Abundance Energized! Alex Trembath of The Breakthrough Institute on Radio Abundance

The following conversation was featured on Radio Abundance, Episode XXIII: Abundance Energized! Alex Trembath is the Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hello, and welcome to Radio Abundance! We are here with Alex Trembath. He's the Deputy Director of the Breakthrough Institute, and this is his second appearance on Radio Abundance.

Hey Alex, welcome to the program!Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Thanks for having me back, Steve.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hey, we are thrilled that you are back. We had an amazing conversation about two months ago.

You know, the Breakthrough Institute was very early to the world of Abundance, long before Abundance had a name, with fingers in a lot of areas, but especially energy and the environment, sending out a call to the world that our approach to the environment was neither helping the environment nor ourselves and proposing a better route through what you call "eco-modernism" in terms of how we can build a greener world and a more energy-efficient world while also lowering the cost of energy and making it easier for people to live where they want to live and live near where they work — building a world with more energy, more food, and a better environment for all of us and every creature on earth.

Is that a reasonably accurate description?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

That was great.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Amazing. So in that last conversation, which I will link to because it was phenomenal, we talked about the origins of The Breakthrough Institute. We talked about your work in energy. And we talked quite a lot about nuclear energy and safety. We went through different nuclear accidents and talked about why it was safe and really analyzed them. So it's a really phenomenal conversation, and one of my favorites. We're not going to retread old ground, but I highly recommend that.

So, we are really excited to talk more because there's so much to this area. You also work on things like agriculture and food. We're really excited to talk about Abundance when it comes to food.

You are also doing events! In fact, our audience may have heard of or may also be about to attend the Abundance Conference in DC. You are one of the biggest if not the biggest and certainly one of the key organizers and producers of that. So, I figured we'd start there.

Let's start with just what it is, right? To anybody who is not already initiated or who does not already have their ticket, what's the Abundance Conference?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Yeah, we're really excited about it. It's two weeks from today, as we're recording. It's September 4th and 5th in Washington DC.

This is really the national gathering of the broad Abundance movement that we all and that all your listeners know and love. At this point, there's 15 think-tank and activist co-hosts and a number of sponsors as well. We're going to have over 500 people there, from every walk of life.

We're going to have thinktankers and journalists and philanthropists and advocates and activists and investors and technologists and elected officials at the state, national, and local level. Our hope is that this becomes the annual convening of the Abundance Movement.

This is the second time that we're doing this event. We launched a pilot Abundance Conference in DC last year that we all really loved, and we wanted to do it again and make it bigger and make it better.

You know, I've been doing events for over 10 years. I won't say it's not hard! It is hard work! Logistically. Substantively.

But it wasn't hard to build interest for this event. Let me say that we sold out six weeks in advance. We have a waiting list of over 200 people at this point!

My hope is that we can accommodate more people and ideas in the future.

We're really excited. We're going to cover housing (obviously), energy, infrastructure, Artificial Intelligence, healthcare, immigration, families, state capacity, governance, and on and on and on — the wide swath of the Abundance Agenda.

We’ve got some pretty incredible speakers lined up. I'm just really excited!Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You’ve got incredible speakers! You've got some amazing speakers, some amazing partners. Give us some razzamatazz for a second? Let's name-drop a little bit! Who's coming?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Yeah, so obviously 2025 is the year of the publication of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

You know, Derek Thompson, who really coined the term "the Abundance Agenda" in 2021 — which was kind of a Rubicon for a bunch of us, right? We talked in our last conversation, Steve, about how a bunch of us within Abundance, including Breakthrough and the YIMBY movement and organizations like Niskanen had been doing Abundance-y stuff for years or more. The Federation of American Scientists is a co-host on this event, and they've been operating for over half a century at this point on a whole bunch of stuff related to nuclear and science and technology. But, it really was just over the last few years that we all found each other in this new context under this new tent called Abundance.

So, we're thrilled that David Brooks from The New York Times is going to be interviewing Ezra and Derek about their book and the reaction to it over the last six months or so. We're also thrilled to have dozens of elected officials from around the country, including a number of Members of Congress who will be on stage, as well as Representatives from State legislatures and Mayors and local Representatives from City Councils and local government.

We're also thrilled to have the Governor of Utah. Spencer Cox is going to come talk about what Abundance looks like in his home state of Utah.

Those are a few of the big keynotes that we're excited to have planned for this year's conference. And then, beyond that, like I said, we've got 15 co-hosts and a bunch of philanthropic and other sponsors focused on a range of issues that I could never hope to program in my many years of planning and executing climate-and-environment-focused conferences.

We've got The Institute for Progress helping us figure out a panel on Immigration and The Federation of American Scientists spearheading a panel on the next Golden Age of American Science and Science Investment. We've got The Niskanen Center helping us with a panel on families.

We've got the whole YIMBY movement — Welcoming Neighbors Network, Metropolitan Abundance Project, The Abundance Network, YIMBY action — collaborating on a session, sharing lessons from what worked for communications and organizing in the housing sector to what might work in other Abundance sectors, like energy or infrastructure.

I'm really just scratching the surface here! It's a lot of partners. A lot of sweat equity. A lot of ideas. A lot to be excited about.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You mentioned you've been throwing events before. This is something we share and love, and we'll talk about the importance of events in a second.

But you mentioned you've had a decade of experience throwing events in the world of energy and climate and the environment. So, going back to last year — so, pre-Rubicon, we're back in Gaul — how did this come together in the first place?

Because 15 partners and co-producers or however you want to call it, that's a big number to come out of the gate with that! So, going back to last year, what was the origin story of kicking this off?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

You know, it was a few years ago that I ended up in conversations with folks from some of these co-hosts, just talking about what it would look like and what the purpose and strategy of an Abundance gathering in our nation's capital would look like.

Like, “what should we and why would we convene to co-host an Abundance conference in DC?” And I was talking with folks again, from like The Institute for Progress and The Foundation for American Innovation and The Niskanen Center, about this realization that we are all marching to the same tune.

We are — with significant kind of substantive and even ideological differences between us — all part of this Abundance coalition, this Abundance movement. And last year, really, I and Derek Kaufman, who founded Inclusive Abundance in 2024, spearheaded the first Abundance Conference in DC along with four other co-hosts: The Federation of American Scientists, Institute for Progress, The Niskanen Center, and The Foundation for American Innovation.

And that went really well. It was six co-hosts and a bunch of sessions and panels. We had folks who were at the time working in the Biden Administration. We had Jerusalem Demsas, who this week launched a new magazine, interviewing Patrick Collison, one of the benefactors but also one of the visionaries behind the Progress and Abundance movements. And it just really felt in that event like momentum was building, and a bunch of us wanted to do it again, expand the tent, and democratize the effort.

So, going into this year, we went from 6 to 15 co-hosts. I think last year's headcount was something like 250 people. This year, we've got almost 600 people. And, like I said, there's honestly 100s more people who want to come.

So, I don't know exactly where this thing is going, but it really does feel like a significant groundswell of folks who want to show up in person — like you were saying, Steve — who want to gather and see each other and meet each other and celebrate Abundance victories.

And also, I think, hash out our differences and tensions across the ideological and political spectrum that spans Abundance. That's really my substantive interest in this event: putting like-minded and civically-minded people in a room together and hashing out our strengths and our weaknesses and our commonalities and our differences.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, it's a pretty huge leap, right? You had 6 partners last year. This year, it's 15. So that is 250%. You also mentioned that last year had about 250 people. This year, not only did you set out and go, “we're going to double that,” but then, you sold out well ahead of the conference and have about the size of last year's headcount on your waiting list!

So, you have about 300% of what you had last year, in terms of people that want to go, and will double it in terms of people who actually can go.

In terms of what people can expect and get out of the event — you've started this already — so, obviously, you go. You have fun. Obviously, you learn things. Obviously, you see people you've heard of and meet them.

But, you mentioned — and I thought this was a really interesting way to start — the idea of coming in from different perspectives. So, this is an event for people on the Left, the Right, the Center — every weird where in between —and I love that you mentioned this as a place to come together and be like, “all right, what do we agree on? What do we disagree on? And where are the differences and things that we can work out, merge, understand each other better?”

Those kinds of things. That can only happen when you do actually trust each other enough to be in the same room together and talk to each other.

So, I thought that was really exciting. In your world, in your life as an event producer, in this conference and everything you've done before: why do events? What does this do for people?

You've named a few things. I'm just curious about the power of events? It's a lot of work! Why do this work?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

You know, part of the reason you're talking to me about this is because, not wholly unique among the co-hosts, but particularly among the co-hosts, Breakthrough had the talent and infrastructure and the team in place to throw a conference.

Again, that's not sort of an exclusive strength of ours, but it's something that we have done — and, we think, done well — for well over a decade, is put on events. We've got an events team. We've got relationships with vendors and all the software that that goes into throwing a multi-hundred person event.

And we had the interest and passion for this invigorating-but-challenging work of putting on a conference. And that comes from myself and my colleague Thia Bonadies, the Abundance Conference's Producer, working together for many years at this point, working really hard to bring people together who don't see eye-to-eye on things, and to hash out disagreements, tensions, differences, both in (hopefully) well-planned, well-staged, moderated discussions, but also in all the really important off-stage, informal conversations that happen organically at events.

Events and convening were super important to us at Breakthrough over the last almost two decades that we have been operating because we saw ourselves as offering and building a new philosophy for thinking about the environment and for thinking about the relationship between nature, humans and technology. And we couldn't do that just ourselves.

The staff of The Breakthrough Institute, we relied on expertise. We relied on feedback. We relied on Socratic discussion of the constituent parts of what became eco-modernism.

So, it was just really part of Breakthrough's DNA: bringing people together across disciplines and across differences helps shape and build momentum, but also disciplines a framework, a philosophy, and a movement.

And now, working with all the co-hosts of Abundance, and, you know, the co-chairs of the conference, Jen Pahlka and Zach Graves, and the program committee and everyone who has volunteered time and energy and money and financial support for the conference to make it what it is, I think reinforces to me that the value of bringing people together in person and forcing yourselves to create a program — to create a session on immigration or to create a session on energy Abundance or to create a session on overcoming scarcity in the US healthcare system — when you actually have to not only put your brain to that task, but put multiple brains and multiple institutional imperatives behind that task, you really force yourself to hash out what you believe, why you believe it, what the evidence base is for your policy or political program, and I think that's true across issues and across subject matters.

Obviously, I and we as organizers of Abundance 2025 are not the first persons to realize that workshops or colloquia or conferences are powerful in that way. But I think they are.

The last thing I would say about it is: I find myself thinking that events like this are increasingly important, actually, in a world where we have a fractured media landscape, no hope of building a shared info-sphere, and broken attention spans at the personal and institutional level. I think that we should do a whole bunch to combat all of that, but one of the things I think we should do is spend more time together in person.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Oh, I had promised myself we were coming up against the limit of how much we could talk about events before we got to energy!

But then, you mentioned, a really important point:

Events have always been important in politics. They've never stopped being important. But I agree: I think they're suddenly more important than they have been. You named a few reasons why, and I'll give a few more.

You named the fact that our society is fractured. We get news from different places. We get our worldview from different places. And the only way to reconcile those things, instead of living in different realities and fighting with each other from different realities, is to merge them by being in the same place at the same time and talking to each other. That's one part of this and our fractured ecosystem.

I would also say that's related to what we call our Loneliness Crisis, which is very relevant to YIMBYism and Abundance because it's very hard not to be lonely when you don't live near each other. When you live in your little fortress and you have to drive 30 or 40 minutes to see people you know, you end up being in these little silos. Events are a panacea for that.

And then, I would say, obviously, the online space has gotten a little harried and corrupted, and we're only at the start because — whether you love AI, hate AI, or, like me, sort of both — the world in which, I mean, you're just not going to be able to tell who on the internet is a person or not, right? Are either of us a real person or not? Or even, is this Alex and Steve, or did Alex and Steve outsource this interview to their representative AIs? Not right now, but I know people working on that and pitching that, right? Like, that's coming.

So, it seems to me that the only way to know that you are talking with a person and dealing with people and living in the world of people — and politics is just people — is to be with people and to be present with them.

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

I agree with all of that, Steve. And it raises, I think, a really interesting — philosophical tension might be too strong a word to use — but a philosophical tension for those of us who believe in progress, growth, and Abundance in the first place. Which is that we are all — broadly, maybe not maximally, but broadly, on average — advocates of progress, of technology, and of change.

You know, the whole premise of YIMBYism is that the existing community is not and should not be sealed in amber. And that, actually, dynamism and change and growth are part of what makes a community vital.

Same with energy, right? We are talking about the clean energy revolution, but the reality is that we have always been revolutionizing and rebuilding and building over our energy system. It's part of what makes us human. It's what makes us growth and science and Abundance advocates in the first place.

And I think — and again, this isn't unique to Abundance, but it is maybe particularly relevant to those of us so enamored of progress in technology - there is a kind of shared humanity and a shared community that, I think, all of us in society are increasingly treasuring and frankly anxious about as we talk about new media landscapes and as we talk about the hopeful — I agree with you — productivity boom from Artificial Intelligence and all the new tools and instruments and capabilities that we're developing with digital technologies, and as we talk about ever more globalized culture and economies and society, I do think there is a humanist — and, frankly, at times, "small 'c' conservative" — need to cultivate in-person interaction. To cultivate family. Tribe. Village. Whatever you call it.

And I don't really know what the resolution or the solution to that tension is, but I can tell you again that there is a demonstrated, mass desire to all get together in person and feel it and talk about it, including among a bunch of us who are generally very optimistic about technological change and about dynamism. I find that tension really vital.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, when we think about “political parties,” there's a word in there that I don't think gets enough attention, which is “party.”

Whether you want to do anything in politics or with people, you've got to throw a better party.

And this is a good start.

Let's segue, though, from this to The Breakthrough Institute and your portfolio. If I go on your website and look under "Our Work," you list five topic areas where you're saying, "hey, how can we use better policy and better technology to create better results, better results for the environment, better for the trees and the fish, and better for people in America,” right? “We can do better.”

One is Climate and Energy. We’ve been all over that. Nuclear Energy Innovation: we went all over that. Environmental Regulatory Reform, all over that. And then, you have two that I think are really interesting and that I want to spend time on today.

One of them is Food and Agriculture, which I don't think gets enough attention in politics in general and even in the Abundance space. I want to know more about eco-modernist and Abundant food and agriculture!

What do you mean by that?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Yeah. So, for our part as The Breakthrough Institute, we see ourselves as making the environmental case for industrial agriculture.

So, if you think about food and the environment or “foodie environmentalism” or the “slow food movement” over the last half century or so, Rachel Carson, one of the founding figures of modern environmentalism, was writing largely about the use of organic chloride, pesticides, and pollution from farm systems.

The concern and anxiety about the ecological effects of food production are really hard-coded into environmentalism. That mostly has manifested as an environmental movement in opposition to industrial agriculture and factory farms.

There's good reason for that! When you talk about industrial agriculture, you're talking about massive machines powered by fossil fuels. You're talking about synthetic fertilizers that are created by natural gas as opposed to created by waste products from livestock and from crop systems. You're talking about nitrogen pollution from over-application of fertilizers creating dead zones and rivers and waterways. You're talking about pumping up water from aquifers in the desert and growing crops in places like California — where, 400 years ago, if you had told the very few people who lived in California that the desert would one day be the nation's breadbox, it would've been shocking!

So, obviously, agriculture has enormous environmental impacts. By some measures, it has the largest environmental impact of anything that humans do. Something like half of the ice-free land on Earth is dedicated to growing food for humans.

Actually, the bulk of that is grazing land for cattle and other ruminants, and a huge amount of it is also for crops that feed cattle, as well as biofuels and food that humans actually eat. So, it's by far the leading driver of land use change around the world, much bigger than cities or even mining and minerals production. It’s a much, much bigger order of magnitude. Bigger than anything else we do.

So, the environmental concern about the agricultural system is well-founded!

Our point of view is that: all of the things that environmentalists have been telling us that we need to do to minimize our ecological impact from our food system would actually make it worse, when you do the math.

Organic food and organic agriculture use only organic fertilizers and pesticides, which lead, on averag — and this is a really robust finding in the empirical literature — to lower yields. So, you might have less pollution on a given acre of land, but you need more land to grow food, which leads to more deforestation.

If you compare synthetic versus organic fertilizers, to be a little reductive, you're talking about chemical fertilizers made in a factory using the Haber Bosch process versus, very often, cattle manure.

First of all, the synthetic fertilizers tend to produce less nitrogen pollution per area of application because you can be more precise. But, another thing to remember is that, for that cattle manure that that does go into fertilizing organic farms, those cattle were mostly industrially-fed cows!

So, the organic food system is really floating on top of the bulk industrial food production system, without which it couldn't exist. And, if you do all the math behind the assumption that you do produce all your food with just organic inputs, then you end up using over an India's worth of land extra in order to feed the population we have today, let alone the 1, 2, or 3 billion more people that we're expecting to live on the planet by later this century.

What we observe is that, yes, the environmental impact of the food system has been growing over the centuries and millenniums, but mostly because the population has been growing and we need to feed everybody.

In that time, the environmental footprint of an individual's agricultural demand has gone down dramatically. So, even I, with a 'high-up-the-food-chain omnivorous diet, the land that is needed to cultivate and grow my diet is 10 times lower than what it would've been for someone living a thousand years ago. It's 50% lower than it was for my great-grandmother.

So, even in the last one hundred years or so where we've seen the scale deployment of irrigation and synthetic fertilizers and synthetic pesticides and multimillion dollar, GPS-guided combine tractors and massive irrigation systems using pumped water from aquifers, we're using less land. We're actually using less water. We're using fewer inputs per capita to grow more food.

That’s the long and the short of our view on what sustainable agriculture should look like: it should look like we're economizing on land and inputs to grow more food, using less land, and sparing more of the land area and nature for wild nature.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

The history of food is addictively fascinating, and also, I think, at times terrifying. Check me on any of these facts and rein me in if we're going too deep on this, but I think of a number of things, right?

First of all, the fact that: the stuff we're growing — all of those fruits and veggies — the “natural stuff from the ground for humans to eat” is not natural! That's not “God-given!” The Garden of Eden wouldn't have had apples!

Fruits and veggies, as we know them today, are an invention. Humans made them. People in the Americas created potatoes and yucca and corn and tomatoes. It took a long time, but it's a human invention.

All of this stuff that we think of natural — and then you go to the world of fertilizer, right? For a long time in history, the best fertilizer was bones. Human bones. If there’s a battle near where you live and a bunch of people die, that’s terrific news! Go gather bones, grind them up, and that's going to help grow your food.

And then, post-1492, you get Europeans colonizing the Americas. And, in South America, they went, "Whoa, this is weird! Why are all these South Americans going to this island to harvest bird poop and taking it up to the Andes to grow potatoes?"

And then, they realized that: actually, bird poop is an incredible fertilizer. And then, you get things like the Guano Act in American law, which was, like, if we find an island with bird poop on it, we can claim it to harvest the bird poop to grow food.

And then, I mean, pesticides. You talk about pesticides as an invention and synthetic. It's also an arms race. If you don't use pesticides, your whole crop can be wiped out. That’s happened many times in the last few hundred years. But, if you do use pesticides, you haven't suddenly invented your solution for the future. The bugs learn, too. And, by next year or in the next couple of years, they've adjusted. So, you're constantly having to come out with new, escalating ways of keeping your food safe from the bugs as the bugs learn, too. That scares me.

I am very curious how you think about this. When you talk about using less land, is that stacking things? Is that artificial light? Meat? Do you like the idea of designer-invented meat? What do you see as the future and the right solutions for this kind of thing?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Yeah, I think that, given the scale of agricultural production and the range of productivity around the world and the stubbornness of peoples’ diets, we're going to have to do all of it and at least attempt to max out every solution set that you just mentioned there.

Just to go through a few of them: American cereal production — corn, soy, wheat — is two or three times more productive than the global average. If you got the rest of the world up to existing American standards — not sci-fi stuff, not vertical farms, not brand new sort of varieties, but just up to American standards — you would spare enormous amounts of land for other purposes, whether it's rainforests or grasslands or parklands. The other half of eco modernism is that we kind of want to intensify human production of nature to spare more and more of the planet for wild nature and for managed nature. So that, you know, that's one.

You mentioned vertical farms. You know, there's a lot of pessimism around vertical farms right now, partly because vertical farms need water and pesticides and fertilizers, just like any sort of crop system. But, they need way less of that because you can be much more precise with most of your inputs in, a vertical greenhouse.

What you need a lot of is energy. You need a lot of electricity for the halogen lights in your greenhouse. And that is just added costs compared to getting your light from the sun and the sky.

Now, there's a benefit there, which is that you can have the lights on all day. But, most plants don't actually want the light all day. Yes, food that we eat is mostly an invention, created by humans over eons. But still, most plants expect the sun to go down. Leaving the artificial sun on requires you to tinker with the plant itself in order to make it absorb all of that energy.

So, there's a well-founded pessimism for vertical agriculture for those practical reasons, but I do think that it has a future, particularly for leafy greens and some vegetables, like strawberries and tomatoes and cucumbers and things like that. Those are not a significant share of agriculture and humans' environmental footprint, but they are a particularly inefficient one.

If you look at the amount of calories you produce with an acre of lettuce compared to an acre of corn, it's almost irrationally different, because there aren't any calories in lettuce. We want to produce lettuce and we want to produce fresh produce greens, but if you're talking about efficiency of calorie production and land area, it would be great if we could figure out how to move a bunch of that produce and greens production indoors, where it uses far less land and water and fertilizer and pesticides.

That requires a lot of energy, in addition to decarbonizing the energy supply and powering these AI data centers and new critical minerals production. If we had ‘mega high energy Abundance’ from solar and nuclear and natural gas with carbon capture and all of the technologies that we'll talk about and that we've talked about before, you could do things like desalinate water for agriculture and for municipal water supplies. You could do things like vertical agriculture. And you could actually make those things economical.

You also mentioned “alternative meats.” You know, we have been advised not to call it “fake meat,” because consumers really don't like that!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Designer meat! Customize the marbling on your ribeye!

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Definitely not “in vitro meat,” which is another term of art. People are still figuring that out!

Alternative proteins, like the ones people know best, like Beyond Foods and Impossible Burgers, really took off thanks to impressive design and impressive science five or six years ago.

I think that they — Beyond and Impossible in particular — got a bit of a windfall from the pandemic, when people were stuck at home and they needed to buy a bunch of frozen food, and “there's this new, exciting food option in the grocery store!”

So, yeah, you're going to buy a bunch of fake meat. That didn't really last. There was a sudden rise and then a sudden decline in consumer interest in fake meat.

I think that's because, as good as Impossible and Beyond Burgers are — and I really do like the Impossible Burger, in particular — they're not quite as good, I think, is the general consumer sentiment, compared to a regular beef burger.

And, once you get out of hamburgers and chicken tenders, we just are nowhere close to producing a really good salmon filet or grilled shrimp or ribeye or chicken thigh or the things that people find really tasty and really care about.

Those are the kinds of things that require quite a bit of science to actually produce. I don't know if it's some combination of fermentation and 3D printing that will do it, but those are two of the main processes that these startups and scientists are exploring to actually produce tasty, edible, competitive, desirable protein.

If you did that, you would really minimize the significant environmental impacts from our food system!

Again, the biggest environmental footprint — maybe of anything in the world — is cows, who belch methane and who require a vast amount of land area for grazing.

Here again, I would say that organically-fed cows actually require more land area for and more inputs for a given amount of meat produced, just because finishing the cattle-raising process with grain and feedlots makes them bigger faster, so that they're brought to ‘slaughter weight’ faster and they spend less time belching methane into the air for a given amount of meat produced!

So, there again, there's an opportunity to accelerate the industrialization of cattle production to — relatively — lower its environmental impact.

But, you're still talking about an enormous amount of carbon and land area for feeding and producing beef! And so, there again, I think we need to both make more efficient our livestock production systems with the animals that we have today — which, not unlike the sort of fruits and vegetables you mentioned earlier, are an invention of the human species at this point, if you look at...

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah, they don't come like that! With all that fat. That's not how they came. We did that!

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Yeah, we did that! And, you know, I think it's a fair argument that it's our responsibility to have some stewardship and some dominion over that. We do have dominion over the lives of over a trillion animals, depending on how you count it, especially when you tally up all of the tilapia and shrimp and seafood that humans consume in a given year.

It's a really daunting challenge. Not just the ecology of it, but the animal welfare. I think we're going to need to, again, press on all levers to make these systems more efficient — and hopefully more humane along the way — while trying to crack that really tricky science and engineering challenge that would finally deliver scalable, sustainable, and desirable alternative proteins.

So, those are a few things across the sort of horizon of our food future!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Well, it sounds, Alex Trembath, like you were describing, a world where there's more food and less death and more land for people and less global warming, which sounds dangerously Positive-Sum. You can't think like that!

On vertical farming, as you mentioned, if you mention vertical farming, you might as well put a sign on your forehead that says, "dunk on me!”

You've talked about that having a lot to do with energy. And, obviously, you guys are in energy! So, if you get everything you want on energy — if we changed the laws and you could build nuclear and AI went through its booms and busts but at the end of the day they built nuclear and, maybe, one day, we take climate change as seriously as Richard Goddamn Nixon did more than a half century ago and build a bunch of nuclear plants across the US to make energy cheaper and the climate better — if you get what you want on energy, does that solve the problem with vertical farming? Does that become attainable then?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

I don't know what kind of thresholds there are. I’m holding out hope that with ‘hyper energy Abundance’ — like with solar farms and nuclear plants dotting the landscape (in my imagination of it, the solar farms will be a lot more visible than the nuclear plants, which take up far less space and you can kind of bury them under parking lot) and a lot more ‘hyper-Abundant’ electricity —I don't see why a certain amount of like greens and produce production indoors wouldn't become more economical.

It would surprise me, based on my surface level review of the scientific literature here, if we ever produce corn or soy or grow cattle equivalents indoors. But, I wouldn't bet against surprising amounts of innovation here, especially once you start talking not in years but in a decades and centuries timescale!

150 years ago, we might have known that the atmosphere was 70% nitrogen, but we still fought wars over bird poop in the Southern Hemisphere because there's this weird collection of dry islands where it just collected.

And then, as soon as Europeans industrially discovered guano, they started to run out of it, and scientists were scrambling to figure out, “well, there's all this nitrogen in the atmosphere, but we can't get to it.”

So, these scientists in Germany — Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch — got together and came up with the aptly-named Haber-Bosch process, which fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere into ammonia fertilizer.

Again, that would've sounded like gobbledygook and magic 150 or 200 years ago!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Still does!

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Still does! Yeah. When you actually start to talk about fusing two atoms together to release gobsmacking amounts of thermal energy and then turning that into electricity, these technologies are really magical.

I like to remind myself of that when I think not 5 or 10 or even 25 years down the road but 50 or 100 or 200 years down the road — not that I expect to be around to experience it. I do start to shed some of my pragmatism — and certainly some of my pessimism — around the agricultural and industrial and energy and urban processes that we take for granted today.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hey, maybe one day, maybe soon, the world will look like the cover of the Abundance book.

Which I thought should have had more skyscrapers, but they didn't ask me!

On your website again, we talked about a couple things: ‘Climate,’ ‘Energy,’ ‘Environmental Regulatory Reform,’ ‘Nuclear Energy Innovation.’ We've talked about ‘Food and Agriculture.’

You also have ‘Energy for Development.’ And your headline on that page is, "Confronting Green Colonialism and Western Hypocrisy."

Very spicy! What does that mean?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Energy for Development is our way of talking about energy and agricultural development in low and middle-income countries.

Our policy proposition there is that, due to, again, a misguided environmentalist impulse in international aid and global development, there have been legal and non-legal restrictions made on investments in energy infrastructure and food systems in poor countries for decades and generations.

There have been bans on hydroelectric fossil fuel and nuclear energy investments by places like the World Bank and the European Development Bank and the Overseas Private investment Corporation and other multilateral finance organizations that were created to help accelerate industrialization, labor force expansion, and technology transfer in the poorest parts of the world.

We have placed these restrictions on the types of technology, energy, and infrastructure that would really allow our poor neighbors in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia and Latin America to have access to, while still enjoying those technologies ourselves!

If you look at the US energy system, we use everything. We've got 20% of our electricity coming from nuclear. We've got another 20 odd percent coming from wind and solar. We've got 40% coming from natural gas, 7% or 8% from hydrogen, and the rest of it coming from a little bit of coal and geothermal.

Most of those technologies — at least until recently, when there's been reform movement to fix what we considered a pretty great injustice here —most aid and development finance have been restricted for most of those technologies.

So, our Energy for Development program has been focused on fixing that by engaging lawmakers in Congress and engaging the rule-makers at places like the World Bank and the European Development Bank and other multilateral finance institutions, and also by emphasizing the really central importance of energy infrastructure to economic development.

You know, there's this other model of energy access and international aid, which says, "if you just install solar panels and micro-grids in these poor villages in poor countries, then you're providing energy access and you can leapfrog over the fossil fuel industrialization that we benefited from in Europe and East Asia and the United States and beyond.

Our view there is that: that will not work. It is better than not to have a solar panel on your home, and it's better than not to have a clean cook stove in your home, but what drove economic growth and improvements in human welfare in every country around the world is urbanization, industrialization, and agricultural modernization. And those require lots and lots of energy.

And — to put a fine point on it — lots and lots of oil and natural gas.

Maybe a lot less coal than Germany, the UK, and the United States used, fortunately. But we're still using quite a bit of oil and natural gas in the United States, and we've been arguing for a very long time at this point that it is one of the more screwed-up injustices in the world that we're telling the poorest people on the planet that we're going to restrict access to the same technologies that we still benefit from.

So, that’s, in a big nutshell, what our Energy for Development program is focused on.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, in terms of oil and natural gas, it seems like there is almost a carbon investment — like, a dirty energy investment — that's needed in order to have clean energy.

Which is to say, if you want wind turbines and solar power and all this stuff, some amount of the manufacturing for that does take the dirty, shitty, crappy oil and natural gas.

And so, if you want to reap the benefits of clean technology, there is a very short term sacrifice in order to have the "return on investment" of a better, safer world and climate later.

Is that right? How do you think about where the most polluting energy sources factor in today and in the coming decades? What's the right way to think about how that fits into a wider and greener system?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

There's a couple of angles on it. It's a really well-formulated question, Steve. You actually stumbled upon the right terminology there, which is a term called “EROI,” or "Energy Return on Investment."

EROI is an attempt to calculate all of the input energy that goes into producing an energy-producing technology and doing a cost-and-benefit calculation.

So, if you have a solar panel that produces however many megawatt hours of electricity over its lifespan, how many megawatt hours of electricity went into producing that panel? And that (which is a large surplus) is your EROI.

But, the size of that surplus is different from technology to technology.

So, on the one hand, you're very right that we do actually need significant amounts of industrial energy. Electricity in particular, but also the steel and concrete and glass and copper that go into producing nuclear reactors and solar panels and wind turbines and batteries.

We need energy to produce those raw and engineered inputs in the first place. And, we need fossil fuels still for most of the stuff that we do, as far as we can tell.

There's a push in energy and climate spaces to electrify everything.” Which, directionally, I think is a great goal. If you can electrify vehicles and furnaces and boilers and stoves and ovens and things that currently run on gasoline or kerosene or natural gas, then you can plug everything into the grid and build lots of solar and lots of nuclear and run our homes and our personal vehicles with electricity.

The problem is that: that's a minority of what we use our energy for. Most of the energy we use goes to the industrial and agricultural and bulk transportation systems. Those are still heavily-reliant on especially oil and natural gas, not just for fuel, but for process input.

You need coal to produce steel, at least at scale right now. There's startup arc furnaces to try and use electricity to create steel and similar innovative designs to produce low carbon concrete and low carbon glass and things like that. But, at the moment, the best way that we know to produce steel and copper or to produce steel and glass and plastics and other petroleum inputs and other petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals is using fossil fuels as an input. And, meanwhile, using natural gas, especially for when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing on our electricity grids.

Now, we're attempting to solve that whole terrain of problems. We are getting better at building and deploying batteries that can store excess renewable energy for when the sun goes down and when the wind isn't blowing for a few hours of the day.

We're trying hard to make longer duration energy storage economical. We are working on electrifying technologies that currently use kerosene or gasoline. We're making progress in some places, like with thermal heat pumps and with electric vehicles — Tesla and Rivian and all these things.

But, it's really hard, you know? That's really the upshot for me at the end of all these conversations, is that this is hard, not easy. There's a hard industrial and engineering and policy challenge that will mostly happen pretty slowly.

We see really exciting and increasingly visible signs of progress. You can see Teslas out in the world all over the place, at least here in the Bay Area right now. You can see solar panels. I hope, in the not-too-distant future, we start to see, if you drive to the right place, really cool geothermal drilling sites.

I hope that we start to see micro-reactors sort of dotting the landscape, and that more of this decarbonizing infrastructure becomes visible and exciting to us.

Really, you're talking about — to your point, Steve — the next rung up the energy ladder. And it just would not have been possible and would not have been feasible to, for example, do the Manhattan project without industrializing first! It wouldn't be conceivable to create fake meat if we hadn't figured out how to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere.

So, to the original impetus behind your question: telling poor countries that they can't rely on, not just those fossil fuels, but those processes —and telling them that they can just leapfrog directly to solar panels on their rooftop to power a cell phone and a light and maybe a cook stove — I think is just profoundly unjust, and also really misunderstands the nature of economic growth of energy systems and energy transitions and the nature of climate action and what decarbonization is actually going to look like.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, this has been an amazingly fun conversation.

I'm once again honored to spend time with you and to get to hear about the Abundance Conference and the meaning of events in politics and food and agriculture and justice in climate and energy technology for the world.

As we come to a close here, I'm curious: The Abundance Conference is about to happen, and it's also sold out! For anyone that's either finding out about it in this episode or was, like, "oh, I was going to go to that! What do you mean it's sold out?" — (that's scarcity, Alex!) — for anybody who is interested now: how can they make sure they go next year? How can they follow along? How can they get involved? How do they plug in?

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

Get on the waitlist! Follow the website. We'll be sure to keep anyone who signs up for the wait list appraised of future gatherings and future events.

And then, beyond that, I would literally just go and sign up for the newsletter of all 15 co-hosts, who will talk about the future of the Abundance movement and the future of any Abundance events, including the Conference, but not just the Conference.

I would also say that, if you're in New England a couple weeks after Abundance, YIMBYTown is just a few weeks later (for our housing listeners)!

And that, if you're in the Bay Area, there's a Progress Summit in Berkeley (which I believe also has a waiting list)!

I hope that all of these events continue and take place in much taller, more capacious buildings in the future. There are a bunch of really cool institutions where you can follow along now.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Amazing. Alex, thanks for spending time with me today! I'll see you in a couple weeks! Thanks for joining us on Radio Abundance!

Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of The Breakthrough Institute:

I'll see you in DC, Steve! Thank you so much for having me on again! This was great!

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