alanzibel.bsky.social
Personal account. Trying to do the right thing and make the occasional joke. Former WSJ, AP & more. Now at @publiccitizen.bsky.social. (No, I don't actually have a mohawk).
307 posts
2,535 followers
2,311 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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well aware of Rothstein! and have been a YIMBY for years
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i forgot pritzker. Him too.!
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my overarching complaint with the abundoids is that they mix up what's a state/local responsibilty and what's a federal responsibiity. i don't understand why that's good policy or good politics.
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yes. one more example of how abundance is state & local policy & very little to do with federal policy. No clue why Ezra & Derek intentionally sought to confuse the matter. They certainly know this.
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exactly right! especially in CA, with CEQA. i think ezra talks about CEQA being invoked for UC Berkeley housing, which is just nuts but doesn’t seem to be a national problem at all.
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sure sounds good. there’s really not much of a debate about what progressive housing policy is. that’s a much more generational fight than an ideological one.
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and if you listen to the Demsas/Jenkins podcast, Jenkins notes right off the bat TX has tons of wind & solar resources in areas without much other stuff! the TX anti regulation culture is only part of the story.. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/g...
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there’s just a lot more to this stuff than Ezra & Derek are presenting
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This abundance debate is an internal Dem feud. i’m sure Biden admin had people on both sides.
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housing YIMBYs in state legislatures are overwhelmingly progressive Dems. And the IRA was direct outgrowth of progressive campaigns. It moved to the center by the time it came law to get Manchin & Sinema‘s vote.
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TX oil guy politics changed a lot after fracking but the roots of their power market seem to have evolved out of an effort to bring more renewables on board! Remarkable! So the red good/blue bad thing seems a bit off to me.
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and i’m not, like, a george w bush fan but even as president…. www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/p...
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keep in mind that all this stuff got going pre fracking boom in a dime when Saudi oil dependence was a bipartisan concern.
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i hadn’t seen that … i would argue, from having talked to folks in our awesome @publiccitizen.bsky.social Texas office, that the Texas renewables boom is not a “neutral” laissez faire policy but an intentional effort to promote alternatives to O&G. It sounds weird but it’s true.
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never been there but apparently it’s quite windy in west texas !
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TX and CA have both built a TON of renewables over the part 25 years, taking different politics approaches. It’s not really airport book material but important to understand how that happened
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it’s just so much more complex than that. One issue holding back renewables in the mid atlantic is that the power grid operator, PJM, is captured by big utilities and spans so many states that it’s hard to control. TX and CA seem to have more power over their grid operators.
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Electricity policy is super arcane. Siting, permitting, power grid market structure, NIMBYs all have an impact. Renewables are huge in Texas, mainly because of policy choices made by George W Bush and Rick Perry, not MAGA GOP. also huge in CA, which took a different electricity market approach.
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Housing and energy are very different policy areas, with so much complexity and nuance. It’s really good airport book to claim that they’re the same thing but it’s not intellectually honest.
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I’m a housing YIMBY and have been so for years. None of this is new or revelatory to me. NIMBYs suck. We have tons here in Maryland.
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people stereotype a lot and don’t really understand what enviros and consumer advocates do. Ezra’s take is way off on many things that he didn’t fully report out or understand.
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uhhhh what do you mean specifically.
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national environmental groups are not the obstacle there! overwhelming support for transmission.
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just saying “permit energy” is … not good environment & energy policy. Certainly most environmentalists do want to speed up wind & solar & battery storage to the greatest extent possible. Other issues are huge, such as interconnection with power grids (major problem with that in east coast)
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well, i think permitting policy should depend on whether the energy source is harmful to human health or not! nobody ever got asthma from a wind farm or a solar panel!
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Yergin does run the leading fossil fuel industry conference….
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This is exacerbated by fact that Abundance folks don't really offer anything as a substitute. They just say "get rid of bottlenecks." But when you do that, you create immense risk of adverse (if inadvertent) consequences. I.e., expanded & at least further entrenched fossil fuels.
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the thesis seems to extrapolate the politics of very progressive communities to … everywhere.
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eg the big NY yimby housing bill didn't die in the state Senate, where a variety of Dem insurgents hold unusual sway, but in the establishment controlled Assembly
broadly I think many non-leftist Dems with unusual policy preferences have a deep misapprehension of their alliance with party leaders
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Would it be a Republican budget if it didn't have handouts to big oil?
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Importantly, there is NO evidence of political interference in the economic data produced by BLS, Census and BEA. Rather, this is about gradual erosion in the quality of the data through underfunding, staff attrition, etc.
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Matthew Yglesias identifying the Democratic Party's electoral issues: school closures during covid, "paralysis on women's sports" and "candidates running on late-term abortions"
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good to know & sorry about the inside joke. welcomefest is this thing www.salon.com/2025/06/04/w...
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And then they just openly lay out that gutting federal environmental review is just the first step - next is stuff like the endangered species act (yeah I hate those species) and the guest Bagley talks about having to slice off environmental laws like they're an invasive vine? (not endangered sadly)