13 Comments
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Virginia Postrel's avatar

It's a side point, but you are blaming baby boomers for the follies of their elders, including Ralph Nader, just as they too often get credit for the accomplishments of the so-called Silent Generation (https://vpostrel.substack.com/p/the-most-misnamed-generation). The people who pushed no-growth housing measures in California were significantly older than the boomers at the time. Insofar as boomers caused these problems they did it by triggering the anti-growth backlash among their elders (https://www.vpostrel.com/articles/how-i-caused-californias-housing-crisis-2). Sam Hall Kaplan, the LAT architecture critic who served as a cheerleader for the anti-growth movement, is 90 years old. That's the age of boomers' parents.

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Brian Chau's avatar

That's a fair point. It's important to assign blame correctly, and it's absolutely true that many of these policies pre-date the boomers, even if their cultural advance is popularly associated with the boomers.

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Andy G's avatar

It seems to me you are both correct.

Even though some of the policies pre-date Boomers, they have been entrenched and defended by Boomer elites.

You are 100% correct to decry Boomer environmentalists.

I would take it one tiny step further. the minority of them who are pro-nuclear might at least be sincere in their AGW catastrophism. Still wrong, of course, but sincere.

The large majority who are anti-abundance and cite AGW as the reason, but are not only not pro-nuclear but rabidly against it, deserve even more derision than you grant.

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Avery James's avatar

The book is explicitly addressed to Democrats who like to read, and the point is to convince them that Democrats should move a bit in a a supply-side direction on energy and housing. From that specific standpoint, the book is fine. In fact, one could argue Abundance is to MAGA as Adlai Stevenson was to McCarthyism. Not in favor of it, but not attacking it the way the small and frustrated left-wing would prefer.

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Andy G's avatar

It seems to me BC’s point is not that the book is harmful.

His point is that center-left Dems refusing to punch left is what’s harmful.

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Avery James's avatar

Yes I was wrong and hadn't finished the book upon trying to argue this. Upon further reading, I tend to agree with Brian that it is an incomplete manifesto. Unfortunate.

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Rob F.'s avatar

Great take

I completely agree that there needs to be 100+ Op-eds in respectable publications over several years making the "Boomer environmentalists are actually evil" case from the multitude of angles to which you allude and graveyard of defeated projects that were stopped in their tracks. Only then would you get the sea change.

Anecdotally I've seen a ton of good and important work defeated by the Sierra Club alone, but I don't think anyone has ever pulled things together so that someone who is approaching this for the first time and wonders "isn't environmentalism good?" would be able to see what the reality looks like.

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Desert Tortoise's avatar

I am a lifelong environmentalist and former climate scientist, but man do I hate the Boomer environmentalists. Their continued opposition to issues like nuclear power, fracking, and housing construction leads me to conclude they are not pro-environment, they are anti-human. Historically, there's no faster way to destroy the environment than to adopt communism.

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Daniel's avatar

Day of the hemp pillow when?

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Sian's avatar

I bet a hemp pillow doesn't even suffocate someone adequately.

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Mustafa's avatar

Idk how else to say this, but across your substack, you genuinely do not have any real insight to offer to anybody. None of this is even remotely interesting -- its indistinguishable from AI-generated content. It's completely fine to just share your opinions on LLM wrappers or whatever your startup does. Please stop contributing to spam on the internet.

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Mustafa's avatar

I don't even disagree with your points on Abundance. The problem is that they are so bland and obvious that it boggles my mind that you found it necessary to publish it to the world.

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Nicholas Weininger's avatar

Perhaps the right pithy slogan for an aggressive abundance-ism would be "They stole our flying cars!" It's true on a literal object level per Storrs, it's a synecdoche for a lot of other stuff that's true and important, and it seems like a pretty powerful image-- though maybe I am unrepresentative in that.

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