Renewables are the key to preventing resource scarcity, argue European leaders, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, whose bestselling book Abundance became one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2025 and launched a political movement dedicated to what Klein calls “a politics of plenty.” The logic is straightforward and appealing. Solar panel costs have fallen more than 90% since 2010. Wind power costs have dropped by 70%. Battery storage prices have collapsed.
If governments would simply clear the regulatory obstacles to building solar farms, wind turbines, and transmission lines, the abundance argument goes, clean energy would flow so abundantly that fossil fuel dependence would become a choice rather than a necessity. “The miracles of solar and wind and battery power,” Klein told the Long Now Foundation, “have given us the only shot we have to avoid catastrophic climate change.”
