Interesting. I'm a little bit skeptical of the connection you're drawing though, at least without digging more into the sources used by Klein & Thompson in their book. There's only two uses of 'abund-' in that document.
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They've drawn the link themselves quite explicitly in the years since. Have Nordhaus and his colleagues's own words: 1. thebreakthrough.org/articles/abu... ("participated in a panel with ... Klein") 2. thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-2...
sep 2, 2025, 1:39 am • 1 0 • view
In the second specifically: Nordhaus positions himself as predicting the movement. He is also the loudest voice for ecomodernism. It is not unfair to critique the two together when powerful figures use their terms as smokescreens for power.
sep 2, 2025, 1:43 am • 1 0 • view
(To be absolutely clear; I think he gets a lot of the basic facts of these situations right! But I think his arguments and follow-up solutions can go badly off the rails, e.g. the fission promotion stuff)
sep 2, 2025, 1:47 am • 1 0 • view
"High-efficiency solar cells produced from earth-abundant materials are an exception and have the potential to provide many tens of terawatts on a few percent of the Earth’s surface." ...
sep 2, 2025, 1:35 am • 1 0 • view
& "The ethical and pragmatic path toward a just and sustainable global energy economy requires that human beings transition as rapidly as possible to energy sources that are cheap, clean, dense, and abundant."
sep 2, 2025, 1:35 am • 1 0 • view
That paragraph is immediately after one talking about how the only solution capable of doing that is nuclear fission.
sep 2, 2025, 1:39 am • 0 0 • view
Is fission a big part of the Klein & Thompson argument?
sep 2, 2025, 1:41 am • 0 0 • view
Not as big as it was in this 10 years ago, but again, my point is that there is a legacy to their ideas and arguments. That ideas evolve with time is normal, but the framing and positioning matters.
sep 2, 2025, 1:45 am • 1 0 • view
Oh sure, it wasn't going to be /sui generis/. I guess the hyperlocal context to my very original comment is that some friends on here and I have been having a discussion about how useful the 'abundance' framing is to left-wing/progressive causes and I've been on the skeptical side.
sep 2, 2025, 1:47 am • 1 0 • view
And tl;dr I guess I was more right to be skeptical than I knew.
sep 2, 2025, 1:48 am • 2 0 • view
Although having said that, even the eco-modernists seem like they would likely be frustrated by the Tesla statement, given how much it seems to be giving lip-service to their words while slow-walking any promise of implementation (not usually a Tesla hallmark!)
sep 2, 2025, 1:50 am • 2 0 • view
Quite possibly, yes. Though as that last Nordhaus link shows, they also seem preoccupied with identifying their opponents over pursuing their stated goals, sometimes. (That's the text of a conference keynote, mind you.)
sep 2, 2025, 1:54 am • 1 0 • view
The ecomodernists look clearly part of the same intellectual milieu as Klein & Thompson, but, well, there's a lot of people who are part of that milieu, myself as a very junior member but nevertheless included.
sep 2, 2025, 1:37 am • 1 0 • view
They have a lot of reasonable ideas but the way they talk about them - and about those who disagree with them (not a problem unique to them, granted!) - gives space for cooptation and extremism.
sep 2, 2025, 1:41 am • 3 0 • view