Radio Abundance

Congressman Jake Auchincloss helped launch YIMBY Democrats for America and Radio Abundance by joining us on our premiere episode alongside Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Secretary of Housing & Community Development Jake Day. Less than 6 months later, Congressman Auchincloss joined us at in Washington DC to explore his new op-ed on Charter Cities, in which he wrote:“Building new cities next to productive cities is the “have your cake and eat it too” of economic development. “Having your cake” is agglomeration. Adjacent hubs generate the interactions that drive innovation, which increases productivity, which boosts wages. “Eating it too” is affordability. A new city can build housing and infrastructure at the scale and speed necessary to produce enough supply to drive down costs. This benefits not just the denizens of the new city, but those of the existing one, too, since housing markets are as regional as labor markets. Over the long term, new cities can become links in a new economic geography, radiating economic opportunity inwards from the coasts and forging a more geographically inclusive nation.”Along the way, we also talked about one of Congressman Auchincloss’ most important issues: the attention-fracking of America’s children by social media companies by what Congressman Auchincloss calls “digital dopamine.”Read the op-ed here, and enjoy Congressman Auchincloss on Radio Abundance! Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

This month, Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed a new Executive Order to increase housing production and affordability in Maryland. Secretary of Housing & Community Development Jake Day joined Radio Abundance in Washington DC to answer your questions about the new Executive Order, from what it entails to how they plan to enforce it to what we can expect to see as results.Secretary Day joined us on the same day that we interviewed both him and Congressman Jake Auchincloss at the DNC in Washington DC — two of three guests from our premiere episode double-header. With only Governor Wes Moore missing from a reunion special, Secretary Day brought a special message from Maryland Governor Wes Moore for all YIMBY Democrats across America:“Hey, Jake, please give my best to the YIMBY Democrats! It’s crazy to think it’s been just 5 months since that first episode we did together. How funny that you’re getting the band back together with my man Jake Day and Congressman Auchincloss. I’d be there with you if I wasn’t literally launching my re-election bid today! You’re in great hands though, and together with Secretary Day, we’re making sure that Maryland leads in addressing our housing crisis, Building America, and championing Progressive Abundance. We got this.”Here’s that clip:The “Housing Starts Here” executive order:* Directs the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development and the Maryland Department of Transportation, in conjunction with the Maryland Department of General Services, to identify specific state-owned properties for transit-oriented development, paving the way for more homes for Maryland families to be built through improving the use of state-owned land.* Promotes government efficiency by reducing state permitting timelines, bringing more homes to market faster while improving the transparency of jurisdictional housing production.* Creates a new state housing ombudsman to act as a liaison between the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development and other state agencies, local governments, developers, local communities, and other stakeholders to assist in the permitting process—ensuring development projects continue without delay.* Directs the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development to work with local jurisdictions to create housing production targets for the state, each county, and each municipality with planning/zoning authority. The production targets are to be published in January 2026 and updated every five years.* Establishes annual Maryland Housing Leadership Awards to recognize jurisdictions that make progress on their housing development goals. The awards give jurisdictions bonus points that increase their competitiveness when applying for funding programs through the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

This interview is our most harrowing and disturbing interview on Radio Abundance yet. It was chilling to edit. Two days before Charlie Kirk was assassination in broad daylight and President Trump announced that anyone who had ever called him a Fascist was “directly responsible for terrorism,” Congresswoman Laura Friedman sat down with Radio Abundance host Steve Boyle to lay out the case for why Trump was pursuing a march to Fascism and how she faced the ever-present threat of political violence. This interview from September 8th, 2025, serves as an important historical artifact of the mood and stakes in this nation even before Kirk’s murder, untainted by the ferocious and dangerous discourse that has followed. It is worth your time. Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

This July, Radio Abundance host Steve M. Boyle returned to London to commemorate the 20th anniversary of surviving Al Qaeda’s 7/7 London Underground Attacks by visiting Parliament at the invitation of Chris Curtis MP and Labour YIMBY organizers.On July 10th, Chris Curtis sat down with Radio Abundance to tell our American audience how he and the UK’s Labour Party are pursuing Abundance across the pond. Take a listen! Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

New York City has 3 major pro-housing initiatives on the ballot that NYC New Liberals Political Director Tibita Kaneene thinks might be bigger than City of Yes. As we speak, however, NIMBY elected officials are mobilizing with dirty tricks to protect their own “member deference” vetocracy-of-one, a practice that Congressman Ritchie Torres called “municipal feudalism” on his own episode of Radio Abundance.We’re in the midst of a few high-intensity weeks, so we’re shipping episodes right away and backfilling transcripts later. We wanted to give you the auto-generated transcript, but there’s too much “Chiyose” and “Zellnir Meiri” to be legible. If you’d like to help us clean up and ship transcripts faster, reach out to us at Team@YIMBYDemocrats.org! Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

This episode was filmed on Tuesday, September 2nd. With Radio Abundance Host Steve M. Boyle on a flight to DC, Radio Abundance Los Angeles Host and newly-christened Executive Director of People First California Zennon Ulyate-Crow pinch hits to lead a special conversation with Jon Lovett, the co-host of Pod Save America, host of Lovett or Leave It, Cofounder of Crooked Media, and former speechwriter for President Barack Obama.Pod Save America were gracious enough to welcome us into their studio for this special episode of Radio Abundance, where Zennon got to ask the question that’s been on everyone’s mind: Jon, how did your brain not break listening to that? And how much longer can we have a Democratic party if our “Progressive champions” are intent on minimizing affordable housing and flipping the House and the Electoral College to MAGA for a generation?Get the answers to these questions and more on this episode of Radio Abundance!Thank you, Pod Save America, for letting us film this special episode of Radio Abundance at your studios!We’re shipping this timely video right before we leap into the Abundance 2025 Conference in Washington DC. We will backfill the transcript in the coming weeks! Enjoy the discussion, and make sure to catch the original! Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:Hey, everybody. Welcome to Radio Abundance. My name is Steve Boyle. I'm the Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America, and we are live on location in London today with Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North. Chris, thanks for joining us on Radio Abundance!Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:Thank you very much for having me! It's great to be here. Well, it's great for you to be here, I suppose, is probably the better way of putting it? Thank you for coming to this great city and chatting to us!Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:I mean, it is a tremendous honor. As I mentioned the other day at the Labour YIMBY Summer Party, it genuinely is the honor of a lifetime, no matter what happens from here on out, because I'm not in London to hang out with you — that's very fortunate for me — I'm here because, 20 years ago, I survived the July 7th terrorist attacks, and it felt very important for reasons I could hardly begin to explain to be back here for the anniversary. And it turns out to have been because, a couple days before coming, the Labour YIMBY folks reached out to me and asked me if I wanted to do a podcast with them. I said, "You're never gonna believe it: I'm coming to London!" They said, "You're never gonna believe it. We have, like, 10 things booked that week. Do you want to do all of them?" And so we have gotten to meet each other, and here we are sitting down together.Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:Yeah, it's very good to have met you, and very good to form these Trans-Atlantic partnerships to beat the scourge of NIMBYism and hopefully get both of our great countries building again, because it's the only way we can start to solve the problems that both our nations face.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:I mean, it is incredibly exciting, right? Our nations are family members. And, you know, families bicker from time to time. But that's a family, right? You have a kid. You raise the kid. The kid gets older and says, "I want more agency." You say, "I don't think so." Kid says, "I think so."Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:Who's the kid in this?Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:We're the kid! You're the parents. And, eventually, we've got to leave the nest. And then, after a little time of tension, we become quite close again. And have been ever since.Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:Yeah, I mean, if you follow the analogy to its end, eventually you are going to be caring for us. I'm not sure how I feel about that!Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:I think we've done a lot together as nations, from supporting each other in democracy to defeating fascism, and if we can help each other to build, that's fantastic.And what I mean by help each other really is to learn from each other. Because I think the best way to go about this — the best way to help each other — is to share information and also case studies. So, I'm excited that we get to do that today, because even for our very wonkish and worldly audience, there's things you know about the UK and there's things you don't.I think most people will be able to name your Prime Minister and the last few as well. They will have knowledge of certain UK scandals and historical developments. I'd be surprised, though, if a lot of people know what Milton Keynes North is. Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:A massive shame that is.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:Well, tell us about it!Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:So, Milton Keynes is probably one of the places in the UK that would feel most familiar and at home to an American visiting.We have these things that are incredibly rare in the UK, actually, which is roads that run straight. We have a grid system like you have in DC and lots of other places. And that is basically because it is a New Town. A New City.I'm the first Member of Parliament -- it's the same age as my mum -- I'm the first Member of Parliament that was born and grew up in the New Town, now City, of Milton Keynes. It's got a population of about 300,000. It was built and designed by the 1960s Labour government, who saw the massive housing shortage that the country faced and realized, particularly here in London, that we needed to start building new places and new settlements to live in.AMilton Keynes was the biggest and most successful of those places and has consistently grown ever since. Over the past decade, we've been building between 2,000 and 3,000 homes every single year. We are on a trajectory to become a city of about 500,000 over the next 15 or 20 years.I think what's most exciting is: we built this new settlement, now this new city, where so many people have made their home, but we've also built a massive economic success story.It's halfway between London and Birmingham, two of our biggest cities here. It's also halfway between Oxford and Cambridge, which are big university cities which I'm sure many of your audience have heard of. It's slap bang in the middle of all four of those. So, it's got really good connections to all of those places. And, partly because of that, it's got a real thriving economy.We've got a massive growing tech sector. Robotics. Loads of other exciting stuff going on. More startups than almost anywhere else in the country. So, anyone that's coming over or looking to invest in the UK, please do consider it, because it is a really exciting, vibrant place and somewhere that I'm determined to continue building and ensuring that kids growing up there today can have the same fantastic start in life that I had growing up there a few decades ago.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:Let's just double stamp something you said. Before we even get to your role in Parliament, how UK housing law works, and how you're trying to change that: you mentioned that Milton Keynes is a New Town. Which is to say, in the thousand year history of your nation — you can correct that; I know there's several pieces to the United Kingdom and maybe you have different ideas of where they begin. I'm going Battle of Hastings; we can refine that — Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:We're getting the Bayeux Tapestry coming over! That was announced this week.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:Ooh.Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:We've already gone off on a tangent! The French are sending us over the Bayeux Tapestry for a little bit next year. Come back and see it!Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:It's a dangerous precedent for you if we're starting to return artifacts to different places…Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:I refuse to comment!Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:But in this long history, not so long ago, your people in government said, "Hey, you know this place where there is nothing? There should be a town here. We will build it." And you're not the only one!So, I'm very curious: you started to allude to this, but, man, I think an American audience would be interested in why that decision was made in and how it was executed, right? Was it just the government building things? Was it a public private partnership? How did this work?Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North:It was a big government decision, and it was far more government-led and executed. It was a Development Corporation, as we call them, that was set up, which is a publicly-owned organization. It had compulsory purchase powers.My great, great grandparents were farmers on the land. They had their farm compulsorily purchased off them by the government in order to build it. So, it was a level of forcefulness and government control. A lot of it was private money still. There was a lot of private capital that was invested in it, but it was a lot more government-centered and government-focused than you would necessarily do today.It was just because there was such a determination at the time to break through the housing crisis that the country faced. I think what was also interesting about it — obviously, kind of having a quite well planned city was quite interesting, and you talk about the grid system and everything else — but it was also being able to start from scratch. Picking what was effectively a lot of farms and going, "Let's build something here" really allowed for innovation.So, they built entire housing estates to look at how, if you build in slightly different ways, it can lead to homes that use less energy, because there was a fuel crisis at the time. Thinking about how to build far more efficiently, so that you can get more bang for your buck with building.We learned so much through the process of building as well. Actually, we — the government in the UK — is now thinking about repeating this process with a series of more modern New Towns. And what's interesting as part of that process that we're going through is looking back to the New Towns of the past, particularly Milton Keynes, and thinking, "What did we get right? What did we get wrong? What can we learn from them to ensure that the places that we build in the future can be even better?"And that's quite exciting.!Like, actually, we talk about building and development and the things that it achieves in new homes, whatever. But actually, this idea of building somewhere new — and the innovation and what you can learn from it — I think is also really exciting.Stay tuned for the next chapter of our Radio Abundance interview with Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North in the United Kingdom, filmed in London. Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: Hello! My name is Zennon Ulyate-Crow. I'm here with Radio Abundance, live in Los Angeles. Sitting right next to me is Jon Rawlings, running for Council District 3 in Los Angeles.Jon, want to tell me a little bit more about why you're here today?Jon Rawlings, Los Angeles City Council Candidate:Yeah, so we're here at the Sepulveda Stop of the Orange Line. We're reacting to City Council yesterday voting to oppose SB 79 to build more housing near transit. We thought this would be the perfect place to do it because behind us we've got what I think is a Chevron gas refinery and an empty parking lot on the other side. And this seems like the perfect place that we should be building housing.Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: Can you tell me your first reactions to the Council opposing SB 79 and what you would want to do as a Council Member to support building more housing near transit?Jon Rawlings, Los Angeles City Council Candidate:Yeah, I mean, my first reaction is obviously disappointment. We certainly need bills like SB 79 to build more housing around transit.But my second reaction was: I expected it. This is a City Council that has traditionally always said "no" to more housing, no matter what that looked like, whether it's a state bill or something on the local level.So, as a City Council Member, I want to get to a City Council that says "yes" to more housing, especially around transit. That feels like probably the most obvious place we should start with building housing.This station right here is actually the site of where they're planning to build the new Sepulveda Pass transit corridor, which is a train line that's going to connect the Valley to the West Side. You're going to be able to get from here to UCLA in 9 minutes.Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: Why is the LA City Council opposing building more housing in places like this?Jon Rawlings, Los Angeles City Council Candidate:Well, we've seen City Council tends to listen to the loudest voices, even though that might not be indicative of the population of their districts. And those tend to be the NIMBY, wealthy, single family homeowners. And you'll hear standard terms like, "oh, we want to maintain control of our city and the way that we do things, and we also don't want to change the character of our neighborhood."But, for those of us in this space, we know that that's just BS and that just means they don't want to do anything. They want to maintain their control, and that means not building anything.Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: As a Council Member in CD 3, what would you do differently for your district and for the City of Los Angeles as a whole when it comes to housing and transportation policy?Jon Rawlings, Los Angeles City Council Candidate:Yeah, for me and my district in CD 3, we definitely could use some more building around transit and commercial corridors as well. There's definitely some opportunities along the Orange line and even along Ventura Boulevard to build more housing, bring in more density, and create more walkable cities.In terms of transit, I would very much be an advocate for the Sepulveda Transit Corridor and building heavy rail down there, as well as other, you know, bus lanes and bike lanes and other transit-oriented development and just transit means of getting around the city.Zennon Ulyate-Crow, Host of Radio Abundance LA: If there's any way that people can help out with your campaign, what could they do the most to help?Jon Rawlings, Los Angeles City Council Candidate:Right now, it's getting the word out. So, follow the socials for sure. Just look up Jon Rawlings (J-O-N & Rawlings like the baseball company) to follow me on social media.If you're interested in volunteering, you can go to the website JonRawlings.com to reach out. Or even DM me on Instagram!I'm available, and we're looking for volunteers and people that want to get the word out about good candidates that support transit and housing! Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

The following conversation was featured on Radio Abundance, Episode XXIV: The Cut Red Tape for Housing Act. Laura Friedman is a United States Congresswoman from California and a member of both the Build America Caucus and the YIMBY Caucus.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:Congresswoman Friedman, welcome to Radio Abundance! You’ve been on Radio Abundance before, but this is our first-ever live episode!We got an early scoop that this bill might be coming and chatted about doing an emergency podcast today to be timely, and we thought, "hey, as long as we're going to talk to you anyways, let's do it live and try a new format and see who shows up!” I mean, we're going to have the same conversation either way!So, this is a lot of fun. We're extremely excited to talk to you again, and we’re also extremely excited about the new bill. And always extremely excited to try a new, fun, live format.United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:Yeah, it's exciting! It's kind of edgy. I like it.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:Super edgy…United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:Dangerous!Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:As is this bill, maybe? A little bit? Dangerously helpful?I'm going to ask you about it in a second, but I want to set this up both for the audience and for you. First of all, you have been on Radio Abundance before, so for anybody that wants to know your origin story, how you got here, or how you think about this: go there! Today, we're going to talk about the bipartisan Cut Red Tape for Housing Act.And what I want to say to you is: you know, we have folks in our listener community who are maybe the foremost experts in their field in this sort of thing, and also folks who are coming to this movement for the first time and trying it out and seeing if they like it.So, I bring that up (and talk so much off the bat) only to set up that, in a moment, I'm going to ask you, "What is the Cut Red Tape for Housing Act?" But, I actually want you to tell me twice. First, I want you to tell me for somebody who is joining this movement and curious and inclined to it. The layman's big picture. High level.And then, I want to both liberate and encourage you to get real deep in the wonky details here. Because, I promise you, this is the space where you're going to be rewarded for that level of nuance and statistical precision.So, with that intro done…Congresswoman Friedman, what is the Cut Red tape for Housing Act?United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:What this bill does is: it makes all infill housing categorically exempt from having to do a NEPA review (a review from the National Environmental Quality Act). That would mean that, if you're building housing that has federal money in it—(Because housing that doesn't have federal money generally does not go through a NEPA review unless there's certain things happening in terms of its location or its impact on an environmental resource. Generally, your infill housing in an existing city like Los Angeles or Boston or Memphis wouldn't have to go through NEPA unless it was receiving some federal funding.)Generally, those projects are Affordable Housing that have pass-throughs from the federal government, often through the state, which trigger the NEPA review. That's a review that can take 12 months. It can take 15 months. Generally, they're approved. However, they take time, and they cost money: usually a couple hundred thousand dollars for Affordable Housing projects that already exist on a financial knife’s edge in terms of making projects pencil.So, we want to get rid of that amount of time that these projects are being stalled. We've heard stories from developers about losing financing or potentially losing financing because of delays with NEPA reviews. Certainly, $200,000 could go back into creating more units, a better building, and lots of other things rather than doing a duplicative environmental review that's generally going to be approved anyway.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:This does remind me a little bit of some of the action in California. We just had Michael Tubbs on the podcast. He's running for Lieutenant Governor. As he spoke a little bit about CEQA reform, he mentioned, "if you've done a report before and the squirrels were fine, they're probably going to be fine even though you've changed the project a little bit."That principle of “we've actually already checked, and we don't necessarily need to rerun the whole process” -- I think it's interesting.United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:And, let's be clear: this bill only impacts infill housing. It has to be a site that's already been developed. We're not talking about going into a city and taking a park or a community garden and then, without doing any looking at environmental impact, building a building.We're talking about taking a parking lot or an old donut shop or a strip mall and redeveloping it as housing. That should be, generally, an environmental positive, not an environmental negative! Because, of course, if you don't build the housing near jobs and schools and businesses, you end up building housing oftentimes in actual green spaces out in areas that haven't been developed before.So, there should be a net positive to the environment from these projects. There's no reason for them to have to go through NEPA, especially since they're going through other environmental reviews. We also exempted projects that would require the demolition of a historic structure. And, as I said, these are previously developed lots that are in urban areas.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:I do think this is such an important point for the movement as a whole to keep coming back to, right? Which is: if you love your suburbs — and even more so if you love your rural area — the best way to protect both is to let dense areas be dense! Right? The densification of the suburbs and rural areas, perhaps some of that is population growth (for however much longer that lasts), but quite a lot of that is people being exiled from cities that are not pulling their weight.So, this kind of infill housing, where you've already got places that are developed and that are fairly dense and that are a very natural place to build more housing — it seems ridiculous to stop that, and thank you for taking away some of those ridiculous barriers!Let's define infill for a second. I am looking at the fact sheet, and it says, “either 75% of the site's perimeter adjoins parcels developed with an urban use, or 75% of land within a quarter mile radius of the site is developed within urban use.” So, that's how we're defining the proximity to a relatively dense urban environment. Then, I'm seeing “no larger than 20 acres, located on vacant or underutilized land that was previously developed for an urban use.” So, that is how we are defining infill. And you mentioned the demolition carve outs?United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:Yeah. We wanted to make sure that we addressed any concerns that people might have going in as we introduce this bill. We want to not miss something that might lead to objections. We want to make sure it's a net positive for communities.And so, we use a lot of the definitions that are in the new California law for CEQA exemptions for infill housing as a viewpoint and as a guide because they went through a year-long process of being in discussion with environmental groups and with cities. I'm never one to miss taking material from people that have done their homework! And it seemed like a perfect time to introduce NEPA reform.I've worked on these issues for my time in the California legislature where I served for eight years. I have worked on and done my own bills to reform CEQA (which is the California equivalent of NEPA), particularly with an eye towards housing.So, I've worked in this space, and when I ran for Congress, a lot of what I talked about was bringing that same work to the federal space and looking for the opportunities to do streamlining and make our processes make sense and not be barriers to the things that we need.We know what we need to do, and we need to do it quickly. That's what this bill is about.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:It seems like — and it's shining through this conversation — you've both written a bill that is designed to have an extremely positive impact, but also a bill that you think can pass. That's ringing through how you've learned from California and learned from what I might call handling objections ahead of time. I am curious how you see the politics and future and timeline of this? IThis is a bipartisan bill, so I'm curious about Representative Edwards: his interests and your relationship. I'm curious, especially for folks who maybe aren't deep Congress watchers, what are the chances of passage? What is the process? How long might that take? I'm curious how you would game out the road from here.United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:Well, I only got elected in November and got sworn in in January, so I'm still learning a lot about this process! But I'm very encouraged by having bipartisan support. I'm part of a new caucus called the Build America Caucus, and so is Representative Edwards, so he seemed like he was a natural person for me to approach. He had questions about the legislation, and I'm really very honored that he chose to join us and co-lead this. It's great to be able to have support from across the aisle already because, if you don't have that in this particular Congress, it's very hard to get legislation passed!That gives me a lot of hope that we can get this through. Now, I know that, in Congress, they are looking at doing permit reform across the board. But, I also wanted to make sure that we did something that was specific to housing and that did address legitimate concerns that people have around the environment. I'm not sure what shape that permit reform bill is going to take, and I think it's important from the environmental perspective to introduce legislation that, yes, wants to move housing forward quickly, but also respects legitimate environmental concerns, which is why we did a bill that had guardrails around it and includes exemptions to the bill. It includes NEPA review for things like historic resources, travel resources, and greenfields.I don't know if we're going to get that in the permit reform bill, but I'm hoping that, if they see this bill, that maybe they will adopt this bill into whatever they're doing. Or, this bill can stand alone as its own piece of legislation. As long as it gets passed into law and we remove these barriers and get rid of this red tape that is so needless and really slowing down and costing more money to Affordable Housing developers, I'd be happy with any way that we get that done.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:You know, I want to ask you about the environment in a second because that looms heavily here. I want to know how you would frame for everybody what NEPA is and the background of the National Environmental Policy Act. And, of course, and this came through in the last podcast we did together, a huge amount of your motivation here — and, I think, this movement's motivation — is to do right by the environment. And to stand up and raise our hands when there is an environmental law that is hurting the environment.So, we will talk about that in a second. But I want to quickly ask you about caucuses. It was very interesting to me when you mentioned that being a part of the Build America Caucus with Representative Edwards helped you identify him as a potential bipartisan partner — and, frankly, the importance of being bipartisan now, and that, for passage, if Republicans are going to be in the majority, you kind of need one of them... I bring that up because we have talked to both Congressman Harder, who founded the Build America Caucus, and Congressman Robert Garcia, who founded the YIMBY caucus. It is so cool that these caucuses exist, and it's also, like, okay, now what? What does that mean? What does a caucus do? Here, it sounds like you've already named one very specific function, which is just to identify and connect you with allies to get stuff done. So, I am curious for a second what those caucuses existing has meant for the work? As somebody who's joined one, what does it mean for you? What does it do for you to be a part of that?United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:For me, it's a couple of things. It's certainly a signal of my priorities and my values to be a member of both of those caucuses. But, more importantly, it does show me right away who my allies are when it comes to this work.And so, we were able to very quickly secure a co-lead who is a Republican co-lead because we went to members of the caucus. Hopefully that also gives him the trust that I have similar goals. And then, I'm hopeful that the caucus will get behind the legislation and come on as co-sponsors and that we will have a whole group of legislators pushing together.You know, it's a new caucus. And I'm new to Congress! But, it's my hope, too, that the caucus itself has a package of bills (this being one of them) that we put forward as caucus bills. We haven't had that conversation yet because we're so new and people are still introducing their legislation for the year, but I would love to see the Build America Caucus and the YIMBY Caucus start to have a package of bills that are known to be caucus-supported bills.I was a member of a couple of caucuses in the California legislature, and we did that every year, where we had our core bills and then we had bills that we supported. It was very helpful for people to know what the values were of that particular set of legislation. It helped for people on the outside who were stakeholders (for instance, people in the Abundance movement) to know what the key pieces of legislation are and what to focus their attention on. Because it takes a village. It takes people on all sides pushing for legislation to get through.And when you have that, those people coming to legislators all around the country and saying, "I heard about this bill. This would help get Affordable housing built in your district. I'm a stakeholder in your district. I'm a resident. I want to see this pass,” it just gives them one more reason to vote yes.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:I find it very cool when you reflect on the idea that you are new in Congress, telling that story of: you're there and you know what bills are good, but now you actually do have to figure out how this works — both interpersonally and logistically — and how to get stuff done. Maybe I don't watch the right TV shows, but that to me is cool to openly acknowledge that! As somebody who has lot of policy chops who now has got to figure out how you're going to get results in this new space: who's helping you? Who do you go to? How do you find out how to get stuff done and be effective? Who feels like your ally and mentor in Congress?United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:Well, certainly my amazing team! You know, when I was interviewing people to be on staff, having these goals and an understanding of housing policy and a desire to see more housing built — and not just housing, but more clean energy, more energy transmission, all the things that we need to live a better life and to make things more affordable for people — was key in my mind.I purposefully brought people on that were YIMBYs, to be honest about it, both in my district office and in my capital office. So, that's a big part. That's the start, because I have people I can sit around with and talk about ideas and who are looking actively for ideas to help with this movement, as you put it, and this goal. And also, I have certainly folks in my district that I know from my work doing very similar legislation at the state level in California. I have a housing advisory group, and several of those people are folks that advise me on a lot of the legislation I did around parking reform and ADUs and everything else that I've worked on and want to keep working on.And then, in the legislature, of course we have the representatives you mentioned. Robert Garcia, Josh Harder. There's a whole bunch of people who also really lean into this issue. And it's growing. As the housing affordability crisis is growing around the country, we see more and more members of Congress wanting to find solutions.Housing is becoming unaffordable in places where even recently it was affordable. Young families today don't feel that they will ever be able to buy a home. That's a fundamental change from the way things were 20, 30 years ago. Maybe even 15 years ago. This isn't just California policy. It's not just Los Angeles policy. It's really national policy.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:Looking at this bill: I have fact sheets and everything I've been able to consume today in the last couple hours, but I do not have the text of the bill. So I'm very curious about the scope of both the bill and about NEPA in the sense that, in a lot of the chatter today, a phrase that keeps coming up is Affordable Housing. That phrase is not, though, in the fact sheet, so I am curious if you can flesh out for me? Both in terms of NEPA generally and also in terms of this reform. We've talked a little bit about what it applies to and doesn't in terms of infill and urban areas and previous uses and things like that, but in the spectrum of Affordable Housing and who's building the housing, what is in scope and not in scope?United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:Unlike CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, which affects — even though single family housing's categorically exempt and housing kind of is and kind of is not through a whole patchwork of exemptions — it's a much broader review process, whereas NEPA is limited to projects that have federal funding.So, you're generally not going to be talking about your market rate housing unless they're in the context of a larger project that has some federal funding. You can imagine — I'm just going to throw it out — like, a baseball stadium or some project that has some federal nexus or federal funding. Or, more likely, a train station or a piece of transit infrastructure that might have housing attached that might trigger a NEPA review because of the federal funding. A regular market rate apartment building does not go through NEPA. The projects that go through NEPA are ones that have some federal funding — any federal funding — and that's generally affordable housing, meaning housing that's built with federal subsidies and then rented through covenants to low-income individuals for reduced rent and for rent that would be cheaper than they could get from market rate housing. So, that's why we refer to Affordable Housing, because this is generally going to help with the creation of subsidized affordable units.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:Can you handicap for me what to expect in terms of the creation of subsidized affordable units in the coming years? Not even in terms of what this bill makes possible so much as the appetite of the federal government right now to build subsidized affordable units. And, if we win (in what is a very long time from now), can you gauge for me, numerically, the past, present, and what you might expect from the next few years in terms of the actual appetite to build subsidized, federally-funded affordable units?United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:Well, it's hard for me to say because I don't communicate directly with this Administration…Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:You don't text them?United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:You know, the Trump Administration, it seems to me that they are not very keen on funding housing in general, and they've made overtures at closing out Section 8.Certainly for the things that keep tenants in place and a lot of the programs that come through our CDBG financing that are meant to assist tenants who are on the verge of homelessness, they've made a lot of overtures towards cutting these programs. And I can tell you, from speaking to our local housing authorities, they're really, really afraid of the impact on homelessness from X-ing out a lot of these assistance programs.You know, we're still working on the budget for this year, so it's hard to say what's actually coming down the pipe. I also have not been able to really take the temperature of the majority party's interest in funding subsidized affordable housing.And look, you're not going to subsidize housing your way out of our housing crisis. And not everybody qualifies for subsidized housing. You have to be low-income under certain definitions to get into one of these units. But, on the other hand, there's definitely a subset of the population that needs extra help and that's not going to be able to afford a lot of market rate housing.You know, folks coming out of the prison system. People who are in recovery. People who are severely disabled. A lot of our seniors end up on very, very fixed and low incomes and can't afford market rate housing in our more expensive urban areas where they grew up and where they have their connections and their ties.So, there's a lot of people where subsidized housing is really a lifesaver. Recent immigrants. You could point to a lot of populations that need that kind of housing. We used to have a better system to create it in California through our redevelopment agencies that paid a lot of dividends back in terms of also redeveloping blighted areas and polluted areas. But we lost that when the state got rid of that particular tax increment method of financing housing. So now, developers are cobbling housing costs together through a series of tax credits and other federal programs. And so we really do need an expansion of those programs, even while we encourage market rate housing, which we also need because there's a lot of middle class people who also need housing and who are being priced out of the market!So, there's going to be different strategies that we need to employ to get the housing that we need. And subsidized housing is definitely one of them.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:You know, JD Vance and I text each other on Signal all the time, and he's told me very clearly that he thinks that once we deport all the illegal immigrants and then all the legal ones and then all of the citizens that made fun of him, housing prices will go down, so I think we'll be fine…But, it does occur to me that, even if the Trump Administration builds nothing in the next few years, there's still two giant ramifications to this bill and passing it now, even if the Administration doesn’t take advantage of it. Which is to say: a future Democratic Presidency, while picking up quite a lot of pieces, will be able to build. As somebody who says “Yes in my backyard!” to both market-rate housing built by the private sector and housing built by the public sector, that excites me. You are making that easier for a future Democratic President. But also, I think of the message this sends to states. Whether that's California or New York or Illinois or any states that are thinking about reforming right now, this is another little dent in the universe and crack in the dam, showing that the momentum is on our side and that this is the right thing to do from a policy perspective.So, even if Trump is not helpful here, it does seem like the signal this sends and the future it sets up is also valuable in addition to the immediate impacts and potential this bill unleashes. United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:Yeah, I mean, you've got a law here that's a good law with NEPA. But, when it's spilling over and creating barriers for exactly the kind of housing that everybody says we need, which is affordable housing for low-income people, seniors, disabled, and others, for no reason — for absolutely no environmental gain that anybody can point to — we're reforming that law. This bill will lower the cost of developing affordable housing. It will speed up the process at a time when we know we desperately need this housing to keep people from slipping into hopelessness.This will make it more affordable. That money should be going into these buildings. It shouldn't be going into hiring consultants to write environmental reviews that have already been done through other processes. It's completely red tape. It's the kind of red tape and bureaucracy that everybody hates.So, I think this bill's a no-brainer. It should be easy, and I'm hoping it will be. Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:Very nice. I did promise we would tee you up on the environment. So, let's get into this now:We are talking about the reform of an environmental law, and we have pretty strong feelings about how this will help the environment.Give us a sense of the stakes of this and the impact you think this will make? Why, in terms of outcomes and values and morals, is this the right thing to do for the world we live in?United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:Sure!This makes it easier to build on previously developed infill sites, sites in our cities, and on land that was already developed and needs a new use. We've got a lot of those around our communities. Often they're blighted. Closed. Rivers of concrete. Closed strip malls. Obsolete office buildings. They're eyesores, and they can be magnets for crime and blight. This would speed up the process of turning them into something that we need, which is places for people to live. It's a benefit to our cities. There's no downside! It's certainly not harmful to the environment. But if we don't do it, we know what happens. Not only do more people struggle with affordability for housing, but also people face homelessness. And, when we do build, if we don't allow building in our cities and in infill sites, people will build in places that haven't been developed before, and that's when you have real environmental impacts. That's when you're building on land that's habitat or on land that's covered in trees, out in the suburbs, where you have to now drive much further from your job, causing polluting air, car congestion, and all those things that suburban development outside of cities creates.I'm an environmentalist. And I'm a huge supporter of environmental laws. And I am not a supporter of suburban sprawl. It's un-environmental! It's a terrible use of land! It causes traffic, congestion, and smog. And it eats up precious open space and habitat for animals who are already struggling.So, this makes a lot of environmental sense. And it's my hope that environmental groups will support it on that basis.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:Sounds like a lot of bad stuff is caused by not building housing! We should probably build housing!United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:Look, at the same time that I've authored numerous bills to speed up housing production at every level, from new market rate down to affordable housing, I have authored key bills around wildlife connection, connectivity around habitat protection, around biodiversity, around reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and clean energy. To me, it all fits together. I don't see these goals at all as being at odds. I think that, if you care about the environment, you should care about building the housing we need in the right places, and you should also care about better ways of moving people around that are more sustainable than individual car trips.I think that it's a triad. We should all be thinking about that. If you're thinking about the environment, you should also think about where you're going to grow your cities and how to do it in a sustainable way and how to move people around. So, I think we need to be thinking about these issues much more in a holistic way.I've done policies to try to link that. Just to go into the Wayback Machine from a few years ago: when I worked on parking reform, to me, it was about the environment. It was about better ways of supporting public transportation, using land better, and building the housing we need, all in one piece of legislation.So, I look at this in very much the same way. It's about taking away an environmental review that is actually stopping something from happening that's a huge net benefit for the environment.NEPA is a great and groundbreaking piece of legislation that we should protect. But we should also, as environmentalists, be very clear about fixing the things that aren't working about it so that it can't be weaponized against the environment and repealed!If you're thinking strategically, the last thing you want to do is have a nonsensical use of NEPA that its opponents can use to justify getting rid of it.My attitude is: it's a great and important piece of legislation. Let's fix the things that we know need to be fixed so that we can protect the parts of NEPA that we absolutely need to protect our environment.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:Hey, don't think for one second taht I was going to let you get out of here without plugging your work on parking and cars!Folks, if you're watching this or you're hearing about Congresswoman Friedman for the first time, I think you're going to like what she's done before on parking and cars…You know, I was once talking with a member of Congressman Scott Peters’ team, and they called him an “OG YIMBY.” So that has entered my vocabulary, and I would say that Congresswoman Friedman is an “OG” and an innovator and pioneer of the Parking Wars.I've got to get you out of here, so, look, give us a couple seconds of final thoughts? And also, where do you go from here? I mean that literally: this is announcement day, literally where do you go from here?United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:Well, I would say that, number one, my message for the movement is to create a big tent. I've had a lot of success at bringing environmentalists on board with this agenda. I come out of the historic preservation world, so I'm always careful to respect the goals of people who love old buildings and want to retain the character that really important old buildings give. I've worked on preserving buildings like the Cinerama Dome and the Capitol Records building and the Case Study houses in Los Angeles, and I don't see that at all being at odds with creating the landmarks of the future. So, rather than throw rocks at each other, let's bring these movements together — the I Love Buildings movement along with the environmental movement, who understand that we need to have these coalitions and find ways of building consensus and moving forward.We've been able to do it in California with a lot of success. And, by the way, working also with our friends in the labor movement, who also are incredibly important to bring on board, so that this is a benefit for all of these major stakeholders. That would be my closing message! I really appreciate your having me here today. It's exciting. When I got the invitation, I was really excited! And for those of you I don't know, it's nice to actually meet you! We are going to be announcing more housing bills. We're working on a package of really cool housing bills, including one that's even bigger than this... So, stay tuned! A lot more to come!And that's a teaser… You're not getting another word out of me on that!Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:Look, I've got to build hype, too! So, long as you let us cover that with you, we'll do the tease and the whole hype and buzz process, and we can let things trickle out when the time comes…We are honored and flattered and blown away that you would carve out 30 minutes of a pretty important day to spend with us and dive into this and give us your perspective, both as an innovator and a pioneer in making Abundance happen and also as somebody who's truly accomplished on this and is fairly new in Congress and now is making it happen and learning the ropes and getting stuff done.So, this has been super cool. Thanks for joining us on Radio Abundance! Onwards and upwards and on with your day!United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:Thanks so much! Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe

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! Get full access to Radio Abundance by YIMBY Democrats for America at radioabundance.substack.com/subscribe