Highlights
The U.S. economy is the largest in the world, and delivers the highest standard of living to its citizens among major global economies. The U.S. nevertheless faces a number of challenges, many of which can be traced to flawed government policy.
Among the more pressing impediments to accelerating growth and prosperity in the U.S. is an inability to build. Between trade restrictions, prevailing wage requirements, zoning and other stipulations from policymakers, costs mount and opportunities for new housing and infrastructure dwindle. Central to this challenge are activists that impede progress in the name of a utopian ideal. Such maximalist thinking – which the progressive writer Ezra Kelin calls “everything bagel” liberalism – manifests in some of the more pressing drags to growth: energy and housing.
A current example: Activists are currently fighting energy production in states like Ohio and around the country. Specifically, earlier this month, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) and the Sierra Club pushed to shut down a power plant in southeastern Ohio. PESP is typical of a strain of activism in today’s left. While nominally a critic of the private equity industry, its members can be found embracing pro-Hamas messaging and communism. Joining hands with leftist environmental groups to raise energy costs is par for the course. The plant in question happens to be the largest coal plant in Ohio, and among the largest in the U.S.
At present, the U.S. relies on coal power for 16 percent of its electrical generation. Since the onset of the pandemic, energy costs have leapt 29 percent. These increased prices impact lower-income families disproportionately, with energy costs totaling 17.8 percent of such family budgets. While other energy sources are surpassing coal, lower income families, and a nation with significant and growing power needs can’t afford to shun 16 percent of its energy portfolio. Indeed, the plant the PESP et al. want to shut down is critical to the state’s power grid and the energy market.
Every energy source involves tradeoffs – from sourcing rare earth materials for solar to carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Among fossil fuels, natural gas is a reliably cleaner and, thanks to a revolution in natural gas production, abundant. In 2016, natural gas overtook coal as the leading source for electricity generation in the U.S. For rational policy observers, this should be a welcome development – a cleaner and abundant energy supply. But for the leftist movement, such positive developments are targets of opportunity. Indeed, PESP joined over a diverse array of over 100 progressive groups to support heavier regulations on fracking.
As of 2023, nuclear power has overtaken coal as the second largest source of electricity generation in the U.S, according to the EIA. Nuclear power generation is cleaner still than natural gas, but not for leftist activists. Indeed, PESP criticized one private equity firms’ ownership of a nuclear power plant as an example of ownership of “polluting assets.”
At every turn, as the U.S. transitions to a cleaner energy portfolio, leftist activists such as PESP can be found attempting to thwart progress.
This is consistent with other trends among progressive policymaking, such as housing. In many locales, housing markets are broken due to regulations that push up costs and restrict supply. Progressive activists can be found at the center of these debates offering ideas that would make housing affordability worse. Many of the same activists looking to make energy more expensive are likewise engaged in making housing more expensive – including PESP.
Policymaking inevitably involves some tradeoffs to achieve any given objective. A policy that seeks to do everything can accomplish nothing. The Biden administration’s Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program is a textbook example. The program authorized $42 billion in taxpayer subsidies to provide greater broadband access. Years after enactment, having been larded to the brim with progressive policy mandates and stipulations, the program hadn’t connected a single household to broadband internet.
Progressive activists are free to push impractical, unaffordable, and utopian policies. And responsible policymakers should feel free to ignore them.