The abundance agenda meets scarcity politics

Open Circuit

America is facing an uncomfortable question: do we know how to build anymore?

House Republicans just passed a reconciliation bill that would repeal much of the Inflation Reduction Act while adding up to $5 trillion to the national debt. The legislation doesn't just gut clean energy incentives — it hinders the most realistic path to meeting exploding electricity demand.

After leveraging hundreds of billions in clean energy investments, 80% flowing to Republican districts, every GOP House member who promised to protect these programs voted to eliminate them anyway.

"Who wants this?" asked Costa Samaras, former White House energy advisor and current director of Carnegie Mellon's Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. "Who wants to have more expensive energy and less manufacturing in the United States?"

This week, Samaras joins Open Circuit to talk about the potential impact of the legislation, lessons learned from the IRA, and whether the abundance framework offers a viable alternative for scaling the clean energy economy.

As the country faces 150 gigawatts of new electricity demand by 2030, the reconciliation bill would make deploying and manufacturing a wide range of clean resources more expensive — likely forcing investment overseas.

This sets up a direct collision with the "abundance agenda," which argues that America has become too good at stopping things and not good enough at building them. The abundance solution: make it easier to build infrastructure, accept some messiness in exchange for progress, and focus relentlessly on outputs rather than process.

But can abundance thinking survive an era of deep political instability? We explore what an "IRA 2.0" might look like — one that pays for performance, builds government capacity, and creates durable coalitions for getting big things done.

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Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Katherine Hamilton. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand.