Matthew Yglesias on Abundance and the Politics of Energy

**Jason Bordoff** (0:04)
It was always the case that the cost of energy was a big deal. And I think for a long time, people in the green world had sort of convinced themselves that this wasn't really true. You know, that they looked at this kind of very abstract polling, that like, you know, people don't like oil companies, or people are very worried about climate. And they were like, ah, you know, so they want more aggressive climate action. And people sort of do want that. But they care a lot about the price of things. Abundance and affordability have become buzzwords among policy makers these days, often triggering sharply different interpretations of how to attain them. To some, an energy abundance agenda means fewer regulatory barriers to produce more clean, cheap power. Others, however, question whether the narrative glosses over the hard trade-offs around land use, community concerns, or environmental impacts. Yet even as data centers, surging power demand, and rising electricity costs dominate public discourse around energy today, the way we talk about decarbonization and mainstream politics has changed radically. So what have we learned from major climate policies like the Inflation Reduction Act? And what does the trajectory of these policies say about the durability of climate politics today? My guest today argues that energy policy can't be siloed off as merely a climate issue, contending that clean energy progress is far more politically and economically durable when it's tied directly to economic growth, industrial capacity, grid infrastructure, and affordability rather than a narrative of consumer sacrifice.
This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I'm Jason Bordoff.
Today on the show, Matthew Yglesias. Matt writes the slow boring newsletter about US politics and policy on his substack, and he co-hosts The Argument podcast. His most recent book, The Rent Is Too Damn High, is about the policy origins of the middle class housing affordability crisis in America. Matt joined me to discuss political lessons from the Inflation Reduction Act and how progressive Democrats are responding to surging demands for energy infrastructure. We dive into what a pragmatic abundance agenda looks like in practice, and how to handle the massive power demands of AI without burdening consumers, and where climate and energy policy is trending in today's politics. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Matthew Yglesias, thanks for making time in August holiday season to join us on Columbia Energy Exchange for the first time. Great to talk with you. Really glad to be here. I think a lot of people, but maybe not everyone listening will know of you and your writing, but just help people understand what you do. Sure. Punditry, journalism, all of the above, and the scope of how you spend your time. I've been a journalist for most of my career, but kind of opinion-y journalist, doing magazine-y stuff, columnist stuff. For the past five and a half years or so, I've been writing a newsletter called Slow Boring. I also, they've been telling me I need to tout my new podcast, The Argument with Jerusalem Demsas. Everyone should check it out, going on other podcasts.
Good promotional plug. I'm trying. I'm trying to get better at promotion.
Doing opinion writing mostly, I mean, I'm very interested in a wide range of things, and something that strikes me about the energy space is that, at least on the Democratic Party side, there's tended to be a siloing of economic policy is handled by one set of people, and energy has been handed off to a different set of people who are like the climate people. And energy is just too important, I think, to silo off like that. This is not like a small niche like how are we going to handle endangered woodlands where you can just say, okay, we'll kind of cordon that off, right? Because energy is the fundamental building block of everything that happens in the economy, which then also means that the politics of everything you do are going to get noticed, right? It's not going to fly below the radar. If you're hoping to have an actual impact.
So part of what I've been trying to do as a generalist is get people to integrate across foreign policy and national security, across economics, across politics, and really think about what are we trying to do here? As we have a set of people who want to make big changes to address climate change. But I think we need to do that in a way that doesn't break the politics of Western democracies, in a way that doesn't wreck the economy that we are trying to preserve, and that hopefully actually makes a constructive positive impact on the climate issue rather than banging our heads against the wall with stuff that doesn't work. Well, if Slow Boring doesn't work out, you should come lead our development and fundraising team because that was a perfect explanation. Now, I mean, I'm saying it in jest, but 13 years ago when I started the Center on Global Energy Policy coming out of the National Security Council, what you just said was and remains the rationale, which is the only way to understand energy is to connect the dots across economics and economic development and national security and geopolitics and climate and sustainability. And if you only think about energy through one of those lenses, you inevitably fail because energy has to be about all of those things simultaneously. I remember Megan O'Sullivan who you know, I do a lot of my writing with, something like five years ago wrote in the New York Times, if energy reliability, affordability, security suffers in the course of the transition, the first thing that's going to evaporate is support for a transition. Absolutely. We have seen some of that. And then you're laying on an additional element of politically what works.