil and gas production increased. But I think I'm very torn because I would like this bill to pass. And I agree with the pragmatic legislators that the best way to get this bill to pass is to not have a giant fight with the mainstream green groups, is to beg and plead with them and reason with them and so on and so forth. But as an ideas man, as a thinker, as a thought leader, as a bold truth teller, you know, I see Genevieve Gunther and I see Bill McKibbin. I say McKibbin because he's a very mainstream guy. Yes. Has been touted as, like, a quasi-abundant figure at times, writes for The New Yorker, et cetera. Like, I take his opposition very seriously. Like, this is a guy who, before he wrote his solar maxing book, wrote a book about how people shouldn't have children. He wrote a book about how economic growth isn't important. And, like, he writes for The New Yorker and is widely hailed for a reason. Because, like, this is a movement that, like, at its core, like, puts no value on human prosperity or existence. And I, like, I don't know. I, like, I do and I don't want Martin Heinrich to say that. You know, like, it would be counterproductive to just blow up the whole Democratic Party coalition over this. [00:58:18] Speaker 2: As someone who doesn't want to work in politics, because I don't actually like the fact that you can't just say exactly what you think and what you think about everyone else. Like, I understand the sentiment of what you're saying. But I think that, like, no effective politician behaves this way. I don't think it's a knock against abundance that, like, someone like Martin Heinrich or whoever it is, like, isn't contravening all conventional wisdom about how to get incremental legislation passed. No, no, no, no. [00:58:40] Speaker 1: It's not a knock on abundance. [00:58:43] Speaker 2: I mean, that's what you're saying, though. [00:58:44] Speaker 1: I think it is a—because Heinrich's not the right person, right? He's the negotiator of the bill, et cetera, et cetera. But I have always thought at the very first abundance conference, I was supposed to do dialogue with Derek Thompson, nice guy. And I came out and I said to him, I said, like, you and Ezra are, like, two of the nicest people who I know. And I just don't—I think the ideas that you are advocating for are, like, more contentious than you are making them out to be. And Derek started answering the question. And then a bunch of climate defiance protesters showed up and disrupted the event to protest me, to be clear, not to protest him. But I don't think—and what they were mad at me about was an article I wrote saying that Kamala Harris was correct to come out against a fracking ban. But, again, they weren't protesting Kamala Harris because there was a kind of a view inside the Democratic Party that fracking ban is bad politics in Pennsylvania. So it was correct for Harris to flip-flop that way. But I was saying that, no, it was actually correct. Yes. And that was too hot of a take, right? And I do keep bumping up against this when I engage with politicians. They're not furious that James Tallarico is saying that he will preserve oil and gas jobs. But if he votes as a senator in line with his campaign promises, they're going to be really fucking mad, you know? They are counting on Mary Peltola to help deliver them a Senate majority. But they're also saying, well, after the election, we're going to have a majority and we can write a better bill. [01:00:25] Speaker 2: I just think this is what the ecosystem of activism is. I mean, I just think the original point that I was making here is that people underrate, like, making correct arguments about the state of the world and empirical research and, like, how, like, finding ways to have cooperative overlapping consensus with people that are different than you and have different ideologies than you. Like, I think that all is, like, true. And we're, like, because I believe that, like, both climate change is a real problem and most of the things that would severely restrict American emissions are, like, undemocratic and completely unpopular. It's sort of just, like, you need some sort of persuasive force that is not really concerned about public opinion acting. Like, you need someone to be doing that kind of, like, we are trying to build. And, again, the environmentalist movement is built off lots of people kind of doing that over time. And that happened with, I mean, we, with clean water, it happened with clean air, and, like, they found issues where there was a lot of public opinion in their favor. And I think that, like, I don't really, like, I think the problem is that, like, the people who fund climate defiance and the people who are adults in the room, because most of these climate defiance people are either children or very young adults, I guess. It's just, like, yeah, like, they're protesting and they're not super coherent about policy. And, like, that's bad, but, like, the problem is the processes that allow them to stop renewable energy from being developed and the adults in the room who don't try to correct the record with elected officials and to make sure there's, like, an actual clear epistemic environment by which we can make decisions. So, like, I don't blame the activists. Like, it's not me. I'm not blaming activists. You said activism's bad, like, five times. [01:01:53] Speaker 1: This is why I don't blame it. Literally, the simple fix for activism is just everyone who's involved in it should be fired from their jobs and it should just go away. That's fine. The question about abundance, though, right, is, like, abundance as an idea is, I think, a little bit piggybacking on yimbyism. Yimbyism, yeah. Right? Yimbyists have been very pragmatic in their legislative work. It's a lot of elite consensus stuff. It's a lot of bipartisanship. It's not really, like, a mass movement taking to the streets, et cetera. But on an ideasmith level, it has involved saying that the big picture constructs of other people, of both, like, NIMBYs, but also of the classic... [01:02:43] Speaker 2: Environmentalists, anti-gentrification activists, et cetera. [01:02:46] Speaker 1: And the, like, niche affordable housing universe are wrong. [01:02:51] Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, that it's not... Yes, but they also accept them when they come on board. Like, right now, there's not, like, a spiking of the football. [01:02:57] Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, no. Of course, of course. But you do have to say it. But that's what this bill is saying. I'm not saying... The bill is and isn't saying it, right? I think... I just think... I think there is a question. There has been just this question in my mind since the first Abundance Conference, since I read the first draft of the book. Because I think it's like, what are we saying about, you know, the relative constellation of forces and ideas that are out there in the world? Are we saying, oh, you've made a small analytical error, right? And, like, actually, if you really understand the transmission process, then you're going to see things our way. Are we saying there's, like, a clash of worldviews here between, like, a humanistic worldview and a romantic anti-modernism? And, you know, I think you have to engage in different times and in different ways across the whole spectrum of these things. And it is striking to me, again, just that affordability is in the name of the bill. Affordability is in Hakeem Jeffries' slogan for Democrats. It's in every ad that is being run. But the dialogue inside the caucus is just about climate change. You know? And that is... There is a... It's not any one person's fault. Everybody is operating in systems. But, like, we are missing something. If at a time when everyone agrees that the most important issue on the minds of the voters is affordability, that we can't discuss an energy bill primarily in that lens. [01:04:50] Speaker 2: Okay, I think it's a good time for a break. When we come back, we'll be doing peer review. Okay, we're back with peer review, which is our section of the show where we talk about a new paper and discuss its implications. So, this week, we're doing Falling Fertility, the Changing Value of Freedom, Fulfillment, and Family. The authors are Raquel Fernandez, Inez Berniel, and Milagros Onofri. They are at NYU, the Center for Distributive Labor and Social Studies, which I haven't heard of. But this is an interesting paper. They look at two intersets of international surveys taken about a decade apart. One in 2012 and one in 2022 across five European countries. And what they find is that the ideal family size fell from 2.42 children to 2.31 children, which is a big fall, even though that doesn't sound very big. And also, the share intending to have a child within three years fell from 28% to 21%. They're like the central kind of like overall finding is that people are increasingly seeing parenting as limiting their freedoms, that people no longer think that children are necessary for a fulfilling life. And then, also, that women's work entering the workforce and working long term is increasingly seen as an important part of a good family. And so, I think there's a lot of discourse in the pronatalist space about how they're not just trying to increase the number of births that women have, but that they're trying to match up the ideal number of children women have with the actual number they end up having. And they say, like, listen, the reason why, like, women aren't having children is not because they don't want kids, but because there's something stopping them from achieving their ideal family size. And this is, like, actually a very load-bearing claim for the movement because, you know, in order to attract people who aren't just social conservatives, which most women, particularly the West, are not, you have to make the case that you're doing something in the interest of women, not just that you're trying to get them to have more children for the sake of the economy or religion or whatever it is. As a result, I think those findings are actually quite concerning for pronatalist activists because if it's the case that increasingly, actually, women just don't want to have as many children or people don't want to have as many kids, then that, like, indicates that, like, okay, well, if we think it's a problem that people aren't having children, you are trying to now either, A, coerce them into it or convince them of something that is a pretty, like, I think, private decision. I think people feel uncomfortable with the idea of, like, public coercion in that space. [01:07:25] Speaker 1: Well, I have two minds about this. Yeah. Because, okay, so they say, you know, ideal fertility preference has fallen to 2.31. [01:07:32] Speaker 2: Yeah. [01:07:33] Speaker 1: Now, there's no state in the United States where people have 2.31 children anymore. Yes. And also every European country has lower fertility than that, right? Mm-hmm. So at this fallen level that they're explaining the fall from 2.42 to 2.31, I think Israel is the only OECD country that actually has as many children as people say they want after this fall. So I still do think that there is a sense in which the gap between ideal and realized fertility is a more interesting question than the question that they are asking, right? Because, you know, the substance of the findings here that's, like, people think having kids is a pain in the ass, it's like, yeah, that is what people think. And yet, like, they say they would want to have, most people say they would like to have two or three children. Mm-hmm. But actually most people have one or two children. Mm-hmm. And that latter fact, the gap, just still strikes me as a more interesting question than the decline. I'm also not totally sure about your read of the movement. I mean, I have increasingly seen social conservatives be frustrated with what they see as the respectability politics of this, what we're just trying to close the gap between realized and ideal fertility, increasing frustration with the entire policy conversation, and just wanting to say, you know, look, guys, this is about cultural values, that in the United States of America, self-identified conservative women still have children at a very high rate. It is only moderate and progressive women who have stopped, that in Israel, they have the same macroeconomic factors, but people are more religious. And even the sec, you know, and this, secular Israelis have more children than secular people in other countries. [01:09:35] Speaker 2: But way less than the religious Israelis. Yes, yes, yes. [01:09:36] Speaker 1: But I mean, that there's a chain connectivity across all of society that is driven by- [01:09:43] Speaker 2: Religiosity. [01:09:44] Speaker 1: Well, by the share of religious people, essentially, in the society, and that secular people somewhat pattern-matched to those sorts of norms. And so all we, or they, not me, but, you know, that just working on religious revival is all that really counts here. You know, which I think is, I infer from the tone of this article that that is not what Raquel Fernandez and Esberniel and Milagro Sonofri think. But I think it is consistent with, you know, I think the social conservative view is consistent with the views of this people. [01:10:17] Speaker 2: But to be clear, when I say low-bearing, like, I think that there is, like, no successful pronatalist movement in the West that tries to tell women that their preferences are just wrong. Well, I think that there- Like, I actually do find it, like, at a personal level, I was much more convinced when I learned about this, like, matching problem that, like, there were women who really wanted these kids. They were not able to have, they were not able to achieve their desired fertility. And maybe that's because they started late, and so we want to improve reproductive technologies to make it easier for them to have kids in their 40s. Maybe it's because, you know, they couldn't find a partner until too late, or they couldn't find a partner at all who wanted to have children with them. Or maybe it's because their housing costs were high, so, like, well, I don't want to, like, crowd my kids into a bedroom. And so, like, whatever it is, like, maybe, and, like, people say things like, well, people used to have way more kids in the past with less resources. And that's all true, but, like, people want more things now. And, like, we should try to help them do that. And I think this is, like, not an uncommon view among women who I think are, like, the constituents you actually have to convince here if you're going to want more people to have children. And I get that, like, social conservatives, I mean, I think this is actually matching our conversation about permitting reform a little bit here. But, like, you're correct that, like, I think it is very, very difficult to achieve the level of fertility of, like, the post-war boom era without having a very big shift in values. But the question is, do those values have to be conservative? Is there a new synthesis that we could imagine? And also, like, could you just, like, incentivize it by making it extremely easy to have children? Or also, I'm, like, partially, I don't know, like, somewhat convinced by the idea that fertility preferences are, like, really not stable and they shift a lot over generational cohorts. And that, like, people who were saying we're having way too many kids out in the post-war period, like, that didn't hold. And, like, now, like, maybe Gen Alpha comes after Gen Alpha. I don't actually know. But whatever generation after Alpha, maybe they'll really be super into having children. [01:12:19] Speaker 1: Presumably Gen Beta comes after Gen Alpha. [01:12:21] Speaker 2: I have no idea. Is that, we just circle all the way back around and we're just doing it again? [01:12:25] Speaker 1: Well, how did we get from Zoomers to Alphas? [01:12:27] Speaker 2: All right. You know? [01:12:29] Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know either. I guess that's an official diagnosis. I just, I do know my ABCs. And B comes after A. [01:12:36] Speaker 2: You are correct that it is Generation Beta. And I guess that was stupid to not immediately get. [01:12:41] Speaker 1: That's kind of a sad name for a generation. It is. [01:12:46] Speaker 2: So, yes. They're described as AI naturals. Okay. Maybe that's what they're going to be called. Generation AI natural. [01:12:52] Speaker 1: Wait, I'm just saying there's a policy conversation about this. And then there's a, an evangelical. Yes. Right? And I think that, you know, I think that within the social conservative camp, that within the pro-Natalist camp, there has been an ongoing just sort of disagreement about this. Right? And that this paper is, this paper is not going to convince social conservatives to give up. Right? It's going to convince them to give up on the sort of agreeable, overlapping consensus policy conversation that you're talking about. And to say, you know, darkly, we need to, like, coerce women or tell them that they're wrong. Or less darkly, more in keeping with the spirit of liberalism, just we need to tend our own garden, build our churches, have our own large families, and raise our own kids. And through cohort dynamics, you know, the same— [01:13:53] Speaker 2: I think the pro-Natalist movement is more worried on a more shorter—is worried on a shorter-term time scale than that would actually resolve. [01:13:59] Speaker 1: Well, they seem a little incoherent to me. [01:14:01] Speaker 2: That's true. There's not, like, one spokesperson first. About what it is they're doing. Yeah. [01:14:04] Speaker 1: I mean, I see all the time—it was just yesterday, I think, I saw some social conservatives. They had a state chloropleth map of the United States, of fertility by state. And they were showing that fertility rates are highly and increasingly correlated with state-level partisanship. And they seem, like, really proud of that, right? Because, like, they're conservatives. But, like, the number on the high-fertility states was still below two. Yeah. Except in South Dakota. So I'm kind of like—like, what are you bragging? You know, it's like, yeah, okay, liberals are not doing what you want, but that's because they don't agree with you. Yeah. And then you're just failing. You know, like, I think that's worse, right? Just like, you know, I talk about blue state governance all the time. People are like, oh, but, you know, there's, like, problems in Texas and stuff. But, you know, conservatives don't claim that they're going to give poor people free health care. [01:15:02] Speaker 2: Yeah. [01:15:03] Speaker 1: So the fact that they don't give poor people free health care in Texas, I don't think it's such a—I don't agree with them. I don't think it's such a damning indictment of them. Liberals do say that they're going to give poor people great lives. And so when housing costs are astronomical and you fail, like, that's really bad. It's striking that in the most—I think that in the most conservative parts of the country, they still don't come anywhere near to addressing either the, like, gap or preference level of this, right? [01:15:32] Speaker 2: Well, in order to address the gap, they'd have to spend a lot of money, and they're not going to do that. [01:15:36] Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I don't know. Maybe you would have to spend a lot of money. Maybe you would just need to get people to marry their high school sweethearts. I mean, there's— [01:15:44] Speaker 2: Well, in a society where you can't force women to marry their high school sweethearts— [01:15:47] Speaker 1: It would make people want it all—you know, if you turned it all backwards, right? If people were like, I really want to have three or four kids, and then I have an understanding of human biology, that then puts my life plan on a certain schedule where I need to, like, approach relationships with the opposite sex with a spirit of seriousness, starting when I'm 16, 17 years old. I mean, I don't think we're going to have that cultural revolution, but I'm just as a— As a dissentersed third party. As an observer of the scene, it strikes me that the cultural conservatives have, I think, some good takes on this all, but then they're not doing anything about it. Like, it would be really hard. So you have this other version, which is just like, well, so it goes. People like their freedom, and we're just not going to care about, like, the long-term sustainability of society. So I don't know about that either. [01:16:52] Speaker 2: Well, the paper does a little bit more than just show this difference and decline, because they have these pretty long surveys that they're comparing. And so they look at things like work-family conflict, unequal housework association, housing dissatisfaction, and they find that, like, none of these actually really explain very much. So, like, housing satisfaction doesn't include actual housing costs, but just, like, people's self-reports of whether or not they're satisfied with their housing. And, like, that, I think, probably does contain some information about costs. It doesn't really explain very much. Unequal housework seems to, there's a correlation, but then when you just compare women who have, when you control for gender role beliefs, it disappears. So, like, I don't know. It's hard, because this is obviously just, like, a, it's very, like, an observational sort of study, but, and it conflicts in some ways with other literature, which shows that housing costs can have a pretty big impact on fertility. If you are to make big interventions in social insurance and social welfare, that you can impact fertility, and it's not just progressives who think this. I mean, there are, like, a lot of social conservatives who believe that you could have a big impact here by doing that. I think that there's, like, the heart of this paper, which gets to the fact that there's, like, just a values mismatch here between people's beliefs about individual freedom and not feeling constrained by childcare and the need to take care of your kids, like, all of that. That seems to me, like, the core thing, which is very, very difficult to have any kind of policy lever around. And I think it's actually not that constructive for a policy conversation to be focused on how do you change cultural values. It should be, like, given the cultural values we have, how can you make it easier for people to have as many children as they want? Once you solve that problem, if you're still below replacement, like, then maybe there's another conversation that's due. But I'm just sort of like, we're not even attempting to do that. Like, we don't spend anywhere near the amount on children that we spend on, like, the elderly. Like, we're not even close to that kind of level of spending parity. So it's hard for me to take very seriously people who are like, well, we tried nothing and we're giving up now. [01:19:00] Speaker 1: Well, yeah, so I do agree with that. I mean, I always think there's a kind of a—I'm not saying somebody should run on this. But, you know, what if you took the 35th percentile Social Security benefit and you just immediately cut everybody's monthly benefits to that level and you plowed half the savings into reduced payroll taxes and half the savings into increased child tax credit? [01:19:33] Speaker 2: Sorry, I'm just getting a message. Democrats just lost California. [01:19:36] Speaker 1: They lost it? [01:19:38] Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:19:40] Speaker 1: That sure did not land. No, no. It's non-planetary. I'm not saying that. It's just we take for granted that every country dedicates, you know, 10 to 20 percent of GDP to pensions for the elderly. [01:20:00] Speaker 2: Yes. [01:20:00] Speaker 1: Which is both, like, imposes a cost on working age people, but it also, like, has financial impacts on, like, the need to have extended family, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then we spend very lightly on taking care of kids. And then we look at the impact of, like, very small policy interventions. But we just have this large intergenerational transfers built into the cake. And I think it's under discussed, you know, and yes, like, it should be seen through a values framework and many, many other things. But I'm not sure that the values that are at play there are being interrogated in an incredibly clear-cut way. And I think it almost calls for a little bit of a – I'm not a huge believer in deliberative democracy as a concept. Certainly not. But I would be interested in the exercise of getting 15, 20 people together in a room. You know, yeah, focus group. Just, like, asking them to talk to each other. You know, not just asking them what they think, but to try to think it through, right? The way that a parent of three impacts the fiscal balance over the long term versus a parent of one or a childless person. And, like, how do they think this should work? What is it they're saying? People clearly feel that they have paid into Social Security and so they're entitled to it. But that's not really true. You know, and, like, nobody – it's not 100% false, but it's, like, it's definitely not right. One thing that I think is missing often from the pronatalism conversation, though, is that it's an interesting space where I think there's, like, a lot of elite buy-in on at least, like, soft pronatalism. [01:21:58] Speaker 2: Yeah. [01:21:58] Speaker 1: That doesn't acknowledge that, as far as I can tell, like, the mass public just really disagrees with this. That, like, the mass public continues to worry more about overpopulation than underpopulation and many other kind of things like that. Like, somebody told me, you know, a public opinion researcher, that he was working on some, like, abortion rights polling for pro-choice groups and came to them with an argument that tested really well that was, like, if we scrap abortion rights, poor people are going to be having kids that they can't afford and it's going to be increasing the welfare burdens. And just, like, the woke custodians of the pro-choice movement were, like, we're not saying that. You know, because, like, they didn't agree with it. And, like, I think their staff and their funders would all revolt. But that, like, this was an argument that cut a lot of sway with people. That's a mix of, you know, Malthusianism, population bomb type stuff, sort of, like, eugenic concern about poor people's breeding, real hostility to welfare. But these are, like, major drivers of public opinion. [01:23:07] Speaker 2: Yeah, we actually did a poll in July that we asked about this. So we looked at number of people who thought that overpopulation is a big problem. 50% thought that. 40% disagreed. And then when we asked about declining birth rates are a big problem, we got only 43% personally agreed. 42% personally disagreed. So it's pretty even. But there's a pretty big split on the birth rate question politically and on gender. So 54% of Trump voters think that declining birth rates are a big problem versus 33% of Harris voters. And 53% of men think declining birth rates are a big problem versus 34% of women. Which kind of gets to, like, my point about, like, a lot of, like, whether it's official pronatalism or just, like, kind of, like, more social conservative, like, return to tradition type rhetoric is, like, focused on dudes. And I'm just, like, you guys are behaving and talking in ways that are so off-putting to even a moderate woman that, like, you are actively hurting your own cause by behaving this way. [01:24:05] Speaker 1: But I think the most striking thing about all of that is that it's only 54% of Trump voters. Yes, yeah. Because there are a lot of people, opinion elites and influencers in the MAGA space, who not only say this is a problem, but, like, it's a, that, like, low fertility and high levels of immigration to them are 1A and 1B. Yeah. This is a Jewish plot. The sumo bonum of all of politics, right? And the only thing that they care about. And the fact that this is unpopular with the mass public and quite controversial among Trump voters is just, I think, the main thing you need to know about why the policy conversation is so stilted. It's you would need to, to make a big difference through policy change, you would need to make large policy changes. And to make large policy changes, you would need unanimity among, near unanimity among conservatives, plus some buy-in from liberals. And it's exactly the opposite. It's overpopulation continues to be a somewhat mainstream kind of concern. Now, not so mainstream that we're taking big steps to prevent it, but, you know, it's just, like, right there in the poll. If you were like, I have a thing that will boost fertility with no trade-offs and no downside for anybody and no fiscal costs, it seems like people would reject that idea. So if you try to get into the real world. [01:25:36] Speaker 2: Well, this is the whole point. I mean, we say this all the time on the show, but, like, this is what trying to find consensus on different, with different words is for. Like, hey, like, we should spend more on children is, like, a lot more popular than, I'm very concerned that women aren't giving birth enough. Like, it's just, like, I really think that, like, how you choose to, there are a lot of people who are not concerned with overpopulation or declining birth rates who are, like, I mean, sorry, there are a lot of people who aren't concerned with declining birth rates who may even be concerned with overpopulation, but still think that children who are here deserve certain levels of government support to make sure their lives are fair and easy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. [01:26:13] Speaker 1: You know, but this, I wrote a piece for The Argument. Yeah. About values. And I just both, you know, as liberals, as policymakers, you know, we need to try to make policy that are in line with the values that people have. But we're also just people in the world, and we have takes, and we think about things. And, you know, this question about children are increasingly seen as interfering with the freedom of parents, I just think it's an interesting object in the culture at large. Because clearly, like, it's just true that having children is in some ways an interference with parents. How true that is, or how true it's seen as being, but I think how true it is, is in part a function of how we understand the obligations of parents to their kids. Parenting norms have become much more intensive over the years. [01:27:14] Speaker 2: Yeah, if you want to attack values, attack that. Make it easier for some kids to walk free in their neighborhoods at age seven. You know what I mean? [01:27:20] Speaker 1: Well, there's a policy aspect to it. And there's also just a, like, what do we say? You know, what do public figures say one should be doing? How much stress? I mean, I was- [01:27:33] Speaker 2: I mean, I'll just say, like, there's a lot of these stories where, you know, some parent will allow their child who's like five or seven or whatever, take a walk. And then they get- someone calls CPS on them or whatever. And I always like to, like, look at the comments on these stories. Because, like, my reaction to this is, like, this is so insane. Like, even if- okay, let's say you call the police because you're just worried there's, like, some young child walking around. My hope is that the cop would, like, ask the kid, like, everything okay? Kid can explain. Maybe the cop will walk the kid where they're going, make sure everything's good, and then everything ends. Right? I mean, that's how you hope that interaction would go. But, like, this is, like, anecdotal. Like, the comments are often just, like, sorry, like, maybe you shouldn't have gotten sent to jail for 25 years. But I do think that it's crazy for you to let your child out of your sight for more than 10 minutes. And it's, like, 5,000 likes. And I'm like, I think, like, even though I think- and we know this from survey evidence- norms are shifting around this for, like, college-educated Americans much more than they are shifting downstream of that. And I think that's- part of it is that, like, maybe college-educated Americans are, like, in safer places. And so, like, as a result, they're more willing to let their kids roam free in ways. But I think it's actually also a result of the fact that there's been, like, an effort by people like Jonathan Haidt and other people to, like, push for different norms in parenting to have more phone-free childhoods, let your kids play outside, let your kids take risks in that way. And that has not yet filtered down. [01:28:51] Speaker 1: Yeah, I just- I also think- I don't want to make this episode go on forever. But I- I don't know how long we've been going. I think that the view, like, the height view, the- the correct view that I agree with, that kids should be both simultaneously more free, but also less screen- [01:29:08] Speaker 2: Free, yeah. [01:29:09] Speaker 1: It's harder to instantiate in a real way than I think a lot of, you know, boomer takesters sort of make it out to be. Because the screens are very compelling. It's hard to force your kid to go play outside if there aren't other kids outside playing and having fun. You know, um, or to know what to do, it's like, you know, so my- my son's 11, I- I don't want to get too into it. He just, you know, he doesn't have a smartphone. Um, his passion in life is, like, I- I don't want to say his only passion or something, but, like, we negotiate a lot about his, like, screen time usage. That's, like, what he's really into. He's fairly independent. He goes to school on his own. He rides the city bus. Like, he has- he has the- the freedom of the city. But, like, he doesn't have the- the freedom of the internet. Yeah. Um, which is how it's, like, height recommended. But you need to supervise to prevent that stuff or to be coming up with activities or things for people to do. Do you? [01:30:22] Speaker 2: What do you mean? [01:30:22] Speaker 1: Kind of. Because it's just- the- the world is more entertaining than it used to be. [01:30:27] Speaker 2: All right. [01:30:28] Speaker 1: I don't have children. [01:30:29] Speaker 2: I can't really comment on this. [01:30:30] Speaker 1: Um, so I- I think it all, you know, stands for some- some discussion. And- and, you know, because if we just said, oh, it's actually 100% fine for kids to just be on the iPad 18 hours a day, then children would not be seen as interfering with the freedom of parents. Because, like, parenting would be really, really easy. Now, I don't believe that, but it's- [01:30:53] Speaker 2: I think it's a bit of an oversimplification, but I think we've gone on long enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This has been a great peer review, I think. Uh, we are actually going to be- we are reading The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt for our next book club. So if you want to read along or ask us any questions about it, uh, you can do so in the comment section of either The Argument or Slow Boring. Um, as a reminder, paid subscribers get an ad-free version of this episode. If you are a paid subscriber to either The Argument or Slow Boring, you just have to go to the link in the show notes and you will be able to find, um, how to listen to this ad-free. Uh, and, uh, if you enjoyed this podcast, please like, subscribe, tell your friends, and we'll be back next week. Bye.