PCL’s Capital Insider – March 2026

PCL’s Capital Insider for March 2026

“Abundance and Accountability: Are Communities, Democracy, and the Environment At Risk?”  A Review of PCL’s Recent Assembly Panel

Guest Commentary by Douglas Carstens

The PCL 2026 Assembly’s last panel of the day was “Abundance and Accountability: Are Communities, Democracy, and the Environment At Risk?”  (To watch the session, click here)  The answer that emerged seemed to be yes, the risks are there, but there are ways to guard against the risks by keeping our environmental protection and community participation laws strong. The Legislature in the 2025 session rolled back critical safeguards with bills such as SB 131 under the influence of what has been called the “Abundance Agenda.” That moniker refers to a 2025 book entitled “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, but involves so much more and started long before the book’s release and has been playing out on the national stage as well as in California.  The oversimplified takeaway a lot of people got from the book was that rolling back environmental safeguards, a.k.a. regulations, would make things such as the creation of housing, public transportation, and green energy better for California and the nation.  

Ebony Twilley-Martin, Founder of The Regenerative Leadership Lab and former CEO of Greenpeace USA, kicked off the afternoon with a powerful statement of how the word “Abundance” sounds hopeful and encouraging- everyone likes the sound of that- but it leads to the question of Abundance for Whom?  Who is left out, and how is abundance achieved?  

Ebony has done a compelling thought-piece called the Amnesia of Abundance, and she shared many of the insights from that article with us during the panel.  She described how, in talking about the attraction of abundance – where it outlines a world of easy growth and prosperity if regulations are pared away (or chainsawed away)- there is an amnesia in the form of a tendency to forget why the safeguards were adopted in the first place.  The protections for communities provided by requirements for environmental review and public participation in public decision-making are too easily discarded in the rush to deregulate.  What I would call throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  

Ebony talked about the Democracy amnesia- where communities may have a voice now, but taking that away is an erosion of democracy.  She identified the amnesia of equity- overlooking where we all should have abundance and feel safe.  She is dealing with a data center in her community and her son’s environmentally-induced asthma.  Risks and harms are socialized in one area, while profits are taken by others who can afford to live elsewhere.  “Regulation is not just paperwork- it is our voice, it is where democracy lives, it is accountability…. I am for abundance- but an equitable abundance where we are all able to prosper and live healthy lives.” It was such a powerful statement- I thought it was a mic-drop moment and was ready to send everyone home.  But there was so much more to follow. 

Next, we turned to Asha Sharma of Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability and Jen Genata of Communities for a Better Environment, both of whom work to protect disadvantaged communities in California. They turned the tables on the audience by calling for audience members to envision what an abundant and equitable world would look like and what prevents us from achieving it.  Audience members identified issues such as “money in politics,” “privatizing gain and socializing cost,” a “myth of unlimited resources,”  “private equity” (by which I took to mean that was a shorthand way of saying the pernicious effect of private equity making public goods such as housing and healthcare mere commodities to be auctioned off to the highest bidders and a higher power needs to help the less fortunate), the historic failure of governmental leadership to fulfill their statutory and constitutional obligations, “trees and all public things being treated as a resource,” loss of the commons, economic disparity fueled by burgeoning billionaires taking over media outlets and government at all levels.  Asha brought it back to the panel by pointing out that the book Abundance does not address the systemic reasons we don’t have abundance, and that no one had identified over-regulation as the root of all evils that have beset California and the nation today.  

Jen Genata described the experience of communities like Richmond and Wilmington that are living with legacy pollution and pollution-intensive industry citing decisions- decades of decisions that have left them at a disadvantage.  In the area around the former Exide battery plant in Los Angeles, soil lead levels reach 3000 ppm, where 80 ppm already causes serious adverse health effects.  So thinking about Abundance requires thinking about environmental health outcomes and what other burdens are in these communities before considering taking protections away or adding more burdens without review at all (as laws like SB 131 are doing, and the Chamber initiative mentioned by Corey below would do).  

I asked Jen if she could describe the Clean Up Green Up regulations in Los Angeles, because that happened to be a specific boogeyman identified in the Abundance book as an example of government controls gone overboard.  Jen described how Los Angeles requires that when housing is built within a certain short distance of a pollution source- such as a freeway- then air filtration or other methods to protect the people who will be living there are required.  Dylan Gauch-Lewis later pointed out how she had done the math and figured out that adding air filtration costs $100 per unit per year for upgraded filters- for a 100-unit apartment, that would be $10,000 per year. If it prevents one case of lung cancer per decade, it would break even, aside from also preventing lost work days and other impacts.  The difference that I could see was that the costs of air filtration installation might be paid by the developer of the housing (who is making a profit off the construction and might pass the cost on anyway), but the healthcare costs that are imposed at the backend on the people living in the housing are paid by them through their insurance or otherwise – those who could least afford it.  It comes down to a question of who pays?  The Abundance approach seems to favor shifting the cost burden off of the shoulders of the regulated community, such as developers, and shifting that cost burden onto the shoulders of the everyday working people who will be suffering the health impacts and undesirable outcomes of cheap construction next to pollution sources. 

After Jen and Asha, we turned to Dylan Gauch-Lewis, a researcher with the Revolving Door Project.  Dylan helped with a deep dive into the background of the Abundance Agenda, including its origins going back at least 8 years prior to the 2025 book.  It could be described as a marriage of the right-flank libertarian movement called Progress Studies and the centrist left liberal front, known as Abundance liberals or YIMBYism, applied across all policy areas.  Dylan traced how, in the early years of President Biden, supply-side liberalism crystallized around Build Back Better. In 2022, Derek Thompson coined the phrase “the Abundance Agenda” in an article in the Atlantic.  In 2023, Inclusive Abundance- the main organizing arm of the Abundance ecosystem lists lots of groups as part of the movement on its website, including the Cato Institute and the Pacific Legal Foundation. 

In 2024, there was an inaugural Abundance Conference, where Dylan provided a critique:  “Abundance is neoliberalism repackaged for a post-neoliberal world.”  subtitled “The new centrist push to regain control of the Democratic Party, with corporate money”).   For the panel, Dylan provided charts, plenty of citations, and several pages of URL links for articles and materials, with a good place to start being identified on her organization’s site here. The material notes the “push to deprioritize redistributive politics is increasingly out of touch with a political reality in which white-collar criminals and billionaires are looting the government for private gain.”

Next was Corey Brown, a longtime PCL stalwart.  Corey pointed out some strategies for a going forward basis.  The abundance agenda is an effort, in part, to co-opt the center left to support deregulation and is largely funded by tech and other industry billionaires, as Dylan delineated in detail. Its promoters largely ignore or dismiss the reasons why environmental protection and community participation laws were created, despite the significant damage that poorly regulated industries have caused to public health, air and water quality, and natural lands, or the costs that taxpayers and consumers have to pay as a result of the damage.  While the Abundance Agenda deregulation argument may resonate with some political insiders in Washington DC and the State Capitol in Sacramento, it is not a message the vast majority of Californians agree with. Voters care most about affordability and the health of their families, including having clean air and safe drinking water that doesn’t threaten their health and affordable natural lands they can enjoy. Few have read the Abundance book. Politicians who buy into this messaging are at odds with the vast majority of Californians who support a strong CEQA and want industry to be regulated to protect public health and the environment. It is important not to get distracted by the Abundance Agenda argument and to keep focusing on what Californians really care about. 

Next, we heard from Greg Weaver, a longtime reporter with Fresnoland, whom I have gotten to know for his good work diving deep into shady practices and questionable projects in the Fresno area. Greg mentioned Drop Site News- which, like Fresnoland, is an independent news outlet.  Fresno is famous- or possibly infamous- for the “Operation Rezone” scandal of the 1990s, where various developers and politicians (13 of them) were sent to prison for public corruption-related crimes as you can read here. As an aside- some things never change- or don’t change enough- and California has become known as a haven of public corruption more shot through with rottenness than places like Chicago or New York. “Over the last ten years, 576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.”  (NY Times, Aug. 29, 2024) Or maybe it is just that we in California have the tools to identify and root out corruption (with mechanisms like CEQA’s public participation requirements and the Brown Act’s government in the sunshine ideals) where other places are still in need of catching up. Or maybe California is targeted for more investigation. But I digress.  

Greg quoted the way Toby Haslett said, “the Abundance movement is ASMR for Democratic staffers,” with the ideas at the core of it being quite hollow. ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is soothing sounds, completely contentless material, that makes people feel good. The Abundance Agenda is hollow in the same way. People don’t know what CEQA is, or what it does, so they “go for the ASMR.”  People are at a dead end, not able to get ahead because of the supremacy of the asset economy. So people fall for false solutions like rolling back safeguards. Economic inequalities and environmental degradation become intrinsically linked. Greg recommended More and More and More by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz- about the energy transition as a better book than Abundance than, with housing production and oil raising similar issues of asset allocation ($17 trillion in equity locked up by the haves in real estate or oil assets) and creating political alignments between very similar interests aligned against the have-nots.  

As the panel unfolded, I thought an alternative title might have been Moonstruck By Abundance: How Wealth Disparity Has Contributed to Environmental Degradation, Eroded Democracy, and Fueled Public Corruption in America.  I would also amend that alternative title with the comment “Abundance is just ASMR for the political class” to describe the phenomenon in current political circles as “Moonstruck by Abundance ASMR.”

The panel gave a good sense of what abundance means.  So I hope we can hold onto that vision of an abundance of equity, where government leans into creating ways for everyone’s needs to be met, health to be ensured, and safety to be guaranteed. Balance can be promoted when those with the most means also feel an obligation to their fellow human beings to ensure a just and equitable society, rather than engage in an endless pursuit of more and more and more for the few. Asking for deregulation can be a way of silencing people, when instead we should be asking how we can get more people to participate and help make the system better.