No, they can't. President Obama promised to create 5 million "green jobs". He actually created 2,300 of them. Gov. Newsom promised in 2018 to build 3.5 million new homes in California by 2025--and the rate of housing starts in California did not increase at all. The California High Speed Rail project, now ten years behind schedule and expected to cost three times what the voters approved, is a prominent example of government failure in general and Democratic government failure in particular. If the Democrats' "brand" is unpopular, there is a reason for that.
The reason Democrat's can't embrace an abundance agenda is their base: government employees (especially teachers), college educated White women, and Black voters. That was shown in David Shor's survey. Government employees will not support a reduction in regulation (aka government). College educated White women want the status of holding enlightened views, and are more open to rationing energy to producing more. Black voters still vote their identity.
The author's observations are always insightful, but this may be his best attempt yet. He just needs to make the final leap. Dems did not just fail to deliver on an abundance agenda, nearly all Dem energy, the last 4 years, was devoted to enriching the already wealthy and well educated.
At some point, someone will calculate the trillions, with a "T", wasted attempting to reach Net Zero, and how those dollars overwhelmingly ended up in the hands of America's wealthiest. Dems, the party of the downtrodden, handed $7500 checks to US families earning 3X US median family income, when they bought $80K luxury EVs. Who, with a triple digit IQ, did not realize, at its' most basic, the program was welfare for the wealthy?
As he walked out of office, Biden handed billions to Rivian. Rivian makes luxury EV SUVs that cost $100K, and up. Wall Street calculates the company loses approximately $100K on each vehicle sold. Of the more than 2 million cars and trucks on US roads, each year, Americans purchase only a minuscule few that exceed a $100K price tag, but Dems still found the dying luxury company worthy of billions of tax dollars?
To finish the circle, an enterprising reporter should investigate DNC donations by Rivian C Suiters. Ditto for the vast majority of winners generated by American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, expenditures. There was a time when Dems, at least, attempted to hide the graft. Finally, educated DC dwellers understand math well enough to realize if the entire US permanently reverted to only horses and candles, the world's Climate would never notice. It has all been a massive wealth transfer, to America's wealthiest.
Add to that, the time and money Dems expended attempting to forgive the student loans of America's best educated and highest compensated. Dems attempted to erase, up to $40K of student loans for married, 26 year old MDs, JDs, MBAs and PHD engineers, earning up to $250K together, now, on their way to $500K middle age paychecks. The program should have shamed any Dem, with any concern for the poor.
The piece de resistance, was the Silicon Valley Bank bailout, that bailed out billionaires, unable to comprehend FDIC limits, every 80 year old Iowa farm widow abides. The comparisons to Carter are easy, but Carter never sacrificed the lowest 4 quintiles of earners, to benefit the top 20%, like Biden and Dems. It is not enough for Dems to acknowledge their failures. If they want to win back working class and Blue Collar voters , they must promote policies that help, not harm them.
PS As a Texan living amongst oil executives and traders, they would want Americans to understand, US oil output hit record levels, in spite of Biden and Dems, not because of them.
The obvious way to square the circle on abundance is nuclear power. Baseload power and lots of it and no carbon other than what it takes to construct the facilities and extract the minerals (always overlooked in discussions of wind and solar). However, the power of the regulators and the NIMBYs (plenty of Republicans in the last group too) is at its peak where nuclear power is concerned.
That aside, we are doing solar power wrong. Rather than giant utility scale projects that will never stabilize the grid and may actually destabilize it, we need a massive commitment to rooftop and similar solar backed by home based battery storage. This will be less efficient than utility projects but more resilient, allowing homes to function when there is a problem with the grid. This will require subsidy of the panels, the batteries and the switching equipment to allow feeding the grid while avoid the electrocution of utility workers. It also requires a mandate of the purchase prices paid by the utilities so that owners of the systems can recover their costs or even make a profit. At least locally (Nevada), the giant utility projects are getting significant pushback from a weird coalition of NIMBYs, desert preservationists, endangered species activists, and people who don't like solar at all.
That's true -- but how much of those fifteen years were spent in fighting off lawsuits and satisfying idiot NRA regulations about documentation instead of pouring concrete?
So? It's generating power. Compare the California High-Speed Rail project, approved in 2008 with a completion date of 2020 and an estimated cost of $33 billion. So far, none of it is complete, the total cost is estimated at $128 billion, and the estimated completion date is never.
You should listen to the Gavin Newsom podcast with Ezra Klein where they discuss the project at length. Way too much litigation over land acquisition. The first Central Valley leg of the project will begin operation around 2030. Passage of the bond measure was in 2008, followed by the awarding of federal stimulus funds in 2010. Construction contracts began to be awarded in 2013, and the groundbreaking ceremony for initial construction was held in January 2015. Approximately $13 billion has been invested so far on the project.
And what does the California taxpayer have for the $13 billion? A string of concrete ties here, a few hundred yards of rusty rail there, a bunch of bridge pylons and a couple of bridges with no rail on them. In the end, the result is likely to be a very expensive connection from Bakersfield to Merced, a fare only the wealthy can pay (and there aren't very many wealthy in Bakersfield or Merced, and they don't have any reason to travel to the other place.) The people of California will have a sky-high pile of bonds to pay off and a trophy for Dumbest Project Ever.
Ah yes, rural broadband. Now that's something I know about, living 200 yards from a fiber on our rural county thoroughfare that was installed about 15 years ago. It was financed by the Obama "rural broadband initiative," and has no residences hooked up. Imagine if they'd built the interstates without on ramps or off ramps.
Along came Biden's rural broadband initiative, this time with much more money. So, in the summer of '22, I went to a meeting at the regional community college 25 miles away. The building overlooks a big dam and an interstate. I listened to state officials and some "providers" for 2 hours. I learned that the fiber on our road was never evaluated for its performance, and never audited for the finances.
Finally, I stood up went to the window. "See that dam out there?" I said. "It was completed in 1957. See that Interstate highway out there? It was completed in the 1960s. The same federal government that did that, and which electrified rural America, put wireline phones in every rural house, and completed the irrigation projects in our region, can't hook us up to a fiber line that they already paid for?"
An "abundance agenda?" Just who in hell does Ezra Klein think he is kidding? That is one more meaningless label. Like the rural broadband initiatives, it's a press release designed for their friends in Washington, D.C. who don't laugh at them. Aha, that's who he's kidding, the pack of idiots with Ivy League degrees. They are the only ones stupid enough to even pretend to buy that crap.
By the way, we have broadband at our house now. After that meeting, which told me that Biden's program was just as much of a joke as Obama's, I bit the bullet and got a Starlink dish. It works well. The Democratic Party? They are a sick, laughable, offensive joke. They even hate the guy who connected us. Screw them. They couldn't care less about this country. Teixeira? If they ever invite you to one of their shindigs, could you do me a favor and piss in all their wine glasses?
You'd have to be living under a rock not to have heard Ezra's interviews and podcasts with any and everyone about his book and ideas everyone from Newsome to Weis has been having him on podcasts. Clean cities with functioning housing and transportation sounds great.
The one thing missing are the three fifths of voters who are working class.
I've been working in Boulder for the past 3 weeks, the distinctive wizzing sound of electric cars is constant amongst the multi million dollar modest bungalows. I felt to be in the midst of abundance. Everyone was at home all day enjoying that abundance. Walking the dogs, going for hikes, or down to Whole Foods, only leaving when the cleaning crew arrived.
Abundance includes I believe an abundance of low paid imported workers to service the abundantists. Abundance also includes an abundance of low cost consumer goods manufactured in places with abundant low paid workers and imported abundantly to America. If abundance includes the free flow of capital worldwide it sounds to me as if included is an abundance of neoliberalism of the leftish sort.
North of Boulder in Loveland I believe a person with what seems to me to be psychological problems, vandalized a dealership a few times before they caught him.
I notice many more Teslas on the commute. Of necessity most commute to Bldr. There are no houses under a million dollars, none. Most progressivism there seems more performative than anything else. "In this house" type of advocacy though those are no longer in lawns. I have seen anti musk bumper stickers on Teslas to ward off evil spirits.
In a way Teslas were a cool way to display one's environmentalism as well as drive a fast luxury car.
Boulder, Colorado, has a diverse job market with opportunities in aerospace, biotech, information technology, manufacturing, natural and organic products, outdoor recreation, professional and technical services, renewable energy, and tourism. What were you working on in Boulder?
Back in the Dark Ages, I worked at the University. The aerospace and biotech were the direct result of seed money supplied by the then President, Arnold Weber. I will note that he was a Republican.
It would appear that the fundamental problem for the left is what “educated” really means. It seems apparent that if the basic ideology is flawed, it’s time to figure out how to re educate the educated towards a workable truly effective society that is possible. Educated is a dirty word for survival of this country and the world.
One can only wonder how the Hoover Dam or Golden Gate Bridge could ever have been built, or at what kind of prohibitive cost, if today's Democratic Left were running things back then.
Yes, an abundance agenda is as American as apple pie, and a necessary underpinning to favorable economic churning, growth, wealth, opportunity and, politically as well as economically, the continued triumph of Trump's dynamism over the Democratic Left's uninspiring statism.
Never mind New Deal projects. Caesar built a bridge across the Rhine in 10 days. I watched as the CO Transportation Department spent 4 years building a bridge across Plum Creek which you have probably never heard of as it is an intermittent stream. That was just construction. Who knows how long the planning took.
"Stories of Biden’s boondoggles are already passing into legend: the failure of a $42 billion allocation for rural broadband in the 2021 infrastructure bill to connect anyone at all so far..."
Politics plays a big role in this failure. In Nebraska, we are BURYING miles of cable out to the middle of nowhere, cable that will have to be maintained for years.
You could buy Starlink transmitters and people could have access tomorrow for a fraction of the cost, but...Elon. The 'green energy' NGO Dem grifters wouldn't get rich.
It was to lay fiber optic cable to rural areas. I live in a rural area and pay Optimum $90/mo. The wires are co-located on utility poles and service can be spotty when its windy.
You could buy Starlink transmitters for a fraction of the cost of hiring crews to lay cable out in the boondocks -- and then maintain them. So what's the problem?
Maybe I should be working on getting an NGO startup and get rich along with Al Gore, Stacey Abrams, etc.?
Fiber optic cable offers more scalability. That is why it is used in urban areas rather than Starlink. You obviously know more about Al Gore and Stacey Abrams than I do.
Starlink is wireless, and no matter how many satellites they launch it will be shared bandwith. So is fiber/coax, but there's far more bandwidth to share. It is not viable in even small cities, but it's far and away the best way to connect less dense rural areas.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently certified the Cornucopia Hybrid Solar Project In California's Central Valley using the California Environmental Quality Act’s judicial streamlining law enacted in 2011. The decision will speed up the construction of 300 MW of solar along with 300 MW of battery storage.
Once a streamline project is certified, courts must decide on CEQA challenges to it within 270 days to the extent feasible. Often legal challenges can delay projects by up to five years. A similar reform is needed at the federal level for the National Environmental Policy Act.
I would LOVE an abundance agenda. Either party is fine with me. In my driveway are 3 BIG ass trucks. We need them for work and we also like them. I wonder if Democrats would be surprised to learn the Paris Climate Agreement has done nothing. Nada. Throw caution to the wind for 20 years. Build. Innovate. Nuclear energy. Then, rewrite. Energy podcast:
The climate agenda is anti-science. Check the link below. It was produced with the help of Musk's new "Grok" AI. One of the authors is a high school kid! The climate change fraud (and that's what it is) is nothing more and nothing less than an excuse to raise taxes.
This crap comes from the same group of progressives who lectures us about science, while trying to tell us that a human being can change its sex with hormones and surgery. Oh yeah, let's lecture about "the science," when in fact homo sapiens is a mammal, and all mammals are sexually dimorphic, something we all learned in our seventh-grade biology classes.
That this hasn't been drowned out in gales of laughter only shows just how far the "leaders" of this society have fallen. Anyway, have a look.
Broad-based growth produced by abundance, including lots of oil and gas drilling, would probably boost demand for EVs in the long term. Prosperity makes it easier for people to care about the environment. If someone contemplates buying an EV but doesn’t, because they find it too expensive, raising their income is more likely to lead them to buy it than the voices of rich progressives lecturing them about the “need” to go green.
I wrote above that I know something about rural broadband. I also know about EVs, having bought one out of the bankruptcy liquidation of Think North America. I did it out of curiosity, and have used my ownership to study all things EV and all things electricity generation.
Some points to make:
1. Of all the ways to generate electricity, solar has the least uptime, in the low 20% range. Next is wind, whose uptime is in the mid-20s. Hydro is in the mid-30s because it's seasonal, depending on mountain snow runoff. Coal and natural gas are in the 60s. Nuclear is in the 90s, with the downtime in those three being a function of maintenance schedules. Coal and nuclear are the cheapest, but gas has definitely been replacing coal due in large part to gas being cheap in North America but also because coal really does have some environmental issues other than carbon dioxide. Anyone who's choked in a Chinese city knows that.
2. Mark my words, folks, those wind turbines are white elephants. This will become clear in the next decades. The reason is that wind fields are mathematically chaotic, and the pressures vary from the top of the blades to the bottom. This places stress on the hubs and their bearings, which are lasting one-third of the life cycles. The #2 company is Siemens Energy, which has the #1 market share in North America. Siemens has needed two bailouts by the German government, and the cost of the electricity is very high.
3. There is nothing wrong with EVs as a concept. Today, they are viable urban commuter vehicles. Electric motive power is well-established; every diesel locomotive turns the wheels with electric motors. Diesel-electric locomotives were invented in Europe 100 years ago, and were commercialized on by General Motors in the late 1930s. By the mid-1950s, they replaced all of the steam locomotives.
4. In the next decade or so, the lithium-ion batteries in EVs will switch from liquid electrolytes to solid state. This will at least triple their energy density and their range. The batteries will last longer, operate in a much wider temperature range, and be far less prone to catching on fire, and will have much faster charging times. By 2050, and probably sooner, it will be impossible to buy a new ICEV. The market will demand them, just as the market replaced oil lamps, and cathode ray tubes, and has largely replaced incandescent light bulbs with LEDs.
This is not "EVangelism" on my part. Nor is it politics. It is engineering and nothing else. There will be no need to subsidize or require EVs. In every respect, they will outperform ICEVs in light vehicles, meaning cars, pickups, and delivery vans. This will require some upgrading of electricity infrastructure, but that will be fairly easy.
5. An alternative to batteries is "flow batteries," which use nanotechnology membranes that use electrically charged liquid to do what solid-state batteries will do. That's farther out, or so it appears, but either way: ICEV will disappear in the light vehicle market.
6. As I write, the major battery makers (especially the Chinese) are on board with solid state, which will begin appearing late in this decade at high prices, and will then ride the cost curve downward with manufacturing scale economies, just as liquid electrolyte batteries have. The LAST people to see it will be the lazy, stupid "leaders" in this country and elsewhere, at least outside of Asia.
The one exception is Musk, who I have never worshiped and still do not, but Tesla will be right in there with solid state, and along with Taiwan Semiconductor will be a leader. The Democrats are trying to destroy Tesla because Musk committed political Wrongthink, and they have ignored Trump's initiative to get Taiwan Semi to invest here. The outright stupidity of the Democratic Party will fail, as do all attempts to block new technology.
My sense is that a solid majority of Democratic voters, a large majority of independent voters, and 95+% of Republican voters would support an Abundance Agenda if they were provided with a rational explanation for it. The problem is that elected Democrats almost everywhere are controlled by The Groups, the far Left, ultra-partisan wokesters who vote in low turnout Democratic primaries in far higher percentages than the other factions in the Democratic party. The wokesters have veto power over the nominations, so it's hard for even moderate liberals to make it to a general election.
A similar dynamic is in effect in the GOP, which is now in the grip of a cult of personality. Administer truth serum to all GOP members of Congress and I'd bet my life that at least 70% of them regard Trump as a mentally lazy showman who runs a high risk of taking the Republican party down in 2026 and/or 2028. But more sensible Republicans don't dare cross Trump because his hero worshipers will try to destroy any and all opponents.
The bottom line: a centrist/moderate liberal/moderate conservative would have won by a landslide in the 2024 presidential election. My crystal ball tells me likewise for the next election in 2028.
This reality is exactly why we need to stop thinking in binary terms of either R or D. Representatives who will pursue an Abundance agenda will only be elected in sufficient numbers after election reform (open primaries, contested general elections, majority winner methods) gives electoral power to voters in the fat part of the bell curve of political ideology.
From the official Democratic platform of 2020: "We will reduce harmful air pollution and protect our children’s health by transitioning the entire fleet of 500,000 school buses to American-made, zero-emission alternatives within five years." According to the World Resources Institute, 2024: "There are 5,000 electric school buses in the United States." Even if all 5,000 of the electric school buses had been built since 2020, that would mean the Democrats reached 1% of this goal. The only thing the Democratic Party produces in abundance is empty promises.
Electric school buses were not the way to go. When solid state batteries are there at low enough cost (see my other posts), they will be. But it ain't soup yet.
No, they can't. President Obama promised to create 5 million "green jobs". He actually created 2,300 of them. Gov. Newsom promised in 2018 to build 3.5 million new homes in California by 2025--and the rate of housing starts in California did not increase at all. The California High Speed Rail project, now ten years behind schedule and expected to cost three times what the voters approved, is a prominent example of government failure in general and Democratic government failure in particular. If the Democrats' "brand" is unpopular, there is a reason for that.
National Review reports this morning that in 75 days since the LA fires, only four rebuilding permits have been issued.
Here is a link to a more comprehensive analysis of what is happening in LA. https://www.ca.gov/lafires/track-progress/
How many rebuilding permits have been issued?
Do you live in LA or are you just trolling?
The reason Democrat's can't embrace an abundance agenda is their base: government employees (especially teachers), college educated White women, and Black voters. That was shown in David Shor's survey. Government employees will not support a reduction in regulation (aka government). College educated White women want the status of holding enlightened views, and are more open to rationing energy to producing more. Black voters still vote their identity.
The author's observations are always insightful, but this may be his best attempt yet. He just needs to make the final leap. Dems did not just fail to deliver on an abundance agenda, nearly all Dem energy, the last 4 years, was devoted to enriching the already wealthy and well educated.
At some point, someone will calculate the trillions, with a "T", wasted attempting to reach Net Zero, and how those dollars overwhelmingly ended up in the hands of America's wealthiest. Dems, the party of the downtrodden, handed $7500 checks to US families earning 3X US median family income, when they bought $80K luxury EVs. Who, with a triple digit IQ, did not realize, at its' most basic, the program was welfare for the wealthy?
As he walked out of office, Biden handed billions to Rivian. Rivian makes luxury EV SUVs that cost $100K, and up. Wall Street calculates the company loses approximately $100K on each vehicle sold. Of the more than 2 million cars and trucks on US roads, each year, Americans purchase only a minuscule few that exceed a $100K price tag, but Dems still found the dying luxury company worthy of billions of tax dollars?
To finish the circle, an enterprising reporter should investigate DNC donations by Rivian C Suiters. Ditto for the vast majority of winners generated by American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, expenditures. There was a time when Dems, at least, attempted to hide the graft. Finally, educated DC dwellers understand math well enough to realize if the entire US permanently reverted to only horses and candles, the world's Climate would never notice. It has all been a massive wealth transfer, to America's wealthiest.
Add to that, the time and money Dems expended attempting to forgive the student loans of America's best educated and highest compensated. Dems attempted to erase, up to $40K of student loans for married, 26 year old MDs, JDs, MBAs and PHD engineers, earning up to $250K together, now, on their way to $500K middle age paychecks. The program should have shamed any Dem, with any concern for the poor.
The piece de resistance, was the Silicon Valley Bank bailout, that bailed out billionaires, unable to comprehend FDIC limits, every 80 year old Iowa farm widow abides. The comparisons to Carter are easy, but Carter never sacrificed the lowest 4 quintiles of earners, to benefit the top 20%, like Biden and Dems. It is not enough for Dems to acknowledge their failures. If they want to win back working class and Blue Collar voters , they must promote policies that help, not harm them.
PS As a Texan living amongst oil executives and traders, they would want Americans to understand, US oil output hit record levels, in spite of Biden and Dems, not because of them.
I look forward to your insightful comments, great job!
The obvious way to square the circle on abundance is nuclear power. Baseload power and lots of it and no carbon other than what it takes to construct the facilities and extract the minerals (always overlooked in discussions of wind and solar). However, the power of the regulators and the NIMBYs (plenty of Republicans in the last group too) is at its peak where nuclear power is concerned.
That aside, we are doing solar power wrong. Rather than giant utility scale projects that will never stabilize the grid and may actually destabilize it, we need a massive commitment to rooftop and similar solar backed by home based battery storage. This will be less efficient than utility projects but more resilient, allowing homes to function when there is a problem with the grid. This will require subsidy of the panels, the batteries and the switching equipment to allow feeding the grid while avoid the electrocution of utility workers. It also requires a mandate of the purchase prices paid by the utilities so that owners of the systems can recover their costs or even make a profit. At least locally (Nevada), the giant utility projects are getting significant pushback from a weird coalition of NIMBYs, desert preservationists, endangered species activists, and people who don't like solar at all.
The most recent nuclear power plant units completed in the US, Vogtle Units 3 and 4, took 15 years from the start of construction to producing power.
That's true -- but how much of those fifteen years were spent in fighting off lawsuits and satisfying idiot NRA regulations about documentation instead of pouring concrete?
The project cost utility customers over $30 billion, more than double the original price tag.
So? It's generating power. Compare the California High-Speed Rail project, approved in 2008 with a completion date of 2020 and an estimated cost of $33 billion. So far, none of it is complete, the total cost is estimated at $128 billion, and the estimated completion date is never.
You should listen to the Gavin Newsom podcast with Ezra Klein where they discuss the project at length. Way too much litigation over land acquisition. The first Central Valley leg of the project will begin operation around 2030. Passage of the bond measure was in 2008, followed by the awarding of federal stimulus funds in 2010. Construction contracts began to be awarded in 2013, and the groundbreaking ceremony for initial construction was held in January 2015. Approximately $13 billion has been invested so far on the project.
And what does the California taxpayer have for the $13 billion? A string of concrete ties here, a few hundred yards of rusty rail there, a bunch of bridge pylons and a couple of bridges with no rail on them. In the end, the result is likely to be a very expensive connection from Bakersfield to Merced, a fare only the wealthy can pay (and there aren't very many wealthy in Bakersfield or Merced, and they don't have any reason to travel to the other place.) The people of California will have a sky-high pile of bonds to pay off and a trophy for Dumbest Project Ever.
Ah yes, rural broadband. Now that's something I know about, living 200 yards from a fiber on our rural county thoroughfare that was installed about 15 years ago. It was financed by the Obama "rural broadband initiative," and has no residences hooked up. Imagine if they'd built the interstates without on ramps or off ramps.
Along came Biden's rural broadband initiative, this time with much more money. So, in the summer of '22, I went to a meeting at the regional community college 25 miles away. The building overlooks a big dam and an interstate. I listened to state officials and some "providers" for 2 hours. I learned that the fiber on our road was never evaluated for its performance, and never audited for the finances.
Finally, I stood up went to the window. "See that dam out there?" I said. "It was completed in 1957. See that Interstate highway out there? It was completed in the 1960s. The same federal government that did that, and which electrified rural America, put wireline phones in every rural house, and completed the irrigation projects in our region, can't hook us up to a fiber line that they already paid for?"
An "abundance agenda?" Just who in hell does Ezra Klein think he is kidding? That is one more meaningless label. Like the rural broadband initiatives, it's a press release designed for their friends in Washington, D.C. who don't laugh at them. Aha, that's who he's kidding, the pack of idiots with Ivy League degrees. They are the only ones stupid enough to even pretend to buy that crap.
By the way, we have broadband at our house now. After that meeting, which told me that Biden's program was just as much of a joke as Obama's, I bit the bullet and got a Starlink dish. It works well. The Democratic Party? They are a sick, laughable, offensive joke. They even hate the guy who connected us. Screw them. They couldn't care less about this country. Teixeira? If they ever invite you to one of their shindigs, could you do me a favor and piss in all their wine glasses?
You'd have to be living under a rock not to have heard Ezra's interviews and podcasts with any and everyone about his book and ideas everyone from Newsome to Weis has been having him on podcasts. Clean cities with functioning housing and transportation sounds great.
The one thing missing are the three fifths of voters who are working class.
I've been working in Boulder for the past 3 weeks, the distinctive wizzing sound of electric cars is constant amongst the multi million dollar modest bungalows. I felt to be in the midst of abundance. Everyone was at home all day enjoying that abundance. Walking the dogs, going for hikes, or down to Whole Foods, only leaving when the cleaning crew arrived.
Abundance includes I believe an abundance of low paid imported workers to service the abundantists. Abundance also includes an abundance of low cost consumer goods manufactured in places with abundant low paid workers and imported abundantly to America. If abundance includes the free flow of capital worldwide it sounds to me as if included is an abundance of neoliberalism of the leftish sort.
So are there any reports of Teslas being vandalized there, or is Rich White Democrat-on-Rich White Democrat Crime not a thing there yet? LOL
North of Boulder in Loveland I believe a person with what seems to me to be psychological problems, vandalized a dealership a few times before they caught him.
I notice many more Teslas on the commute. Of necessity most commute to Bldr. There are no houses under a million dollars, none. Most progressivism there seems more performative than anything else. "In this house" type of advocacy though those are no longer in lawns. I have seen anti musk bumper stickers on Teslas to ward off evil spirits.
In a way Teslas were a cool way to display one's environmentalism as well as drive a fast luxury car.
Until they took to property destruction, I was laughing at the progressives who worshiped Musk turning to hate when he committed Wrongthink. LOL
Boulder, Colorado, has a diverse job market with opportunities in aerospace, biotech, information technology, manufacturing, natural and organic products, outdoor recreation, professional and technical services, renewable energy, and tourism. What were you working on in Boulder?
I enjoyed my visit to Boulder, but the smell of pervasive weed was naueating.
Did you go to the Dark Horse or the West End Tavern? Good brews, burgers and BBQ.
Back in the Dark Ages, I worked at the University. The aerospace and biotech were the direct result of seed money supplied by the then President, Arnold Weber. I will note that he was a Republican.
It would appear that the fundamental problem for the left is what “educated” really means. It seems apparent that if the basic ideology is flawed, it’s time to figure out how to re educate the educated towards a workable truly effective society that is possible. Educated is a dirty word for survival of this country and the world.
We need more electricians, pipefitters, operating engineers etc. People who build things.
First we need to purge the myth that college prep in high schools is for the vast majority. But you are absolutely right.
A solid grounding in mathematics and an ability to write in English are essential skills. A second language is a big plus.
My second languages were the trades I worked at😏
One can only wonder how the Hoover Dam or Golden Gate Bridge could ever have been built, or at what kind of prohibitive cost, if today's Democratic Left were running things back then.
Yes, an abundance agenda is as American as apple pie, and a necessary underpinning to favorable economic churning, growth, wealth, opportunity and, politically as well as economically, the continued triumph of Trump's dynamism over the Democratic Left's uninspiring statism.
Never mind New Deal projects. Caesar built a bridge across the Rhine in 10 days. I watched as the CO Transportation Department spent 4 years building a bridge across Plum Creek which you have probably never heard of as it is an intermittent stream. That was just construction. Who knows how long the planning took.
Ruy, why don't you invite Ezra Klein on to your podcast.
"Stories of Biden’s boondoggles are already passing into legend: the failure of a $42 billion allocation for rural broadband in the 2021 infrastructure bill to connect anyone at all so far..."
Politics plays a big role in this failure. In Nebraska, we are BURYING miles of cable out to the middle of nowhere, cable that will have to be maintained for years.
You could buy Starlink transmitters and people could have access tomorrow for a fraction of the cost, but...Elon. The 'green energy' NGO Dem grifters wouldn't get rich.
Starlink internet residential plans start at $80/month with equipment fees ranging from $349 to $499
Equipment fees could be negotiated.
Was the Broadband bill free internet for life? Or was it to build the infrastructure?
It was to lay fiber optic cable to rural areas. I live in a rural area and pay Optimum $90/mo. The wires are co-located on utility poles and service can be spotty when its windy.
You could buy Starlink transmitters for a fraction of the cost of hiring crews to lay cable out in the boondocks -- and then maintain them. So what's the problem?
Maybe I should be working on getting an NGO startup and get rich along with Al Gore, Stacey Abrams, etc.?
Fiber optic cable offers more scalability. That is why it is used in urban areas rather than Starlink. You obviously know more about Al Gore and Stacey Abrams than I do.
Starlink is wireless, and no matter how many satellites they launch it will be shared bandwith. So is fiber/coax, but there's far more bandwidth to share. It is not viable in even small cities, but it's far and away the best way to connect less dense rural areas.
The issue really isn't the fiber trunks, but the connections to houses.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently certified the Cornucopia Hybrid Solar Project In California's Central Valley using the California Environmental Quality Act’s judicial streamlining law enacted in 2011. The decision will speed up the construction of 300 MW of solar along with 300 MW of battery storage.
Once a streamline project is certified, courts must decide on CEQA challenges to it within 270 days to the extent feasible. Often legal challenges can delay projects by up to five years. A similar reform is needed at the federal level for the National Environmental Policy Act.
I would LOVE an abundance agenda. Either party is fine with me. In my driveway are 3 BIG ass trucks. We need them for work and we also like them. I wonder if Democrats would be surprised to learn the Paris Climate Agreement has done nothing. Nada. Throw caution to the wind for 20 years. Build. Innovate. Nuclear energy. Then, rewrite. Energy podcast:
https://substack.com/@shellenberger/note/c-103694321
The climate agenda is anti-science. Check the link below. It was produced with the help of Musk's new "Grok" AI. One of the authors is a high school kid! The climate change fraud (and that's what it is) is nothing more and nothing less than an excuse to raise taxes.
This crap comes from the same group of progressives who lectures us about science, while trying to tell us that a human being can change its sex with hormones and surgery. Oh yeah, let's lecture about "the science," when in fact homo sapiens is a mammal, and all mammals are sexually dimorphic, something we all learned in our seventh-grade biology classes.
That this hasn't been drowned out in gales of laughter only shows just how far the "leaders" of this society have fallen. Anyway, have a look.
https://scienceofclimatechange.org/wp-content/uploads/SCC-Grok-3-Review-V5-1.pdf
Broad-based growth produced by abundance, including lots of oil and gas drilling, would probably boost demand for EVs in the long term. Prosperity makes it easier for people to care about the environment. If someone contemplates buying an EV but doesn’t, because they find it too expensive, raising their income is more likely to lead them to buy it than the voices of rich progressives lecturing them about the “need” to go green.
I wrote above that I know something about rural broadband. I also know about EVs, having bought one out of the bankruptcy liquidation of Think North America. I did it out of curiosity, and have used my ownership to study all things EV and all things electricity generation.
Some points to make:
1. Of all the ways to generate electricity, solar has the least uptime, in the low 20% range. Next is wind, whose uptime is in the mid-20s. Hydro is in the mid-30s because it's seasonal, depending on mountain snow runoff. Coal and natural gas are in the 60s. Nuclear is in the 90s, with the downtime in those three being a function of maintenance schedules. Coal and nuclear are the cheapest, but gas has definitely been replacing coal due in large part to gas being cheap in North America but also because coal really does have some environmental issues other than carbon dioxide. Anyone who's choked in a Chinese city knows that.
2. Mark my words, folks, those wind turbines are white elephants. This will become clear in the next decades. The reason is that wind fields are mathematically chaotic, and the pressures vary from the top of the blades to the bottom. This places stress on the hubs and their bearings, which are lasting one-third of the life cycles. The #2 company is Siemens Energy, which has the #1 market share in North America. Siemens has needed two bailouts by the German government, and the cost of the electricity is very high.
3. There is nothing wrong with EVs as a concept. Today, they are viable urban commuter vehicles. Electric motive power is well-established; every diesel locomotive turns the wheels with electric motors. Diesel-electric locomotives were invented in Europe 100 years ago, and were commercialized on by General Motors in the late 1930s. By the mid-1950s, they replaced all of the steam locomotives.
4. In the next decade or so, the lithium-ion batteries in EVs will switch from liquid electrolytes to solid state. This will at least triple their energy density and their range. The batteries will last longer, operate in a much wider temperature range, and be far less prone to catching on fire, and will have much faster charging times. By 2050, and probably sooner, it will be impossible to buy a new ICEV. The market will demand them, just as the market replaced oil lamps, and cathode ray tubes, and has largely replaced incandescent light bulbs with LEDs.
This is not "EVangelism" on my part. Nor is it politics. It is engineering and nothing else. There will be no need to subsidize or require EVs. In every respect, they will outperform ICEVs in light vehicles, meaning cars, pickups, and delivery vans. This will require some upgrading of electricity infrastructure, but that will be fairly easy.
5. An alternative to batteries is "flow batteries," which use nanotechnology membranes that use electrically charged liquid to do what solid-state batteries will do. That's farther out, or so it appears, but either way: ICEV will disappear in the light vehicle market.
6. As I write, the major battery makers (especially the Chinese) are on board with solid state, which will begin appearing late in this decade at high prices, and will then ride the cost curve downward with manufacturing scale economies, just as liquid electrolyte batteries have. The LAST people to see it will be the lazy, stupid "leaders" in this country and elsewhere, at least outside of Asia.
The one exception is Musk, who I have never worshiped and still do not, but Tesla will be right in there with solid state, and along with Taiwan Semiconductor will be a leader. The Democrats are trying to destroy Tesla because Musk committed political Wrongthink, and they have ignored Trump's initiative to get Taiwan Semi to invest here. The outright stupidity of the Democratic Party will fail, as do all attempts to block new technology.
My sense is that a solid majority of Democratic voters, a large majority of independent voters, and 95+% of Republican voters would support an Abundance Agenda if they were provided with a rational explanation for it. The problem is that elected Democrats almost everywhere are controlled by The Groups, the far Left, ultra-partisan wokesters who vote in low turnout Democratic primaries in far higher percentages than the other factions in the Democratic party. The wokesters have veto power over the nominations, so it's hard for even moderate liberals to make it to a general election.
A similar dynamic is in effect in the GOP, which is now in the grip of a cult of personality. Administer truth serum to all GOP members of Congress and I'd bet my life that at least 70% of them regard Trump as a mentally lazy showman who runs a high risk of taking the Republican party down in 2026 and/or 2028. But more sensible Republicans don't dare cross Trump because his hero worshipers will try to destroy any and all opponents.
The bottom line: a centrist/moderate liberal/moderate conservative would have won by a landslide in the 2024 presidential election. My crystal ball tells me likewise for the next election in 2028.
This reality is exactly why we need to stop thinking in binary terms of either R or D. Representatives who will pursue an Abundance agenda will only be elected in sufficient numbers after election reform (open primaries, contested general elections, majority winner methods) gives electoral power to voters in the fat part of the bell curve of political ideology.
From the official Democratic platform of 2020: "We will reduce harmful air pollution and protect our children’s health by transitioning the entire fleet of 500,000 school buses to American-made, zero-emission alternatives within five years." According to the World Resources Institute, 2024: "There are 5,000 electric school buses in the United States." Even if all 5,000 of the electric school buses had been built since 2020, that would mean the Democrats reached 1% of this goal. The only thing the Democratic Party produces in abundance is empty promises.
Electric school buses were not the way to go. When solid state batteries are there at low enough cost (see my other posts), they will be. But it ain't soup yet.