S4E16: Ezra Klein's New Book Has an Abundance of Problems

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:01 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555 think the deserts are Barren wastelands. Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. Thank you, Joe, and welcome to this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:53 - (Chris Clarke): I'm your host Chris Clarke, and in this episode we're going to be talking about the new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance. Now, right up front, I will own up to the fact that I had no intention of reading this book. I have some respect for Ezra Klein, despite the fact that for about a year in one of the most difficult years of my life, — it was difficult for other reasons — people that didn't like my writing online would compare it unfavorably to the writing of Ezra Klein. And that's not Ezra's fault.

0:01:25 - (Chris Clarke): It's more a fault of the overall toxic environment of blog comment threads and left-wing political blogs with laissez faire comment moderation policy in, say, 2005 through 2010. Ezra Klein was at one point a blogger on the blog Pandagon and probably four or five years after he left, I was asked to join as one of a group of co bloggers there. I stayed there for a little bit and when people didn't like what I wrote, they would comment “I miss Ezra Klein.”

0:01:53 - (Chris Clarke): Which again, not Ezra's fault. He had nothing to do with it all. That said, I wasn't planning to read Abundance, especially given the takes I heard in discussions from people that had read it. And you know, I kind of felt like I was getting what I needed to get from the book just by reading those discussions. And yet, in a time when the regime in Washington D.C. is hell bent on cutting back all government enforcement of environmental laws and cutting back the laws themselves and basically deregulating business everywhere they can, it struck me more and more that if what I was hearing about this book Abundance was true, the very best possible reading of this book coming out now is that it was badly timed and I thought I need to respond to this book.

0:02:38 - (Chris Clarke): And of course that meant I needed to read it. So I did. I will say that in a few ways the book is better than I expected. The writing is thoughtful, in some ways, it's compelling, it's an easy read. But in the one topic area that I know really well, Abundance reads as though it was written on a different planet. Or at least about a different planet. Now, for those of you who haven't been following the evolution of my curriculum vitae for the last 25 years or so, let me just say that for the better part of the 2010s, I was a renewable energy reporter for KCET, a public television station in Los Angeles, California.

0:03:18 - (Chris Clarke): I covered the explosion of renewable energy development in the California desert as well as elsewhere in the state. And in Klein and Thompson's telling of how liberal regulation is getting in the way of renewable energy development, the actual history of renewable energy development in the desert never showed up. It was as if these two guys on the east coast had paid attention mostly to the sort of smaller scale proposals for wind power on ridge tops In Vermont, or 40 acre solar photovoltaic fields in small towns in Pennsylvania or places like that where people are perhaps understandably suspicious of things that radically change their immediate environment that don't seem to offer them financial benefit.

0:04:00 - (Chris Clarke): And it just seems like Klein and Thompson took that sensibility and applied it across the board to blue states in the western US where it just doesn't ring true, where government has been bending over backwards to develop renewable energy, often despite significant environmental harm from the projects and significant opposition. And as I dug into a couple of the other areas where the book spent some time, it turned out that they didn't really do a very good job of researching what has actually taken place on the ground.

0:04:29 - (Chris Clarke): Now, one of the through lines in the book Abundance is the idea that environmental regulation and similar laws that were passed in the 60s and 70s on the federal and state level mostly which were really important in combating ills that had been plaguing society, whether environmental or social justice or otherwise. Those laws have had unanticipated consequences that we need to deal with. And you know, I don't really have a problem with that idea per se, but the fact is, Abundance is devoid of actual remedies for this issue, other than calling into question a whole idea of public review and comment periods and other ways in which we have attempted to democratize decision making processes.

0:05:10 - (Chris Clarke): And there is a particularly chilling passage in the book that involves the seemingly cursed attempt to build high-speed rail in California, which is worthy of criticism. I mean, the whole process of high-speed rail in California has just been a shit show in a few different areas. This topic in particular is a place where Klein and Thompson are on fairly solid ground with their criticisms. But in the discussion of high-speed rail there's a chilling line that colors the way I looked at the rest of the book and it reads, the more complex regulations you'll have, the more bargaining you'll get between groups and the harder it will be to get complex projects done.

0:05:49 - (Chris Clarke): Affluent, stable societies have more negotiations and that means they have more negotiators. There's great good in that. It means people's concerns can be voiced, their needs can be met, their ideas can be integrated, their insights can be shared. It also means that it becomes difficult to get much of anything done. This is why China can build tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail in the time it takes California to fail to build hundreds of miles of high-speed rail.

0:06:17 - (Chris Clarke): China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to high-speed rail, end quote. So what are we supposed to take away from that exactly? I mean, Klein and Thompson don't come out and say in so many words we need autocracy to make the trains run on time. But they also imply that there's good reason to limit public comment and public input to limit how democratic these proceedings can be.

0:06:52 - (Chris Clarke): And that comes relatively early in the book, you know, about a third of the way through. Like I said, it colored my reading of the rest of the book. And it would be one thing if public comment under the auspices of laws like the California Environmental Quality Act, AKA CEQA and the National Environmental Policy act, as well as Endangered Species act, zoning on the municipal level, planning commission oversight.

0:07:14 - (Chris Clarke): If all of that regulation resulted in projects being killed even a quarter of the time, we would be forced to take Klein and Thompson's insinuation a little bit more seriously that a dash of autocracy might be effective in getting to our green paradise of abundance. But this book is a testament to the power of selective cherry picking of data in order to bolster an ideological argument. It's interesting to me because the whole point of laws like CEQA and NEPA and other similar laws by which the public and scientists are allowed to weigh in on the likely impacts of proposed projects, the whole point is to take things off the drawing board, to get pass the sketches on the drafting table and to get past the architect's renderings and the computer maps and open up the discussion to people who actually know what is going on on the ground.

0:08:05 - (Chris Clarke): The function of these laws is to ground truth projects, to reduce the number of unanticipated consequences of projects, to ensure that we're not taken as much by surprise by what happens down the road as a result of building this warehouse or that dam or whatever the project might be. And thus it's kind of ironic that neither Klein nor Thompson seems to have done what those laws might suggest they do. If they were building a prison instead of writing a book, they did not ground truth, their accusations, or their arguments.

0:08:38 - (Chris Clarke): And it is hard to find a better example of this phenomenon than one presented by a conversation between Mehdi Hassan and Derek Thompson a few days ago, which I'm excerpting here under fair use. By all means, go check out the entire conversation link in the show. Notes this is just something that leapt out at me as an example of Klein and Thompson's seeming cavalier disregard for the context of their factoids.

0:09:02 - (Chris Clarke): Let's listen.

0:09:04 - (Mehdi Hasan): so I'll come back to the narrowness in a moment. I'm glad you're setting me up for my future. I do want to talk about the narrow vision, but before that, on oligarchy, one of your loudest critics, David Sirota, who I mentioned earlier of the leave, a former Bernie Sanders speechwriter, he criticizes Abundance for not focusing on concentrated corporate power, the role it plays in jacking up house prices and rents, or the role that Big Oil plays in preventing action on climate change that you say you want to see. Right. You started the interview mentioning the need to get more clean energy.

0:09:29 - (Mehdi Hasan): Sirota says, and I quote, we could pass all the federal permitting reforms Kleiman Thomson could dream of, but if powerful fossil fuel interests continue to call the political shots, we'll never achieve the clean energy buildout we desperately need. That's undeniable, isn't it? Like we could agree to every single zoning reform that you might want to. But you know, Big Oil spent $150 million lobbying last year. Donald Trump is now in office and doing their bidding at a federal level.

0:09:53 - (Mehdi Hasan): That's just undeniable. You can't say that the climate change infrastructure problem in America is one of zoning and not Big Oil.

0:09:59 - (Derek Thompson): I would absolutely argue that an enormous part of the fact that American states cannot build clean energy is because it has become practically impossible to actually alter the physical environment without immediately incorporating permitting laws, environmental review, and a host of other lawsuits that keep us from building. I think it's absolutely undeniable. Now, do I think that Big Oil companies have enormous lobbying efforts that in many ways throttle the development of clean energy?

0:10:31 - (Derek Thompson): Yes, I do think that that exists. I do think that that exists.

0:10:34 - (Mehdi Hasan): And it's a bigger problem. I'm just wondering.

0:10:37 - (Derek Thompson): I do not think it explains, though, why the state of Texas builds so much more solar power than the state of Massachusetts, even on a per capita level.

0:10:48 - (Chris Clarke): It's Klein and Thompson's main thesis that blue states are really bad at getting things done. Red states are building housing and renewable energy and all these things that we're going to need in the 21st and 22nd centuries. But there's something about liberal bureaucratic governments that clamps down on innovation and production. And so Thompson's soundbite here just falls right in with their overall thesis. I mean, what's a bluer state than Massachusetts? What's a redder state than Texas?

0:11:15 - (Chris Clarke): What better confirmation of their big idea? And yet, if you cocked an eyebrow at Thompson's comments that Texas has built more solar than Massachusetts on a per capita basis, if you were thinking, well, you know, Massachusetts is small and Texas is big, it's a weird comparison, then you're on the same track that I was when I first heard that. And if you actually look up how much solar has been built to date in Texas and Massachusetts, an entirely different, much more complicated story emerges.

0:11:47 - (Chris Clarke): I can't show you the spreadsheet I'm working off of, so I'm just going to ask you to trust that this string of numbers I'm going to recite will end at some point and that will have learned something at the end of it. But according to the Solar Energy Industries association, as of the end of 2024, Texas had built 41,460 megawatts of solar capacity. That doesn't mean that they're always generating that much solar power. That's just the capacity that they have to generate.

0:12:14 - (Chris Clarke): Meanwhile, Massachusetts had built, by the end of last year, 5389 megawatts of solar capacity. So yeah, Texas has about 7.7 times as much capacity to generate solar power compared to Massachusetts on a per capita basis. Like Thompson said, Texas has 1300 watts of capacity for each Texan, and Massachusetts has a little bit more than half that at 755 watts per person. So strictly speaking, Thompson is correct.

0:12:44 - (Chris Clarke): Massachusetts has less solar capacity per capita than Texas. So why is this sound bite a problem? Well, solar per capita isn't really a very useful metric. When you say per capita, you're including everybody. So that includes babies and people that own businesses that are energy intensive, people that have voluntarily decided to go off the grid, people who are off the grid without having decided to do so, like the unhoused people who live relatively abstemious lives and have a $10 monthly electric bill, People who are on iron lungs.

0:13:20 - (Chris Clarke): In most ways. It's more useful to look at what the solar capacity is for each state as a percentage of demand, rather than splitting it up per person. And when you look at each state's solar capacity as a percentage of demand, the 41,000 plus megawatts of solar that Texas has built is enough to cover just under 7% of the state's electrical power demand. 6.66% of the demand. 1/15th of Texas's power consumption is filled by solar.

0:13:53 - (Chris Clarke): Meanwhile, Massachusetts has that paltry 5,389 megawatts of solar developed. And yet that relatively small amount, less than a seventh of Texas's capacity, meets 24.63% of the state's total power demand. So, yeah, Texas is building more solar, but they're still nowhere near where they need to be. Whereas Massachusetts has got a head start. They're a quarter of the way to 100% renewables just with solar.

0:14:22 - (Chris Clarke): You can also look at the megawatts per square mile of each state. And the reason that you'd want to do this is that the amount of land that's taken up by solar is one of the things that fuels local opposition to solar projects. A fraction of a percent of the square mile that a person lives in developed for solar, that person's less likely to get upset than if it's a quarter of that square mile. A few solar panels in someone's yard, not really a problem.

0:14:45 - (Chris Clarke): 5,000 acres of solar, that's going to raise some complaints, or at least some concerns. So with that in mind, it's kind of interesting to figure out that Texas has developed 160 kilowatts of solar capacity per square mile of the state. And Massachusetts has developed 690 kilowatts per square mile. That's more than four times the rate of Texas. So despite Thompson's kind of glib claim, Massachusetts can easily be argued to be better at solar development than Texas. At the very least, it's complicated and nuanced, and that's not something you're going to get from Thompson's sound bite.

0:15:23 - (Chris Clarke): In fact, with solar installations In Massachusetts filling 24.63% of the state's electricity need, the Bay State is third among all 50 states for converting to solar to meet its power needs, after California, which is at 30% and Nevada, which is at 27.72%. And that says to me that if you're going to pick on blue states, you need to find a different one than Massachusetts in order to bolster your idea that red states are better at Getting stuff built.

0:15:54 - (Chris Clarke): It's an indication of the fact that Klein and Thompson indulge in sloppy arguing. Speaking of solar and blue states, there's very little actual discussion of how the regulatory atmosphere in California has affected solar development. Now, California is arguably the bluest of blue states. The combination of pro solar attitudes among most of the populace and a lot of the government and California's geographical position in the sunny Southwest has made the state pretty much ground zero for solar development, despite occasional intense opposition from habitat protection activists and from people who are worried about being displaced, from people who are worried about valley fever, from soil disruption and projects upwind of their house or their workplace or the prison where they're incarcerated.

0:16:38 - (Chris Clarke): California's lead role in solar development comes in that context. There are a couple of important things to think about here. One is that the California Environmental Quality act, which is roundly condemned among the development crowd for obstructing projects, actually has a provision in it where the agency that is evaluating the project under CEQA can say, yeah, it's going to have all these horrible environmental effects, but we need it, so we're going to approve it.

0:17:04 - (Chris Clarke): This is the overriding considerations loophole. An example of the use of the overriding considerations option concerned a proposal about 15 years ago to build a 709-megawatt solar project in the Imperial Valley in southernmost California. In the southwestern part of Imperial County, there's desert that's basically been undisturbed for millennia, and it's also been populated for many millennia. And as a result, there is a huge concentration of cultural resources in that part of the county. And just lots and lots of evidence of habitation and use stemming from people who had revered this landscape for millennia.

0:17:42 - (Chris Clarke): Enter the company Tessera, an Irish solar firm that proposed to build 709 megawatts of concentrating solar power generation on this landscape. The California Energy Commission was in charge of making the decision. They were running the CEQA process for the state of California. And as a result of the obligatory environmental review, the Energy Commission staff said this project will destroy more cultural resources than all of the other projects ever approved by the California Energy Commission combined.

0:18:11 - (Chris Clarke): Southwestern Imperial County is essentially Jerusalem for desert tribes. Now, Tessera's project would have used Stirling engines to generate power. These are solar powered turbines that have hundreds of working, moving parts each. They're fairly noisy. Each Stirling engine is about like revving a Volvo with a muffler off. There would have been thousands of them in this landscape. It would have irrevocably changed the landscape.

0:18:36 - (Chris Clarke): It would have been A devastating blow to local tribes and to anybody that cares about the cultural history or even just getting out into the desert for some peace and quiet. And the California Energy Commission admitted all this and they approved the project anyway under the overriding considerations doctrine. And they approved the project sister. The Calico Solar Project proposed for the Mojave Desert between Needles and Barstow, just off of Interstate 40.

0:19:02 - (Chris Clarke): Calico was originally proposed for 8,200 acres. It was reduced by a little bit less than half, and then it was approved by the California Energy Commission and the Bureau of Land Management. Neither Calico nor Imperial Solar were ever built. And the reason had nothing to do with environmental regulation. It had nothing to do with NIMBY lawsuits, had nothing to do with climate change denialists questioning the need for these solar projects.

0:19:29 - (Chris Clarke): Both of these projects were dropped because their proponent, Tessera, realized there was no way they would make any money doing this. Why was that? Well, because photovoltaic panels, so solar panels like you see on people's houses, were plummeting in price, which they still kind of are. And unlike Tessera's Stirling engines, photovoltaic cells themselves have no moving parts to break or wear out. TESSERA just couldn't compete with that.

0:19:59 - (Chris Clarke): And CEQA not only had nothing to do with the Tessera projects dying, it actually promoted the idea that they might get built. You can Also look at BrightSource. BrightSource was known for building solar power towers in the early 2000 and tens, and they came under intense scrutiny, not just from me at kcet, but also from groups like the center for Biological Diversity and Basin and rangewatch and eventually the Sierra Club for the incredible damage they were doing to desert wildlife.

0:20:29 - (Chris Clarke): BrightSource had proposed more than half a dozen power tower solar plants in California. And opponents did their best to stop these projects. But in the end, it wasn't opposition or regulation that caused BrightSource to essentially drop out of the US Solar market. It was being unable to compete with photovoltaics. And the one project they actually built, the Ivanpah Solar Project, is being shut down because it's just too damn expensive compared to other kinds of solar.

0:20:58 - (Chris Clarke): So what happened to utility scale solar in California? After the big concentrating solar projects fizzled out, there was a huge planning effort called the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, which streamlined approval of solar projects on more than 600 square miles of the California desert. Outside the desert, large solar projects were also being evaluated and approved by county and municipal planning commissions and electeds statewide, with or without the streamlining offered by the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan.

0:21:32 - (Chris Clarke): California now has more than 900 utility scale solar projects now operating. They cover a little bit more than 220 square miles of the state, approximately the size of the city of Chicago. Now note I'm using the state's somewhat arbitrary definition of utility scale solar, which is seven acres or larger. So that's utility scale solar. You could argue that we need to build more. We probably do. And there are good places and bad places to put it, but that's just one side of the solar equation.

0:22:09 - (Chris Clarke): What about rooftop solar? Well, rooftop solar in California is having some issues right now. It's not because of litigation. It's not because of regulation under CEQA or NEPA or any other environmental law. It's not because of opposition to rooftop solar from members of the public. Not because of hiring quotas or DEI or requirements for union labor. Rooftop solar in California is having some issues because the utilities don't like it.

0:22:39 - (Chris Clarke): Nonetheless, it's doing pretty well. So far. In 2017, which was when I stopped reporting on renewable energy for KCET, the state of California had just broken a total of 5,000 megawatts of installed capacity for distributed generation solar. And distributed generation just means anything that is hooked up to the grid that isn't a utility scale solar project. So it's rooftop solar, parking lot solar, random solar panels on freeway verges and roofs of big box stores and landfills and reservoirs. And just about anywhere that you see solar panels in the built environment, that's probably distributed generation. And we had just passed 5,000 megawatts of installed distributed generation solar when I left KCET in 2017.

0:23:24 - (Chris Clarke): Seven years later, in 2024, we broke 15,000 megawatts of installed solar. So we tripled the amount of distributed generation in the state of California in those seven years. According to the California Distributed Generation Stats website, which we'll link to in our show notes, Californians currently have 18,209 megawatts of capacity installed in rooftop solar (defined broadly) and more than 2 million distinct projects.

0:23:50 - (Chris Clarke): And right now we are facing a politically generated crisis in rooftop solar installations in California that threatens to stall the industry out. And the reason is that investor-owned utilities do not like rooftop solar because it interferes with their ability to profit by building large utility scale projects and then transmitting the power generated there over long distances to where it's going to be used in cities.

0:24:16 - (Chris Clarke): That is the utility company's business plan straight out of the 19th century. They're trying to preserve it in the 21st century when photovoltaics have made it essentially obsolete and the government body that is supposed to regulate these things in California, the California Public Utilities Commission, it might as well be a wholly owned subsidiary of the investor-owned utilities. The CPUC has bought the utilities argument that property owners who have solar are shifting costs to people that can't afford to put solar on their roofs because there are certain costs involved in transmission and other utility expenses which those companies are allowed to pass on to ratepayers.

0:24:56 - (Chris Clarke): They claim that the richest Californians who can afford to buy solar are siphoning money out of the pockets of people that can't afford to put solar on their roof. Or they can't for other reasons. Maybe they're renting and the landlord doesn't want to. But that argument does not bear scrutiny. The California Solar and Storage association, which is a 40-year-old trade group, put out a report in February of this year 2025 with a kind of on the nose title Rooftop Solar Reduces Costs for All Ratepayers in which they take on this self-serving argument by the investor-owned utilities. And here's just a little piece of that report.

0:25:32 - (Chris Clarke): And again, link in the show notes this report is 34 pages clearly written, not hard to read. This is from page 8 one part of the solar cost shift myth invented by the investor-owned utilities and pushed by their allies is a claim that the rooftop solar market is dominated by rich white people who tend to be politically liberal and live in coastal areas. A look at actual data shows this to be false in every way.

0:25:59 - (Chris Clarke): Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory finds that 60% of households that installed solar in 2023 we're low to middle income with total household income of less than 150k. The largest segment of the market is households earning 50 to $100,000 per year. LBNL's analysis is for all residential households including multifamily rental properties. Today There are over 400 low-income apartments with rooftop solar systems directly serving 35,000 income qualified renters.

0:26:31 - (Chris Clarke): If the state's Solar on Multifamily affordable Housing program is allowed to continue, another 1200 low-income apartment projects are in the pipeline to serve another 300,000 renters. In addition, there are many hundreds more market rate apartments with solar as well. As the price of solar has declined, market growth increasingly focused on lower income neighborhoods. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories also analyzes solar customers by race.

0:26:59 - (Chris Clarke): In California, 52% of households that installed solar in 2023 were families of color. And nonetheless the California Public Utilities Commission buys, or at least says they buy the investor-owned utilities argument about cost shifting, and so they have cut incentives for rooftop solar. That threatens to slow down and maybe even functionally stop the adoption of rooftop solar in the state of California.

0:27:28 - (Chris Clarke): People that are in the business of installing distributed generation solar talk in terms of the industry being decimated and the CPUC is considering further cuts. This is not a blue state versus red state thing. This is not about environmental protection laws being out of date or needing to be refined or needing to have exemptions carved out of them. This is not about NIMBYs. It's not about wealthy homeowners wanting to maintain the value of their $5 million homes.

0:27:58 - (Chris Clarke): This is about corporate greed, plain and simple. Don't go away. We'll be right back. We'll continue with my review of Abundance in just a minute, but in the meantime, our friend Fred Bell, who is a nature sound recordist working out of Las Vegas, has offered us quite a number of minutes of his work recording natural sounds throughout the deserts of the Southwest, and we are very pleased to be working with him.

0:28:22 - (Chris Clarke): Here is an explosion of bird song during migration season at China Ranch in the Amargosa Basin, Inyo County, California. A Frisbee's throw from the Nevada state line. Enjoy. You're listening to 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. Don't take your dog on a desert hike in Summer Housing is another issue that Klein and Thompson take on, and I won't be the first to admit that I don't know nearly as much about the housing issue as I do about renewable energy development.

0:30:04 - (Chris Clarke): I will say that it was disturbing to me as I looked through the index prior to reading the book. That the word gentrification showed up nowhere. That the phrases Airbnb and vacation rentals showed up nowhere. That there seemed to be no discussion of how corporations are buying up residential properties as a speculative investment. There is no mention of external factors limiting housing like water supply, which is definitely one of the main obstacles to building more housing. Where I live near Joshua Tree National Park. It's a huge obstacle for the cities in Arizona.

0:30:36 - (Chris Clarke): Going to continue to be an obstacle. The book does discuss Utah as a place that is building housing without mentioning that much of that housing is unsustainable due to questionable water supplies in the future? I mean, how helpful to unhoused people will it be to get them into housing that in a couple of years doesn't have running water because we've overbuilt compared to the water supply? As I read through the book, all of those seeming emissions were confirmed.

0:31:02 - (Chris Clarke): There was in Fact, no discussion of vacancy rates in market rate housing as opposed to affordable housing. What was included in the housing discussion was talk of existing homeowners wanting to keep the supply of housing tight because more housing means the value of their property would go down. And I know that this is truly a problem. It's certainly why you're not going to get much affordable housing built in places like Beverly Hills.

0:31:25 - (Chris Clarke): And there are policies and laws that are responsible for this. In particular, single-family zoning across much of the state of California. I'll be the first person to step up and say that that needs to be changed. If your only metric is number of houses, and that's an important metric, I mean, one person without a home is too many. But if your only metric is number of houses built and not how suitable those houses are for the people that most need them, that's a problem.

0:31:57 - (Chris Clarke): For instance, Texas is indeed building housing at a faster rate than California. But Klein and Thompson don't talk about where that housing is. It's my impression that while both Texas and California are doing some infill housing development, Texas is leaning much more in the direction of suburban sprawl. And that raises a question. How helpful is a new housing development 15 miles away from downtown Austin going to be for people that are homeless? Will it really be the case that more affluent people will move into those places and free up apartments that are more centrally located for people with smaller financial means?

0:32:35 - (Chris Clarke): Doesn't make sense, given the migration of affluent people back into core cities for the last 15 years or so. Rich or poor, most people don't want to live far away from where the action is. And if you don't have the money to maintain a vehicle, it's even more important that you're in a walkable area. Now, I'm not saying that the approach in the blue states is better. There's a ton of room for criticism.

0:32:57 - (Chris Clarke): There are ways outside of environmental law retrenchment or revision that we could be doing better. Could be devoting more resources to planning commissions in municipalities, for starters. Could be spending government funds to buy up land in a coordinated fashion and then subsidizing development on that land. Despite Klein and Thompson's assertions, laws like CEQA are rarely involved in denying proposed housing projects.

0:33:22 - (Chris Clarke): A couple of studies that I found in less than 10 minutes of web searching, which should have been easily available to Klein and Thompson, make really persuasive cases that CEQA has almost nothing to do with the shortage of housing in the state of California. Of all the housing starts that were abandoned or canceled or didn't go through for whatever reason, 2% or less had to do with CEQA. The studies cite factors that cause affordable housing projects to fail. The lack of redevelopment agencies is a huge one, and redevelopment agencies were really problematic, but they did help build housing.

0:33:56 - (Chris Clarke): Also big factors are the cost of land, the cost of the building, the lack of ways to finance projects. And of course you can add things like single family zoning and parking requirements and similar laws which stack the deck against new housing construction. And here's an area where I agreed with Klein and Thompson. They need to be challenged. They need to be revised so that we can get people into homes.

0:34:24 - (Chris Clarke): We don't have to gut environmental laws to build new housing. And even though that is the case, the State of California has anticipated the objections and has amended CEQA to exempt infill housing and similar projects. I'm not going to speculate as to the reason why Klein and Thompson failed to drill down and actually look at things on the ground. And in a sense it doesn't really matter. But if you are hoping for specific policy recommendations in Abundance, you're going to find them kind of scarce.

0:35:00 - (Chris Clarke): Abundance is essentially a polemic, an extended OP ed. And in this climate in which we are facing some of the most treacherous attempts to gut environmental regulations, to undo the work of more than half a century of activism and lobbying and consensus and meetings and compromise on all the kinds of things that went into the current suite of environmental laws that we have on the federal and state levels, as well as more of a granular municipal kind of level.

0:35:38 - (Chris Clarke): In that context, regardless of their motivations in writing Abundance, Klein and Thompson's book is just not helpful. And that's it for this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. I want to thank first off, Mehdi Hasan and Zeteo for putting that interview with Derek Thompson out where I could sample a tiny bit of it. Ordinarily, I would thank people who have become new donors to the Desert Advocacy Media Network and the Miles from Needles since the last episode. And we don't have any.

0:36:22 - (Chris Clarke): Check out 90 miles from needles.com donate to remedy that. We're kind of up against it. I also want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, Martin Mancha, our podcast artwork guy. Ambient desert sound recordings in this episode are by Fred Bell. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. As I mentioned a couple episodes ago, I'm going to be in Utah at the end of this month, up in Salt Lake for a couple days for a conference on grazing on public lands.

0:36:57 - (Chris Clarke): If you're heading to that one, you know what I'm talking about, please let me know. Maybe we can grab a cup of coffee. I'm also going to be hitting southeastern Utah, hopefully going to do a little bit of recording. As a result, I'm not certain that we will have a new episode on the first Tuesday in June because I might be otherwise occupied, but I will know more about that before too long. Our next episode will be on threats against environmental activists and how the current state of affairs in Washington, D.C. with kowtowing to conservative rural interests about public lands issues is part of a process that's been going on for at least 50 years.

0:37:44 - (Chris Clarke): That should be interesting. In the meantime, I appreciate you listening. Let us know what you think about this episode and about what we're doing in general. You can reach out to Chris 90 miles from needles.com send an email, share your ideas and I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now. 90 miles for needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.