Can We Have Abundance? What About Flying Cars?

On April 1, in a large auditorium at University of Illinois-Chicago, I listened to Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein discuss the ideas in their new book, Abundance (Simon & Schuster, 2025).

The book is about reframing our societal challenges from a conservative-progressive lens to one of scarcity-abundance. We are currently facing a scarcity of the things we need most, as evidenced by soaring prices: housing, energy, groceries, and funding for important science and technology research.

I also just happen to finish J. Storr’s Hall Where is My Flying Car? (Stripe Press, 2021), a history of technology progress and critique on its current state of affairs.

Together, these books paint a picture of the world of abundance we lost and how to get it back.

Most of all, they show us how to believe in a better future again.

Turning Point: The 1970s

I was not around then, but both books point to the 1970s as the time when technological and societal progress started to slow down.

In Where is My Flying Car?, Storrs Hall shares several startling graphs showing how progress in the United States flatlined starting in the 1970s:

• Real wages stagnated, deviating from the 2% growth curve we experienced for over 150 years prior.

• GDP per capita also dropped from 2.8% in the four decades prior to 1970 to 1.9% in the four decades since.

• On the technology front, the speed of air travel stagnated. Today we take for fact that jetliners fly around 600 miles per hour. That is not a law of physics, but rather a self-enforced limitation.

The most telling stagnation has come in our energy usage.

Storrs Hall calls this the Henry Adams curve, after the man (from the same family as the American presidents) who first recognized the trend. The Henry Adams curve peaked in the 1970s and has flatlined ever since.

What happened to our energy consumption? It started with the environmental movement.

In Abundance, Klein and Thompson share how Ralph Nader and his followers began suing corporations—and the government—to force them into clean up their act. New environmental laws were passed that protected our water, air, and green spaces. As a result, we invented new energy efficient technologies, like LED light bulbs and fuel-efficient car engines.

The efforts of the environmental movement worked. Today, our world is a relative utopia compared to the mid-1900s.

But now the pendulum of regulation has swung too far into sclerosis. The laws passed in the 1970s to prevent dirty energy from being produced are not barriers to producing clean energy as well. As a result, it has become hard—almost impossible—to build in the physical world: houses, energy, infrastructure, and public institutions.

Storrs Hall adds another consequence of energy stagnation: our once-imagined technological future. Where is My Flying Car? maps the most common Science Fiction predictions from before 1960 to see which ones were fulfilled and to what extend. The trend is very clear: the predictions that have not been fulfilled — flying cars, space travel, nuclear-powered cars, and the like — are those with the highest energy needs. Meanwhile, we’ve poured our energy (pun intended) into relatively low-energy technologies such as semi-conductors and fiber optics.

But to truly live in a world where we have everything we need — enough housing, enough transportation, enough food, and yes, maybe even flying cars — it starts with unlocking a more energetic future.

What we’re missing

We stopped consuming energy for obvious (in hindsight) reasons: The energy we were producing and consuming in the 20th century was too dirty and it was choking our planet. I am glad I grew up in a world of relatively clean air and water, and I’ve only seen it get better over the years.

But we have over-fit for energy efficiency in our world rather than clean energy abundance. Both are important, but energy efficiency naturally caps our potential. Energy abundance unlocks it.

Energy abundance is about more than flying cars, which you might see as pointless or even dangerous (a pilot friend said to me, “People can’t even drive cars… imagine if we all had planes!” and he’s not totally wrong).

Energy abundance is everything. It’s how we heat and cool our homes, cook our food, and travel to work, school, and vacation. It’s how we make our clothes, feed our livestock, cure our diseases, and create the materials to build our buildings.

Energy abundance built the world we have today. Because it was dirty energy, it also put the world on a path to massive and destructive climate change. Many climate scientists and activists demand degrowth—for us to use less energy—to stave off and reverse the effects of climate change. The degrowth movement took hold in the US (look at the Henry Adams curve again), but we are now paying the literal cost: our basic necessities are more expensive than ever.

So what can we do?

Deregulating Clean Energy

In Abundance, Klein and Thompson focus on housing as the tip of the “Abundance agenda” spear. I believe clean energy needs to be our top priority and all other forms of abundance will flow from it.

We are living through miraculous advancements in solar and wind energy, as well as battery power. Solar accounted for 66% of all new energy capacity in the US in 2024. Costs are dropping rapidly for both producing and storing clean energy (battery costs have dropped 89% since 2010).

But the problem remains: we aren’t building fast enough. Solar and wind projects take up a lot of space. NIMBYs use the same laws designed to stop noxious coal plants from being built to also stop clean energy projects. Local and state governments need to cut red tape and fast-track clean energy so that we can continue to replace oil and natural gas.

Wind and solar power are vital. But the real prize—and the real world-changer—is nuclear. It is the cleanest, most abundant energy source we know, and we have hardly improved on it since the 1970s. The most common type of nuclear reactor in the US is the pressurized water reactor (PWR), which uses enriched uranium as fuel and water as a coolant. There are several types of new reactors (many being developed and deployed in China) that are safer, cleaner, and more efficient.

Notice also that today’s most efficient reactors—HTGRs, SFRs, and MSRs—have higher and lower energy output ranges. That means we can build smaller-scale nuclear reactors, putting them in more places, closer to the populations that need the electricity.

Building nuclear has been effectively banned in the United States, but things are starting to change. Here in Illinois this April, the state assembly is voting to lift a ban on building nuclear plants above 300 MWe. Illinois already leads the US in both number of nuclear reactors and total nuclear energy output at 11.6 gigawatts (1 gigawatt is enough to power 750,000-1 million homes). Maybe they can expand their output and become a model for other states.

Again though, we have to return to the challenge of building: even with moratoriums lifted, nuclear energy is almost prohibitively expensive to build in the US.

Plant Vogtle, the only nuclear power plant built in the US since the 1970s, cost $35 billion and took 14 years to complete. For comparison, Chinese plants of the same size (just over 2000 MWe) cost $6-7 billion and taken 5-7 years.

Energy abundance is our goal, but to accomplish that, we need a renewal in our infrastructure laws and legislation. Could AI save us?

AI as a Clean Energy Catalyst?

The promise of energy abundance is not just “energy too cheap to meter,” but technologies we can today only imagine: flights from Chicago to Tokyo in an hour, green (zero emmision) concrete, massive vertical farms, and desalination plants around the globe. While we have the technology to accomplish these today, we do not have the energy to make it sustainable.

AI is another high-energy technology, but instead of waiting its turn in the long line of imagined futures, it has kicked in the door of humanity and announced itself.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

In The Experimentation Machine: Finding Product-Market Fit in the Age of AI (Damn Gravity Media, 2025), Jeffrey Bussgang shares a vision where AI’s massive energy needs spark a green energy revolution in the US:

AI could be the catalyst that finally gets the US to take nuclear energy seriously again. Demand for AI technology is widespread and not going away. Now the largest companies in the country are ready to back this green energy revolution—and we should let them.

But do we really need flying cars?

No we don’t. Personally, I would prefer high speed rail crisscrossing the country and sub-orbital rocketplanes taking me to Tokyo faster than it currently takes to get to Milwaukee.

Whatever your dream for a better future, we can solve it with abundance, and particularly energy abundance.

Building high speed rail takes concrete and iron. Flying cars and rockets need fuel (and more efficient fuel than we use today). Every human on earth deserves electricity, heat, and AC. As it stands now, we cannot become the society many of us envision because we do not have the energy to do so.

I have become a big fan of the Abundance agenda that Klein and Thompson have developed: cut red tape, fast-track green energy projects and housing, and demand a functioning government.

But more than the policy points, I believe in the optimistic future they paint.

Optimism is dangerous; many people confuse it for hope or toxic positivity. But Thompson’s definition of optimism is more of a call to action than a prayer:

“Optimism is not… believing arc of history always bends towards justice. Optimism is recognizing the future is soft clay, and you have two hands.”

We need to be optimistic, which means we need to take an active role in molding the future we want. Let’s start with green energy.