A Grand Green Compromise?

Could we marry the center-left Abundance movement with the GOP's drive for a Fossil Future?

This column is all about a dirty word.

If you’re easily offended, take a Xanax before going any further. Are you ready for the dirty word? It’s “compromise.” This seems far removed from our polarized reality, but indulge me in a thought experiment.

After 18 years of ever-more nonsensical radicalism, there are a few smart people on the Left asking hard questions and suggesting practicality. It may present an opportunity for the right, to make a mutually-beneficial compromise on a subject that matters: energy.

What I’m referencing is far short of a groundswell on the left; we’re talking about a little colony of pundits at this point. But it’s a start – and maybe, if it spreads, my party could find a few people with whom we could work.

Think-tank types call this “the Abundance movement,” sparked by a book written by liberal journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. It’s a #1 New York Times best-seller and for good reason: it says something new.

It reminds me of the waves Alex Epstein made on the right with his brilliant book Fossil Future, in 2022.

After a crushing defeat for their party in November, the introspection into the failures of liberal governance by Klein and Thompson is well timed. They wonder why California has failed to build a mile of high-speed rail despite a decade – and billions of tax dollars – of trying. Florida, meanwhile, started and finished the Brightline Rail with private money in far less time to connect Orlando and Miami.

Klein and Thompson ask why it’s easier to build a solar or wind farm in almost any random red state than in the blue states that are the holy lands of the climate politics religion. They’re frustrated that the National Environmental Policy Review Act adds what they see as environment-damaging delays to renewable energy projects. They accept America needs an abundance of housing, and more importantly, energy, and they reject what they call a politics of scarcity that has overtaken the presumptions behind the Democratic Party’s price-averse economic platform.

If “the Abundance movement” is catching on among Democrats, Republicans should test them out and try to strike a deal. To let them save face, we should name it something they can embrace. Let’s call it the Grand Green Compromise.

I know my right-wing readers now have their thumbs tenuously on their screens at this point and are just a few neuron firings from swiping out of this column. Bear with me.

We only have 53 Republican votes in the Senate and would need 7 Democrats to help pass anything on energy. We’ve beaten all the pro-energy Democrats except maybe John Fetterman. To pass any legislation, we need a few fossil and nuclear skeptics to overcome a left-wing filibuster. Why not fish with fresh bait?

The conservative movement is evolving but an unabashed belief in growth endures, as does universal agreement on the right that affordable, abundant energy is essential to it. It is what led us to defend “clean coal” for decades and growl “drill, baby, drill” in unison at our political conventions. It’s not that we love pollution; it’s that we understand the math of risk-taking is more do-able when the price of BTUs is low. Populists, ascendent in the GOP, know high energy prices screw working people more than venture capitalists; not just roughnecks and pipefitters, but old pensioners whose electric bill eats up a third of the monthly fixed income.

President Donald Trump understands this every bit as well as the two Republican oilmen who occupied the Oval Office before him, and he’s married it to his foreign policy in a more muscular way than they did. “American energy dominance” is Trump’s pillar. Not just independence, but dominance – in keeping with his America First outlook. This desire, and the rightful urgency he demonstrates to disrupt what’s broken, calls for a deal. And who better to preside over a huge deal than the guy who wrote the book on it?

A Grand Green Compromise would conjoin Trump’s America First ambitions with the nascent Democratic awakening to the need for abundant American energy. It could take the shape of a 10-year permit-palooza. Savvy centrist Democrats would be asked to agree to statutory fast-tracking the permitting of pipelines, transmission lines, refineries, nuclear plants, offshore and public land drilling leases, and Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) export terminals and foreclosing any possibility of lawsuits to stop them.

To win over 7 Democratic Senate votes, and co-opt some Democratic governors, Republicans would agree to fast-track the permitting of wind farms, solar arrays, and geo-thermal projects and to plow research dollars into the mass battery storage facilities. As a sweetener, Republicans could even agree to toss some nickels at the yet-unbuilt EV charging infrastructure that Democrats covet for the Teslas they’re suddenly again proud to own.

We’d take energy politics out of the culture war and into the sphere of economic collaboration.

We would get an America that has the electrical capacity to host the servers that will power the world’s A.I. revolution, and perhaps steer it away from the most dangerous potential outcomes.

We would cripple Russia and its malevolence by driving the global price of oil under $55, the tipping point for profitability in Moscow’s aging portfolio.

We would have the geo-political upper hand over China because we could ship cheap LNG to power the developing world and demand its loyalty to the U.S. in return.

American energy dominance, Trump’s platform, is a good outcome for the security of the free world. Fast-tracking it, on the front end of the insatiable global appetite of our A.I. future, is a one-time opportunity.

Democrats – even those who are being reflective like Klein and Thompson – have not yet come around to un-hitching from their fantasy of a decarbonized world. But they should, putting their full confidence behind their belief that, long term, technological advances are on their side.

If we marry the overdue realization on the left in Abundance with the grounded realism in Fossil Future, we might come up with a center-right Grand Green Compromise that MAGA can love.