Talking about the Abundance Movement with Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute

And looking ahead to the Abundance Conference in DC September 4-5, 2025

Readers of my Substack who also listen to my podcast (thank you!) will know that I find the Abundance movement to be one of the most significant intellectual/political developments of recent years. The movement is relatively new. It was given a name by a 2021 essay by Derek Thompson (then at the Atlantic) and attracted widespread public attention with the publication earlier this year of Abundance, the bestseller co-written by Thompson and Ezra Klein.

But the problems diagnosed by the Abundance movement — including the high costs and delays in building housing and infrastructure and energy production, the slowdown in scientific and technological discoveries, the shortcomings in performance experienced by governments in developed societies across the world — have been written about for decades by thinkers on both the right and left. So the Abundance movement has been of particular interest to me both as an intellectual historian and as someone who advocates people from different political perspectives coming together to solve problems that affect us all.

Alex Trembath is the principal organizer of Abundance 2025, the second annual conference bringing together participants from different sectors of the Abundance movement, which will take place on September 4-5 in Washington, D.C. Alex is also deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, a California based ecomodernist research center. In the transcript of our discussion that appears below (lightly edited for clarity), we talk about the upcoming conference, Alex’s work at Breakthrough, how the Abundance movement has evolved and where it may be heading.

Geoff Kabaservice

I'm pleased to be speaking today with Alex Trembath. He is the deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center based in Oakland, California. The Institute's research focuses on identifying and promoting technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges in the areas of energy, conservation, and food and farming. Welcome, Alex!

Alex Tremabath

Great to be here, Geoff. Thanks for having me.

Geoff Kabaservice

How would you expand upon my cursory description of the Breakthrough Institute and its work?

Alex Trembath

That’s a very accurate, succinct summary of our work. I might add that Breakthrough was founded to reform classical environmentalism for the twenty-first century — and by reform, I mean take a look at some of the founding premises and impulses of conventional American environmentalism and reimagine them, first and foremost the impulses and frameworks that environmentalism has around technology. To be maybe a little reductive, environmentalists and environmentalism consider technology a source of destruction and pollution in the world — and it often is, to be very clear. But technology can also not only liberate humanity from drudgery and from vulnerability to the natural order, but can also help solve environmental problems.

Clean energy obviously is the canonical example. When the environmental movement really finds its footing in the post-war decades in the United States, energy consumption is a definitional bad word: “We’re a hyper-consumerist society and energy consumption is not just polluting and destructive, it’s also destructive of communities.” And you have the environmental movement turn not just against big polluting coal plants but against big scary nuclear plants and big hydroelectric dams. The common thread there is not energy production itself, it’s the size and industrial nature of production. Now there is more understanding that solar, nuclear, wind, and batteries are much cleaner in terms of carbon emissions — and quite often, especially in the case of nuclear, use far fewer materials and land area than fossil fuels do.

There’s also more understanding that energy consumption itself can help solve other environmental problems. With more energy, we can grow more food on less land and reduce deforestation pressures. We can desalinate water. We can electrify transportation and home heating and all sorts of things that that produce bigger environmental problems in the world. And so that is the kind of nitty-gritty of the Breakthrough Institute and eco-modernists: a different framework for understanding the relationship between humans, technology, and nature. Technology can not only cause climate change and deforestation and biodiversity loss, but it can actually help address and solve those problems.

Geoff Kabaservice

How long ago was the Breakthrough Institute founded and what did the founders perceive was the need for such an organization?

Alex Trembath

Breakthrough was founded 2008. It was founded after the viral success of an essay published in 2004 by the founders, Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, called “The Death of Environmentalism.” And I appreciate the way you phrased that question, Geoff, because the think tank came after the idea, right?

The idea of “The Death of Environmentalism” was that environmentalism, as a kind of issue public and as a kind of philosophy in American public life and politics, had been very successful in treating and addressing major environmental problems in the twentieth century around pesticide pollution, terrestrial pollution, sprawl, smog and acid rain, and all of the environmental scare stories that concerned American citizens and policymakers in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.

But by the early twenty-first century, environmentalism had become really just another special interest for the Democratic Party. This was in the early days of an awareness of a kind of factional flaw in the Democratic Party that is still present, the realization that the Democratic Party was not guided by a clear, cohesive set of principles but was really just a hodgepodge of special interests. You had the pro-choice special interest, you had the legacy of the civil rights movement special interests, you had the environmentalist special interests. And they all found a home in the Democratic Party, but not in a way that really made sense in terms of principle and in terms of coalition-building, not just coalition management.

And so from their perspective — Michael and Ted both came from environmental organizing and activism — environmentalism had to reinvent itself and reimagine what it means to be an environmentalist for a period in our politics that, in the midst of the War on Terror, was starved for optimism. And that was really one of the first places that anyone articulated an environmental politics of optimism — what we now call a politics of abundance. Not an environmental politics of degrowth or of limits, but one in which we imagine a bright, abundant clean-energy future.

There’s a lot else in the in the essay, and a huge amount of the founding of the Breakthrough Institute was really contingent on the era in which it happened, which was quite different than the era when we’re talking now. The essay, the book that it was based on, the founding of Breakthrough was really in the transition from the George W. Bush administration to the Obama administration and the global financial crisis and what at the time appeared to be the rise of the “permanent Democratic majority.” It was thought that 2008 would be the last year that the United States didn’t have a price on carbon emissions. Obviously that all seems like ancient history now, but that’s the context that the Breakthrough Institute was founded within.

Geoff Kabaservice

If there’s a concept with which the Breakthrough Institute is most associated, it’s the term you used earlier: eco-modernism. Your founder and executive director Ted Nordhaus was among the eighteen authors of the April 2015 Eco-Modernist Manifesto, which proposed what the New York Times described as “economic development as an indispensable precondition to preserving the environment. Achieving it,” the Timescontinued, “requires dropping the goal of ‘sustainable development,’ supposedly in harmonious interaction with nature, and replacing it with it a strategy to shrink humanity’s footprint by using nature more intensively.” How else would you describe ecomodernism?

Alex Trembath

The way we describe it in the manifesto is that ecomodernists agree with traditional environmentalism on one founding plank, which is that we as humans, as citizens, as policymakers should want to protect non-human nature for its existence value, for its intrinsic value, for its use value. But we firmly disagree with conventional environmentalism on the second plank, which is that we protect nature by harmonizing it, that we protect nature solely by pursuing modes of interaction with nature like organic agriculture, renewable energy, relying on ecosystem services — like wetlands filtration of water, for instance, as opposed to engineered filtration of water.

The way we ecomodernists see these things is that the permanent coupling and reliance on ecosystem services and on nature for human well-being is just a way of exploiting and ultimately destroying nature. And there’s a better alternative, which we call decoupling from reliance on nature. Just to be a little bit reductive and maybe a little bit ad absurdum, one way that you could you power the energy demand of the human species is through bioenergy: just switchgrasses and trees. And this is by far the most destructive possible way that we could power our machines and our homes and our vehicles, by reliance on biomass, biofuels, bioenergy.

On the margin, you save nature by transitioning from forests to coal. And this is precisely what we saw in UK and in Germany and the United States in the nineteenth century as the steam engine was diffused throughout industry. You actually started to see the regrowth of forests in those places. And now New England and Germany and a bunch of the places where the Industrial Revolution took off are much more forested than they were before the Industrial Revolution happened.

Of course, coal brings its own environmental problems. And decoupling is not, in our view, a terminal story. We move from wood to coal, but then ultimately from coal to hydroelectric and natural gas and nuclear and renewables. And we’re in the midst of — not an energy transition from dirty to clean, but we’re in the midst of a long, continuous energy transition from more natural and more organic sources of energy to more synthetic, more technological ones. And that transition spares nature overall. That’s, again, being a little bit reductive about it, and much of human economic and well-being has come at the expense of natural lands and of biodiversity and the polluting of the atmosphere.

But our view is that we will not protect the rest of nature by dialing back on human and technological ambitions and reintegrating with nature. In fact, we have significant concerns about relying on ecosystem services and on organic methods of food production and solely on renewable energy. Because, with a lot of shades of complexity in there, a bunch of these more organic, ecological, renewable forms of energy and food production actually use more of nature than synthetic alternatives like synthetic fertilizer or nuclear power. So that’s both a framework and a specific technological picture of what we mean when we announce ourselves as ecomodernists.

Geoff Kabaservice

You’ve touched on some of the principal theoretical differences between ecomodernism and conventional environmentalism, but how do they tend to work themselves out in concrete disputes over policies or projects?

Alex Trembath

The big one is that people are curious and sometimes a little a little confused why we at Breakthrough and ecomodernists generally seem so over-focused on the issue of nuclear power. Part of it is because that is one of the big, concrete disputes that we at Breakthrough and ecomodernists generally have with traditional environmentalists. That dispute has maybe cooled over the last decade — I think, if I can be so bold, in no small part due to the kind of advocacy and research work we’ve done at Breakthrough and in the broader pro-nuclear coalition. But still the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace United States and International — the bulk of the multi-billion-dollar institutional environmental movement — is formally opposed to all nuclear energy. They’re trying to shut down our existing plants and they’re trying to make it illegal or impractical to license and build new nuclear power plants.

We think that that’s both a major social and environmental mistake. Nuclear power is the totemic prototypical eco-modernist technology. It has by far the lowest land and life-cycle material footprint of any energy technology. It obviously produces no carbon pollution or air or terrestrial pollution. And it leads to a bunch of significant policy fights — for instance, over the fate of specific operating nuclear plants. One of the big paradigmatic fights in energy and environment and for eco-modernism is the fate of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, which is about four hours south of where I’m sitting right now in California. Environment America and the Natural Resources Defense Council have lobbied really, really hard to close that over the last ten years. And it looks like, thanks to a number of factors including the nascent pro-nuclear movement, it’s going to stay open for at least a few more years and we expect for several more decades.

Another less black-and-white dispute is over our expectations of renewable energy technology. And I think one of the genuinely powerful “up” things about solar energy in particular is that solar offers a vision of the future, both for (again, to be reductive) “small is beautiful” degrowth environmentalists who just want to put a small two-kilowatt solar panel on their roof and live off the land, and for Hamiltonian “big is beautiful” ecomodernists like myself who imagine massive solar farms contributing to the hyper-energy-abundant future where we’re not living simply on the land but we are flying supersonic jets, desalinating water, growing lettuce and tomatoes in vertical greenhouses, and building massive upzoned cities. But the point is that whereas environmentalists and ecomodernists pretty fully disagree on nuclear, I think a lot of environmentalists and ecomodernists have very high expectations for solar energy. But the question there is really the extent of those expectations.

I think we at Breakthrough would expect solar and other renewables like wind to play a significant role in energy abundance and in decarbonization and in future energy systems. But we do not expect them to power the bulk of our electricity systems until later this century. For that, I think you need non-intermittent technologies like, again, nuclear, advanced geothermal, natural gas plants that hopefully can capture their carbon emissions so that we’re building an energy-abundant future without worsening climate change. And that’s, I think, a legitimate technological and policy dispute about what we are expecting from renewable energy technology.

The last example I’ll give would be the future of our food systems. I talked a little bit before, Geoff, about organic versus industrial agriculture. I think most people obviously interact with their food more than they interact with their energy systems. They go to the grocery store and they eat their food directly, and they often have strong opinions about food itself and food production.

The classic ecological eating framework is small farms, organic farms, fewer pesticides, fewer synthetic fertilizers. If you actually look at the empirical literature on those modes of food production, they’re worse environmentally in every way. They’re lower productivity, which means you need more land to produce the food, which means you’re increasing deforestation and pressure on ecosystems, even if an organic farm itself has more butterflies and caterpillars on it. But to that point, the pesticides and the fertilizers used on organic farms are often just as toxic to wildlife and to humans as synthetic pesticides and fertilizers are. It’s just that you often don’t have the same sort of precision of application that you might with more chemical/industrial inputs.

Now, I don’t want to be Pollyannish about this. Over-application of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, for instance, is a huge driver of environmental problems and eutrophication and dead zones in riparian ecosystems. So there are obviously huge environmental impacts of the industrial food system. But if you move it all to organic food production, it would all be worse, actually. So there the kind of policy debates are about things like favoring organic certification of food production, where organic certification means no synthetic fertilizers, no genetically modified organisms — and that’s just ecologically worse, full stop, with no nutritional benefit for the food that we’re producing. And so there are policy debates around the licensing of genetically modified organisms, about how we’re labeling food in our grocery stores. And so that’s another area of policy debate and dispute between ecomodernists and environmentalists broadly.

Geoff Kabaservice

Do you feel that ecomodernism has had a significant impact on public opinion?

Alex Trembath

I think that we have seen a significant shift in public opinion on some of those issues within ecomodernism. I would say that ecomodernism has had a big impact on the elite conversation around environmental issues: around nuclear, around industrial agriculture. As we’re talking, there’s a great new book out called We Are Eating the Earth by journalist Michael Grunwald, who really makes the environmental case for industrial, high-efficiency at agriculture. So you’re starting to see ecomodernist causes, specific ones, changing both the elite and the public popular conversation around these issues.

For instance, there has been a tidal shift in public opinion on nuclear energy over the last ten to fifteen years. Nuclear was historically a pretty unpopular technology, and that is less and less true. Growing majorities of Americans support nuclear energy for climate and other reasons.

Likewise, I think that when Breakthrough was launched and our founding mantra was to make clean energy cheap, that we needed a technological approach to solving climate change as opposed to just a regulatory approach. At the time, almost twenty years ago, when solar panels were twenty times more expensive than they are today and wind turbines were five times more expensive than they are today and there were no electric vehicles on the road, that was controversial. The idea that we would rely on technology to solve our environmental problems made us a lot of enemies at the outset. And now I think that’s much more widely accepted, because people see solar panels not only on their roofs but they see them driving down the highway. People see wind turbines, people see electric vehicles on the road, people are starting to hear about these really exciting new startups in geothermal and in nuclear, but also in alternative proteins and other exciting ecomodernist technological solutions.

I would say that in comparison to environmentalism, ecomodernism is still, in terms of headcount, a small kind of issue public. And our effects have been more at the policy and elite discourse level. But I still have hopes that years and decades down the road, more and more of the general public will understand themselves as some kind of eco-modernist. I think that even if they don’t use the word “ecomodernist” or that kind of understanding, that there is more and more of a kind of techno-optimist environmentalist out in the world.

Geoff Kabaservice

Before we get into more detail about ecomodernism and your organization, you and I are going to be meeting in person at the upcoming Abundance Conference in Washington, D.C. on September 4-5, for which the Breakthrough Institute is a co-host along with Niskanen and a baker’s dozen of other organizations. You have done an impressive amount of work in organizing this conference. Let me ask first: How would you describe the Abundance movement to people who might not know much about it?

Alex Trembath

I think of the Abundance movement as a kind of supergroup of advocates and activists and influencers who want more material, economic, and social progress in the world. And I say “supergroup” because it includes, for instance, the housing abundance movement — the “Yes in My Backyard movement” — the activist and expert community that has really exploded over the last decade, working to make it easier to build homes, to upzone our communities, to densify cities, and to improve the urban landscape of our cities, towns, and suburbs.

But I come to the Abundance tent from the energy and environment side. You know, we’ve been talking about a kind of environmental politics of abundance for the last few minutes, and I think there’s a bunch of folks like me who see in nuclear energy and GMOs not our environmental doom but our environmental salvation. And we see a future of economic and technological abundance as one that is good for nature, not bad for nature.

Another entry point into Abundance is something that your colleagues at Niskanen work on all the time, which is the good-governance, state capacity community — a growing cohort of public officials and public servants and folks at think tanks and other advocacy organizations working to make our government work better for us. I think there’s an increasingly widespread recognition that while we that we probably shouldn’t just repeal all regulation ever passed at the federal, state, and local levels, that this sort of layered accretion of regulatory expectations and norms and practices have made it harder to build things like housing and infrastructure. But we have also made it harder to build things like parks and to license daycares, made it harder to administer public welfare programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare. And we actually have made it harder for our public servants to do the jobs that we elect them to do and have made it harder for bureaucrats to administer the laws that that our elected officials pass. So that’s another faction within Abundance.

And the last is really the science and progress movement. There’s obviously some overlap among all of these factions, but I do think there’s a distinct group of scientists, science advocates, technologists, and entrepreneurs who want to see the kind of explosion in technological and scientific capability that the U.S. experienced in, say, the postwar Thirty Glorious Years but that we haven’t really seen in a while, with the exception of things like smartphones and ChatGPT. The infrastructural and technological landscape that we see out the window in 2025 is not all that different than it was twenty-five, thirty years ago — again, maybe with digital technologies excepted. Folks have called this “the Great Stagnation,” and the science and progress movement generally exists to end or reverse the Great Stagnation and make a lot of progress in robotics, drones, supersonic flight, biotechnological approaches to disease and food production, and a whole host of scientific challenges that would, like upzoning and nuclear power and unshackling state capacity, create a more abundant future for citizens. So that’s a four-quadrant way of describing Abundance that I often lean on.

Geoff Kabaservice

My colleague Steve Teles has a taxonomy of Abundance factions, or “flavors,” that is broadly the same as yours, although he does look at how different politics can play into each. So on the left, you might have Fully Automated Luxury Communism or what Steve calls “Red Plenty.” On the right, you might have what he’s calling “Dark Abundance.” But let me ask you, what is the relationship of the Breakthrough Institute to the Abundance movement?

Alex Trembath

Like I said, Breakthrough was founded over twenty years ago. Abundance as an idea wasn’t really a thing until a few years ago. I give a lot of credit to — or credit is maybe the wrong word — I give a lot of explanatory power to the COVID pandemic. In COVID, we saw at once the economic and psychic toll of scarcity. We had scarce opportunity to leave our homes, to do our jobs. We had supply chain stresses; in the early days, we couldn’t get toilet paper. And even after that, we had significant supply chain problems in global lumber and commodities and food products, and a spike in demand for housing and a spike in housing prices. In just a few years, from 2020 through 2022, we had a really painful experience in shortages and scarcity.

And we also had a few examples of really mind-boggling progress, particularly in the case of the COVID vaccines. In a couple of days, scientists got together and created the formula for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. And of course, yes, it was too many months between then and people getting shots in the arm, but not that many months relative to the development timelines for vaccines previously. So right as we as an American culture are grappling with these scarcities and these shortages, we’re also seeing the ability of scientists and policymakers to massively accelerate technological progress. And although it ultimately contributed to inflation, we had massive social and economic relief passed by both the Trump and the Biden administrations.

I think Abundance as an idea emerges from this dichotomy: scarcity is really painful for individuals and society, but we can have more abundance of economic and technological and scientific and housing resources than we have today. And there was a new conversation about that dynamic, advanced by a couple of public intellectuals in particular. Derek Thompson, who was at the Atlantic at the time in 2021, coined the term “Abundance agenda.” Ezra Klein coined the term “supply-side progressivism,” which is his way of describing a sort of American liberalism or progressivism that doesn’t just regulate problems away but really tries to unleash abundance through upzoning, through investments in science and technology.

I think a bunch of us in think tank world and activist world looked around and started talking to each other, and we’re like, “Hang on, this is what we’ve been doing for years.” I remember talking to Ted Gayer at the Niskanen Center about this unifying idea of Abundance. I remember talking to Jennifer Pahlka, who was leaving government at the time and had published her book Recoding America, about how this this idea of Abundance really unites folks from the energy abundance world with folks like Jen in the state capacity world, and folks like my friends (I’m here in the Bay Area) in the housing YIMBY movement. And a bunch of us just started talking — not just about how great it is that we have Jerusalem Demsas and Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias and these sort of public intellectuals making the case national media for Abundance, but that we actually have a bunch of institutions who have been doing Abundance without exactly knowing it or without exactly all marching in lockstep to do so.

And you have a slew of new organizations that are founded in the wake of the pandemic to address some of the scientific, technological, and regulatory problems that the pandemic made really salient. So you have the founding of the Institute for Progress, the Foundation for American Innovation, the Abundance Institute, Inclusive Abundance. You have a whole bunch of new organizations that are capturing both a kind of elite attention but also a kind of groundswell of public interest from boots-on-the-ground activists to elected officials who recognize each other now.

I was just one of those people who didn’t necessarily realize that I had been doing Abundance advocacy my whole career. And I ended up in conversations with folks like Ted Gayer and Jen Pahlka at Niskanen, and Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney at the Institute for Progress, and Zach Graves at the Foundation for American Innovation, and the folks in the housing and YIMBY movement. And several of us started talking about the growth of this movement and this coalition generally, but also about the power of bringing that coalition together occasionally for an event. And so a bunch of us got together in 2024 and hosted the pilot Abundance Conference in D.C., and it went really, really well. And we came out of that conference last fall thinking that that this could actually be much bigger.

So last year’s conference of about 250 people, mostly from DC, is being followed up by Abundance 2025, two weeks from today as we’re speaking, which is going have over 600 people. And the waiting list is over 200 people, and those are the people who actually bothered to put their names on the waiting list. My apologies — I hope that Abundance 2026 is even bigger and can fit more people.

But this year is also an opportunity to bring the Abundance movement from all around the country together. We have housing and energy and infrastructure and local government activists flying into D.C. for this gathering of the Abundance movement. We have dozens of elected officials (who consider themselves Abundance electeds) flying into D.C. to have a shared conversation and shared camaraderie. As a longtime event organizer, in addition to my research and intellectual work, I think it’s really important to get together in person to celebrate our victories, to hash out our differences, and to figure out what this coalition is, who we are as a movement, and where we’re going. So that’s my aperture on the origins of both the movement itself but also this conference that we’re about to pull off in DC in a couple weeks.

Geoff Kabaservice

You’ve already answered a question I was going to ask you, but let me ask this in a different way... How different do you think this conference will be from last year’s?

Alex Trembath

I think that it can't be understated how powerful Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s book is. As most readers probably know, Klein and Thompson released a book called Abundance six or so months ago, and that just really exploded the groundswell of interest and support for the housing movement, for the energy abundance movement, for the state capacity movement, for Abundance generally. And so now you have elected officials reorienting their whole policy and political agenda around solving for Abundance and for their jurisdictions on housing, infrastructure, and good governance. You have Abundance students — young people who are figuring out what to do with their lives and feeling that, wherever their careers take them, they want to contribute to the future of Abundance.

You know, I’m a think tanker, you’re a think tanker, and it’s a bunch of think tanks in addition to activist organizations who are co-hosting this conference. And there'll be lots of wonky discussion around financing instruments for housing and infrastructure construction, and around licensing reform for next-generation nuclear reactors and permitting reform for American infrastructure. That’s the kind of world that I’ve long operated in.

I think that a big distinction between last year’s event and this year’s event — and maybe between the past of the Abundance movement and the future of it — is that it’s just going to feel more and more like a movement: more grassroots, boots-on-the-ground activist energy, less wonkery and more camaraderie. I’m really excited to see that kind of collision of types, because I think that there is a difference in people who see themselves as activists in their local community and people, frankly, like me, who engage more at the level of elite discourse as well as policymaking.

At Breakthrough Institute, we show up on Capitol Hill, we show up at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we show up at the USDA. But we at Breakthrough, for the most part, do not show up at our local planning commission. And we’re not trying to build a sort of a grassroots movement ourselves, although we do hope that the extant pro-nuclear, grassroots ecomodernist movement continues to grow as well. And I think events like Abundance 2025 are where those worlds meet. So I’m really excited to see this.

It's not exactly the first of its kind, since there was a conference last year and there are other kinds of events in Abundance universe. I went to FAI’s Bottlenecks Summit last year. The housing movement has been hosting YIMBYtown for the better part of a decade. Here in California, we’re a couple years into the Roots of Progress Institute’s Progress Conference. And so there are more and more opportunities for the broader progress-and-Abundance communities to see each other intensively and face-to-face. And it’s really exciting to see.

Geoff Kabaservice

And at the risk of asking you to repeat yourself, what do you see as the value of an annual Abundance Conference?

Alex Trembath

I don’t think the Abundance coalition, the Abundance movement, knows where it will be in five or ten years. And I say that really as a compliment. This is new. Like I said, a bunch of us have more or less been doing Abundance work for a long time, but we didn’t have the terminology, we didn’t have the formal coalition. And now, to a significant extent, we do. We have fifteen co-hosts for Abundance 2025 and another eight or ten sponsors of the event. There are dozens or even hundreds of Abundance organizations and figures represented in the event. I know that I’m surprised at how fast and big Abundance — as an idea, a coalition, and a movement — has become in just the four years since Derek Thompson coined the term “Abundance agenda.”

I don’t really know where we’ll be in another four years, but I do strongly feel that we’ll be formally collaborating not just on events but on things like housing policy for the YIMBY movement, and permitting reform for the energy and infrastructure side of Abundance. And I think that creating formal partnerships, formal convenings, formal collaborations to get together and ask ourselves tough questions about policy, about coalition management, about what institutions don’t exist that we need to exist — I think that work is essential to sustaining the really powerful momentum that we’ve already seen in Abundance coalition growth and movement-building. And I think that just spending time together in person facilitates the asking and answering of some of those questions, and strategizing does build camaraderie.

I feel especially passionate about the in-person aspect of the conference in the ongoing age of atomizing media and Artificial Intelligence, the post-pandemic world where we all spend a lot of time on Zoom and on social media. There are good and bad aspects to all of that, but I feel even more passionate about intensive in-person gathering now than I did before the Abundance movement launched. So those are a few of the functions that I hope for the conference and also just for the coalition in general.

Geoff Kabaservice

The charge is sometimes made by critics of Abundance that it’s an “astroturf” movement, a collection of corporate-funded entities that neither reflect public opinion nor have a real presence at the level of grassroots activism. And the words “neoliberal” and “neoliberalism” are frequently thrown into as such accusations as well. How would you respond?

Alex Trembath

On the charge that Abundance is this top-down coordinated “astroturf” movement… I don't want Abundance to be above criticism or reproach, but that is just totally, objectively wrong. Abundance is emergent. The folks in the Abundance movement found each other: the folks in YIMBY and state capacity and energy abundance and the folks in both the public interest, pro-science think tank world and scientists and technologists themselves. We didn’t realize that we were all sort of part of the same coalition or movement five years ago.

And we found each other, not because we were orchestrated or astroturfed together, but because we realized — again, thanks in no small part to the kind of narration by folks like Thompson and Klein and Jerusalem Demsas — that we had this shared vision, we had this shared attitude towards the future. I can promise you that no coordinator or orchestrator came to me or anyone else and told us, “You’re going to do a conference, and it’s going to have this message discipline, and it’s going to do all of these things that our corporate overlords need you to do.”

This was bottom-up. This was a bunch of us in both newer and preexisting activist and policy organizations getting together and convincing each other of the value of an in-person gathering. So again, whether it’s progressives or conservative populists launching a substantive critique on Abundance — totally legitimate. But alleging that this is some kind of coordinated astroturf movement, that’s just totally wrong.

On the on the charge that we’re a bunch of neoliberals… I agree (as I often do) with your colleague Steve Teles that the term “neoliberalism” usually obscures more than it explains. Certainly I would argue that Abundance is not old Thatcherite/Reaganite, Clintonite/DLC wine in new bottles. It really is a new policy-and-political coalition addressing a new set of problems for the American infrastructure, economic, and policy landscape.

And those are not only problems like NIMBYism or regulatory capture that you see in things like the National Environmental Policy Act, but they’re kind of new problems for the kind of postmaterial economy and labor force that have, at the heart of them, not so much villains as emerging trends. I imagine many of your readers are familiar with the “Baumol effect,” where as economies dematerialize and grow and reach higher levels of productivity, then relatively more labor-intensive sectors of the economy become relatively more expensive, because you can’t actually economize too much on the labor that goes into health care or into education. And so we’re spending more and more on more labor-intensive sides of the economy like housing, health care, education, and child care.

And that is a new problem that requires new ideas, new policy thinking, a new kind of politics and a new coalition. And that’s the new problem that the Abundance movement exists to address.

Geoff Kabaservice

As a final question… None of us can speak for the Abundance movement as a whole or even for the think tanks and other organizations of which we’re part. But I’m curious to know how you personally got into the work of the Breakthrough Institute and how you’re feeling at the present moment.

Alex Trembath

I’m really grateful that the Abundance movement exists, because it answers those questions for me. It gives me a community and a broader politics beyond just being pro-nuclear or ecomodernist in the American political landscape. I appreciate your question, Geoff, because I had been feeling a little bit at sea in American politics. I’m a lifelong Democrat. In many ways, I’m an urban coastal elite. I live in a dense part of Oakland with my family. But I have a lot of problems with the Democratic coalition, which I see as largely unresponsive to the problems of both the working class and people like me. Housing is too expensive, health care is too expensive even for people in the middle or upper-middle class. Abundance is here to help unscramble the politics that made us politically lost and homeless.

In terms of your actual question, I was raised to be an environmentalist. And when, as an undergrad, I discovered the work of the Breakthrough Institute and the idea that technology could be not just the cause but the solution to our environmental problems — I was really, really offended by it. It was really jarring to sort of encounter this techno-optimistic (perhaps even Pollyannish and neoliberal) way of thinking about humans’ relationship with technology and nature.

Then I spent a good couple years doing some reading and introspection and study, but also increasing engagement with the staff of the Breakthrough Institute at the time when I was an undergrad. And I had a bit of a conversion, frankly — and you know there’s no zealot like a convert. And so I’ve been at the Breakthrough Institute ever since, and have only become more and more convinced of importance of technological innovation and economic abundance for addressing human and environmental challenges.

But where it all began was a kind of collision with what we now think of as Abundance ideas: optimism, technological meliorism, and faith in the possibilities of housing abundance, nuclear and energy abundance. That’s where it all started for me.

Geoff Kabaservice

Alex Trembath, thank you so much for taking time to talk to me today. Kudos for your work at the Breakthrough Institute and in setting up the Abundance Conference 2025. And I look forward to seeing you in DC on September 4th.

Alex Trembath

Thanks so much, Geoff. Can’t wait to see you in a couple weeks!