Abundance

Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and podcast host, and Derek Thompson, a longtime staff writer at The Atlantic, spent years asking a question that sits underneath a lot of climate frustration: why does the United States struggle to build the things it has already decided it wants? Clean energy, transmission lines, affordable housing, high-speed rail. The money exists and the technology exists, and the projects still stall for years. Their answer is that scarcity is often a policy choice, produced by rules and review processes that were written with good intentions and now block the very things they were meant to protect.

Published by Avid Reader Press in March 2025, the book went to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and landed on Barack Obama's favorite books of the year. It earns a spot here because it widens the frame. Most sustainable-living advice is about consuming less and consuming better, which matters, but this is the other half of the story: what has to get built, and fast, for any of it to add up. Read it when the individual-action framing starts feeling too small.