Without further ado …

During a conversation at the 2025 Progress Conference, author and economist asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, “If you could have more of one thing to have more compute, what would the one thing be?” Altman responded with a single word: “Electrons.”

In other words, artificial intelligence (AI) requires massive compute, and massive compute requires massive amounts of energy. OpenAI plans to invest $500 billion in new data center infrastructure through its Stargate project. This will require ten gigawatts of new capacity. For comparison, that’s enough to power roughly 8 million U.S. homes. And OpenAI isn’t the sole firm building that kind of infrastructure.

Energy is the fundamental constraint for more than AI. It is critical to all forms of progress — past, present, and future. It’s no wonder, then, that energy abundance — how to achieve it and what’s holding it back — was the talk of the 2025 Progress Conference.

The bottlenecks are familiar and numerous. Permitting and regulatory barriers are slowing infrastructure deployment of all kinds. The domestic supply of labor, raw materials, and manufacturing capacity needed for the energy transition is insufficient. Political and NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) opponents are holding back existing technologies, such as nuclear reactors. Breakthrough technologies, such as fusion, need further scientific advancements.

But there are signs that the progress community is finding ways around all of these obstacles.

Energy fuels progress

Progress runs on power. There is no progress without energy. Our ability to harness energy has enabled enormous strides in agriculture, industry, manufacturing, transportation, and medicine. The more energy available to a society, the wealthier it becomes.

There’s a reason that Lewis Strauss’ famous line about “energy too cheap to meter” — delivered in 1954, when he was chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission — has stuck in the public consciousness for more than 70 years. The quote is rarely remembered in full, but it’s worth recalling the entire statement as a reminder of why energy abundance and affordability are important:

“It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.”

Strauss’ vision of a future where energy is so cheap that it isn’t worth the effort to measure individual usage looks a lot like the visions of progress shared at the conference.

“Climate and Energy” was technically just one of six tracks at this year’s Progress Conference — and a “mini track,” at that — but all six connected to energy abundance in some way, either explicitly or implicitly. Altman’s answer to Cowen makes the connection between the “AI Protopia” track and energy. The “Metascience” track looked at how we can accelerate scientific progress for technologies like fusion. Several speakers in the “From Policy to Real World Change” track spoke about building public support and clearing regulatory hurdles to deploy nuclear energy.

Outside the “Climate and Energy” track itself, the “American Dynamism” track may have been the most energy-focused.

In conversation with Big Think’s Foster, writer Dan Wang spoke about China’s incredible pace of energy deployment. In 2024 alone, it added 429 GW of new power generation capacity, while the U.S. added only 51 GW. China’s engineering state is not going to let energy be the limiting factor for its industries, but the same cannot be said for the U.S. There will be no such thing as American Dynamism without more energy.

Not only is American progress deeply reliant on how we address energy abundance, so is the planet. According to Climate Action Tracker, we have sufficiently lowered emissions so that we no longer need to fear catastrophic warming scenarios of 3-5 ℃, but we have not escaped the negative consequences that will come from already missing the target to keep warming below 1.5 ℃. As technologist and writer said, citing his friend and climate researcher Jesse Jenkins, this means “we are no longer totally fucked, but we are we are not yet unfucked.” And while the language may be crass, there’s an important lesson here. Our ability — or inability — to deliver a more abundant, cleaner energy future has major repercussions. We must do more, faster.

Bottlenecks to the bottleneck

Insofar as energy is the fuel to all progress, it also suffers from the same barriers faced by the rest of progress — especially when it comes to building physical infrastructure. “Building and transforming the energy sector is fundamentally a physical problem, and it’s hard,” noted Mekala Krishnan, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, during her session titled “The Hard Stuff: Navigating the Physical Realities of the Energy Transition.”

Energy abundance can’t happen without reindustrialization to supply the raw materials and manufacture the essential components of our energy system. China is the leading refiner for 19 of the 20 strategic minerals crucial for the energy sector — and they can restrict those exports at any time. Delivery times for transformers, a critical component of the grid, are more than 100 weeks on average as manufacturers struggle to keep up with demand. More prosaically, rapidly expanding and modernizing our energy system requires lineworkers and electricians. Where will that workforce come from? There’s a projected shortage of roughly a million electricians in the U.S. needed for the energy transition.

Reindustrialization aside, shovel-ready or even completed generation and transmission projects can languish for years because of our sclerotic permitting and regulatory systems. At the end of 2024, roughly 2,300 GW of new capacity was stuck in interconnection queues awaiting approval to connect to the grid. If even a fraction of those projects were connected, energy capacity in the U.S. would increase dramatically.

Achieving energy abundance will undoubtedly require new technological breakthroughs as well. Krishnan’s research at McKinsey suggests 50% of the clean energy transition depends on finding ways to scale existing technologies faster. The other 50% depends on new technology. At a place like the Progress Conference, there is no shortage of optimism that, with the right policies and approaches, we can get there on both fronts.

New (and old) technologies are on the way

The solutions discussed in several sessions and informal conversations suggest an “any and everything” assault on the barriers to energy abundance is already underway. Some attendees are pursuing fundamentally new technologies, while others are fighting an uphill battle against NIMBYism to accelerate deployment. More often than not, they’re doing both at once.

Roots of Progress Institute fellow — who led an unconference session titled “The Potential of Fusion Energy” — believes that, given recent advances, the first working fusion reactors will be deployed within the decade. Casey Handmer and his team at Terraform Industries are working to make carbon-free synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. If these moonshots are successful, they could be bedrock technologies for a carbon-free, energy-abundant future.

Theoretically, nuclear power should already be delivering on that promise. Instead, it’s the poster child for how progress in the U.S. has stagnated — despite the urgent need for clean, reliable base load energy, only two new nuclear reactors have entered commercial operation since the creation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the 1970s.

During a lengthy lunchtime discussion, I heard conference attendees debating whether nuclear can ever regain its footing. While solar and batteries have been plummeting down the cost curve, it is still struggling to overcome the regulatory and public support hurdles preventing it from following a similar trajectory.

Nuclear is in many respects a test of the progress community’s ability to get America and Europe building again. Lessons from the YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) movement and increasing attention to the topic suggest that the public support, political will, and regulatory reforms necessary to restart nuclear power are on the way.

Accelerating home electrification

When it comes to developments in energy, new forms of generation get much of the attention, but I was most excited to hear about advances in the deployment of batteries at the Progress Conference.

Progress Conference attendees were given the opportunity to tour several offsite facilities, including the headquarters of Impulse Labs, which makes a futuristic induction cooktop with a built-in battery that can boil a pot of water in seconds. During the tour, I saw the cooktop in action, and while the speed at which it boiled water was incredible, that wasn’t what astonished me. It was how it melted a large bag of chocolate chips.

The chocolate melted faster than an ice cream cone on a summer afternoon, but the truly amazing thing was that the cooktop could then keep the temperature steady. For over an hour, there was a hot pot of chocolate ready for dipping — no need to worry about it burning or seizing. The technology is so good and the user experience so compelling that I was tempted to buy one then and there. I wanted to make an impulse purchase (please forgive the pun).

So, what does all this have to do with energy? A couple of things.

The first has to do with accelerating home electrification — a core piece of the broader energy transition. We simply aren’t getting cleaner, more efficient technologies, like batteries, into homes fast enough. There are too many costly steps.

Consider the typical path for switching from a gas to electric cooktop. Normally, you need to account for expensive retrofits like upgrading electrical panels, running new wiring, and installing a high-voltage outlet. The Impulse cooktop avoids all this because its integrated battery supplies the power that would normally require a dedicated circuit. Simply plug into an existing outlet, and start cooking.

This is not a trivial detail. Lower emissions aren’t enough to convince consumers to adopt new technologies at scale. Impulse Labs is showing how to get batteries into homes through better performance and economics. As Impulse Labs CEO said on the tour, “I didn’t even come at this from a climate angle. I came at it from a ‘we can make better devices’ angle.” That’s what the energy transition is going to take.

Impulse’s built-in battery can also lower customer energy bills. Energy usually costs more when demand is highest: in the late afternoon and evening. No one is adjusting dinner time to avoid higher energy rates, though, so using an electric cooktop typically means paying a premium for energy. Impulse’s battery can be programmed to charge when energy prices are low, though — you can then use that stored energy at dinnertime, when rates are highest. This is called peak shaving, and not only does it help the customer save money, it helps with grid management by reducing peak loads.

Revolutionizing the grid

If Impulse Labs is showing how batteries can transform home energy management, Base Power is showing how batteries can transform the grid.

Typically, energy generation (supply) and energy consumption (demand) need to match almost perfectly, moment to moment, for the grid to function properly. Too much generation (supply exceeds demand) or too little generation (demand exceeds supply) can both result in grid failures that lead to outages and blackouts.

Batteries break this temporal link between supply and demand. When aggregated, they can operate as virtual power plants: charging when supply is high and demand is low, and discharging when demand is high and supply is low. This ability to smooth peaks and valleys in demand is the fundamental advantage of batteries.

Before the conference, I didn’t understand how much the location of batteries matters. In a session titled “The Grid is the Bottleneck to the Energy Revolution,” , COO and co-founder of Base Power, explained why installing batteries in homes, at the point of consumption, is a boon for the grid: In the same way that the integrated battery in the Impulse cooktop saves on upgrades to the panels and wiring in a house, Base’s batteries reduce the need for upgrades to the grid itself.

The grid typically works like a one-way street. Electricity travels from distant power plants along high-voltage transmission lines and then through lower-voltage, short-distance neighborhood distribution lines to homes. These lines have finite capacity, so every time new generation comes online, more transmission has to be built to carry it. By installing batteries at the point of consumption, Base can increase the capacity of the grid.

Base does this by storing energy locally to ease congestion on long-distance lines. According to Lopas, this is crucial because the U.S. grid already consists of 642,000 miles of transmission lines and 6.3 million miles of distribution lines — expanding and maintaining these lines has become more expensive than power production. Base is reducing the costs of maintaining the grid by maximizing the capacity of our existing infrastructure.

Nonetheless, there’s no avoiding the need for labor, raw materials, and manufacturing capacity to build batteries and get them into homes. Base Power’s approach still demands that we address those barriers to energy abundance.

Powering progress

At the Progress Conference, I heard no sugarcoating of the challenges to achieving energy abundance, nor any underselling of the importance of getting energy right, quickly.

The progress community is a clear-eyed bunch, yet they remain undaunted — they have a clear sense of what needs to be done and a collective urgency to do it. New technologies and strategies are already on the ascendancy. We have every reason to be hopeful that an energy-abundant future awaits, despite how much work lies ahead.

In his opening plenary, , founder of Institute, said that much of the value from the Progress Conference comes from bringing everyone together to be energized. How right he was. We’re going to need a ton of energy, literally and figuratively, to fuel more progress.

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“To me, Abundance is about achieving what’s already possible, Progress is about making more possible. One aims to be on the production possibilities frontier, the other to push out the frontier.”

Jason then asked:

“This implies that the progress movement isn’t focused on achieving what’s already possible. Do you think that? If so, why?”

It’s a great question, and as I started to respond I realized it was turning into an essay. So here it is.

I agree with Jason that Progress and Abundance “overlap 80–90%, and if you’re outside both of them you should probably think of them as variations on the same thing.” But if we’re trying to tease apart the 10–20% of Abundance and Progress that don’t overlap, I do think that progress is more, if not absolutely, focused on the not yet possible.

This is the crux of our friendly disagreement:

“After this year’s Progress Conference, Charles Mann suggested: “Abundance wants to make sure everyone has a house. Progress wants to make those houses better.” But IMO, the progress movement is interested in both of those things, so that’s not how I think of the distinction.” (emphasis added)

I, on the other hand, think the distinction has merit. I see Progress as primarily interested in Abundance as an intermediate step toward pushing out the frontier.

Take a YIMBY policy like single-staircase reform as an example. I think that’s an Abundance policy because the focus is on correcting an immediate, arbitrary constraint on housing supply that gets us closer to an existing production possibilities frontier (PPF). Housing is too expensive; this has several negative effects, and Abundance is working to correct the problem.

I think Progress is concerned with that type of reform only insofar as it’s an intermediate step to clustering talent and reaping agglomeration benefits for a broader goal, like recreating the conditions that led to the incredible output of 15th-century Florence. In other words, expanding the possibilities frontier.

The key point is that Abundance is focused on removing localized, arbitrary constraints that prevent us from using the technologies and capabilities we already have. Single-staircase reform allows for building types we already know how to construct but have been artificially prohibited from building. Progress, by contrast, is about adding new understanding, technologies, and capabilities that expand what is possible in the first place.

I think you could say the same about the distinction between Abundance and Progress related to medical and science reforms. The FDA drug approval process needs reform; immediately viable treatments are reaching patients much too slowly. Fixing that is an Abundance issue because it’s focused on an arbitrary bottleneck. Progress wants the reforms on the way to other metascience breakthroughs that fundamentally alter how we discover new therapies and increase human longevity.

Does it matter?

To answer Jason’s question directly, no, I don’t think Progress isn’t focused on achieving what’s already possible. But I think that what’s possible today is merely a stepping stone to the future the Progress community is focused on building.

If Abundance is an intermediate step on the way to Progress, it’s no wonder that we’d see many of the same people at each conference. And I think it’s fine, as Jason says, to “think of the abundance movement as part of the progress movement,” especially for those who aren’t deeply enmeshed in both communities. But for those who are, I think the distinction matters.

It’s an important because Abundance and Progress require selling different stories and visions. We need different approaches and messaging to convince a city council to revise local building codes than we do to inspire and recruit talent to automate and revolutionize homebuilding.

Abundance is much more political. The thing about being on the production possibilities frontier is that there are multiple places on the curve you can be. Whether we produce a little more of this or a little more of that requires political tradeoffs. Progress right now feels largely above that fray, and I want it to stay there. I want Progress to stay focused on a world of dynamism and possibility over the long-term.

If you’re interested in learning more about Abundance and Progress, read my recaps from each conference:

• Abundance is how we deliver on the promise of liberty

• Powering progress: The quest for energy abundance

Also, I’d love comments on this post. I’m thinking out loud here, so please tell me where you think this distinction breaks down, or whether you see examples that challenge it. Am I getting the line between Abundance and Progress right?

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My awakening began when I saw this inscription on the National Archives.

“This building holds in trust the records of our national life and symbolizes our faith in the permanency of our national institutions.”

Something about the phrase struck me. I wasn’t in town for the Abundance 2025 conference because I had an abiding faith in our institutions; I was there because I wanted to reform them. The hallowed tones sparked my curiosity, and I entered to see what could inspire such lofty language. Inside I found the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights. The scales fell from my eyes, and I saw America in an entirely new light.

I walked out a born-again American.

Abundance and the American Project

It was the day before the conference on my first visit to Washington, D.C. What started as a sightseeing stroll turned into an 11-mile pilgrimage through the city. I didn’t get back to the hotel until almost midnight because I couldn’t stop myself from walking to every monument and memorial on the Mall. I felt energized by a sense that nearly 250 years into the American Project we’re still a young country striving to build a nation that can deliver on its founding ideals. Over the next two days at the conference, undoubtedly influenced by a latent patriotism stirred by my first visit to D.C., I came to view Abundance as a continuation of that messy, never-ending quest.

Abundance is not simply about building more and cheaper stuff, nor is it simply a necessary corrective for sclerotic government institutions. Abundance is part of the long tradition by which we, the citizens and government of the United States, do the work to actually secure “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Abundance is fundamentally about enabling liberty and protecting against illiberalism.1

Abundance is an enabling condition of liberty

To understand the connection between Abundance and liberty consider housing, the most salient Abundance topic. Almost everyone agrees housing is too expensive and we need more of it. But housing abundance isn’t simply about more, cheaper, and denser; it’s about letting people live the life they want, where they want. We’ve arbitrarily and unnecessarily limited the ability for someone to choose for themselves, and liberty isn’t really liberty without choices.

People aren’t self-selecting as city, suburban, or rural people, as though they were choosing between three options based on their personal identity or taste. At least not entirely. In reality, the choice of where to live is constrained by artificial scarcity, and we’re rationalizing “our choices” to maintain a sense of agency.

That’s what happened when my wife and I moved from the Bay Area to the Denver suburbs. There were plenty of quality-of-life reasons we could cite as motivations for the move. Unpleasant BART commutes and navigating around the homeless to get to work were chief among the reasons to look elsewhere. A desire to live closer to the mountains or my parents in southwest Colorado were good reasons for choosing the Front Range. But none of those are the reason why we moved. We wanted a family, and having one in the Bay felt out of reach. Housing was simply too expensive.

We’re happy with our choice six years later. We have a nice house, reasonable commutes, and disposable income left over to travel with the kids. But we lost plenty in the transaction, too. Chief of which is opportunity. For the ambitious and intellectually curious, the opportunities in the Bay Area far surpass those in the middle of the country. Sometimes I wonder where my career would be if I were still surrounded by wildly ambitious folks in a city full of possibilities. In a world of price parity, a world of real choice, I doubt we would have left the Bay.

On the face of it, trading maximum opportunity for a higher quality of life hardly sounds like a tragedy. Yet played out over and over across many lives, it really is. How much human potential has gone unrealized because a lack of housing affordability pushed it from where it can best flourish? How many individuals have missed out on making full use of their talents? The consequence of housing scarcity is that we’ve put an artificial cap on human capital.

Housing is just one example. We live in a world full of arbitrary restrictions that have slowed building and innovation to the detriment of choice and opportunity. Abundance is about removing these constraints and creating the enabling conditions for liberty.

Abundance is an antidote to illiberalism

Abundance is not only an enabling condition of liberty, it’s a defense against a slide into illiberalism. Nowhere was this clearer at the conference than in discussions of family abundance. In a working group on “Abundance for the Family” hosted by and , they defined family abundance as “allowing people to have the kids they want to have.”

There were academic discussions about cost-disease and broken institutions, but even in a hotel ballroom filled with wonks the discussion was more visceral. We were all parents wrestling with not only how to provide our kids with a good life, but if and how we could bring more life into the world. There was a real sense that people in that room had fewer kids and smaller families than they would like, if only the village it takes to raise a child were up to the task.

This isn’t empty rhetoric about how we’d all have more kids if only there was an Abundance agenda to make raising them cheaper. I heard writer Dan Wang discuss his new book, Breakneck, on several occasions at events in and around the conference. The topic from the book that he repeatedly spoke about most passionately wasn’t the difference between infrastructure in an engineering state vs. a lawyerly society, but China’s one-child policy. A policy that resulted in more than 300 million abortions and 100 million sterilizations. China’s leaders believed in and feared a zero-sum world in which population growth would inevitably lead to scarcity and disaster.

Herein lies the real crux of Abundance. We’re either building, innovating, and growing to create new opportunities for people, or we’re contracting and fighting over what remains. History has shown us over and over the horrors that come from a lack of abundance, either in mindset or reality. Abundance is an antidote to zero-sum thinking and policies that lead to illiberalism.

Abundance isn’t a half-drawn horse - it’s a bull

There was much debate about what Abundance actually is or should be at the conference.2 Steven Teles, in one of the gathering’s best speeches, presented six “Varieties of Abundance.” The Abundance community, as wrote post-conference, still looks “a little like the half-drawn horse meme.” There are indeed many details to sort out.

The details are critically important, but I’d argue that capturing and communicating the bigger picture of Abundance is at least equally important. Rather than think of Abundance as a half-drawn horse, I suggest that Abundance should be thought of as Picasso’s bull. In Picasso’s lithograph series, he attempted to draw a bull in as few pen strokes as possible until he had captured only the essence of the animal.

It’s as though Abundance started in the middle somewhere, maybe column three. Caught between details and rough geometric shapes, the inclination among the policy crowd is to add more detail, to shift to one of the depictions on the left. It cannot be ignored that the specifics must come to actually deliver policies and reforms that lead to Abundance. But to quote David Brooks’ criticism of the overall Abundance movement, it can be “too modest and too wonky.” To make Abundance resonate with people, I think the storytelling could stand to strip away detail and highlight the Abundance movement’s moral and emotional center. We need people to understand that the essence of Abundance is making good on the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Abundance is the reanimation of the American Dream

The vibe of Abundance 2025 was much more understated than the patriotic feelings I’ve described thus far. The conference was not a pep rally for true believers with a singular vision. There was real disagreement and a willingness to grapple with issues that defy easy answers and partisan purity. But in that pluralism I saw a unifying opportunity for the Abundance movement to reanimate the belief in the American Dream.

Don’t take ‘dream’ here as a tangible concept measured by home ownership, upward mobility, or GDP growth. Think of it as a literal dream, almost fantastical, yet real enough that you feel like you could reach out and grab it. The original vision of America itself, on display in the National Archives, still feels like a dream, right? More than a nation, it’s an ideal that even in the best of times leaves us wishing we could do better, get a little closer. Our ideals will probably always have an asymptotic quality. We get so close, but never. quite. touch. it.

Yet in our stasis, we’ve allowed the American Dream to drift further away from our fingertips. We risk forgetting that we ever dreamt the dream at all. Too many Americans today are fearful of change because they’ve never seen change that made things better. If we want them to accept change, they have to believe, deeply, almost religiously, that the change will be good. They need a vision of the future that is so different, so good that it’s a dream.

Abundance can bring the dream back within reach. That’s what the conference and Washington, D.C. did for me. To paraphrase , I left with a vision of the “world of tomorrow that shimmered with promise” and a fervent faith in the American Dream.

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Thank you to , , , , , , Brendan Mulligan, and Kaylee Mulligan for their comments on earlier drafts.

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Editor's note: Applications for the Roots of Progress Institute 2026 Blog Building Intensive Fellowship are open. You should apply! The deadline is June 1.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

I’ve had three “we’re not in Kansas anymore” moments in my life. The first is when I stepped out of Grand Central Station, on the way to an admitted students event at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 2013. My heart still pounds when I think about staring up at Manhattan for the first time. I had never traveled so far from home in Arizona. The energy and scale of the city made me dizzy, like a cartoon character knocked in the head. I was not at all convinced I belonged at an Ivy League graduate program. Only a few months prior, I was just hoping for a job with steady hours. I had spent the summer before grad school making $9/hr managing a grocery store in rural Colorado. Undergrad had taken me six years, and my resume featured far more restaurant experience than professional experience. It felt like I had arrived in NYC by accident, by some misunderstanding.

The second moment came a year later. My graduate internship was in Peru. Now I was a continent away from home for the first time and could barely speak the language. I was down to 125 pounds, having lost more than twenty pounds in the first few weeks of the trip because I was unaccustomed to the food and water. While hiking through the jungle on the way to a remote ecotourism business I was there to consult with, I lost consciousness. I remember waking up with a stranger looking down on me, unaware of where I was or how I got there. Only a year before, I had been scraping by; now I was Who Knows Where on an adventure that made me feel like I was living out a scene from one of my favorite books about Theodore Roosevelt.

I could probably describe both instances more succinctly as some exaggerated form of cultural shock. But it wasn’t just the culture that shocked me. It was my sense of self, the limitations on the life I could imagine for myself, that were crumbling. If I was there, living that moment, moments I couldn’t have dreamed of, what else was out there?

I felt the same thing, for the third time in my life, last year at the Progress Conference. This time I felt it coming. The Conference was the culmination of the Roots of Progress Fellowship I had begun about eight weeks earlier. Throughout the program, I had felt something brewing, but I couldn’t put my finger on it through the virtual sessions and interactions.

What did I feel leading up to the event? It felt like reluctance, resistance. A recognition that I seemed to be swimming through a world that was more viscous than the one the other fellows and the advisors inhabited. It wasn’t until we were all together in Berkeley that it hit me like a hammer. These are the highest agency people I’ve ever met.1

The Fellowship was my first inside look at this kind of agency, ambition, and courage. These weren’t new ideas to me. It’s not as though I’d spent the last decade since hiking out of the Peruvian jungle twiddling my thumbs on the couch. I have invested tens of millions of dollars in climate and environmental strategies as a capital allocator and helped build pioneering partnerships to deliver conservation wins on agriculture and forest lands around the world. By most measures, I was well into a successful career.

But once I joined the Fellowship, it dawned on me that I had hit an invisible threshold, an ambition asymptote without realizing it. Watching the other fellows work, seeing how Emma ran the program, hearing the advisors who came to speak with us, that invisible threshold started to reveal itself. It was as though I saw a ripple, light catching in a way I hadn’t seen before as I watched people move through a space I couldn’t. The Progress Conference is where I realized it wasn’t a wall or solid threshold at all. It’s more like a cell membrane. Permeable. Good ideas could flow through, be absorbed, an input to something greater. The experience caused a profound shift in how I think about myself, talent in general, and progress studies overall.

That’s when my sense of what Progress Studies meant shifted from a field of study or discipline to a state of mind, “a vibe.” Progress Studies is about telling ourselves that we can do things. That we can figure it out.

Ambition

Before the Fellowship, I thought of ambition as a desire for things like money and prestige; traditional markers of success. Ambition up to that point had felt like craving, yearning, maybe even envy. As the Fellowship rolled on, I started to see ambition as something akin to vision, a vision of what the world could look like. Ambition started to feel less covetous and consumptive, it became creative and generative. Agentic rather than memetic.

I began to notice my perspective shifting as advisor after advisor spoke about the need for vision. Some spoke about vision related to progress studies writ large, some entrepreneurship, others writing. But the visions had similar shapes and characteristics.

They all had a certain boldness, often the bolder the better. As one of the advisors put it, “hard problems are easier to solve than easy problems” because hard problems attract great people. But they were bold for reasons other than difficulty. They were unbounded by prior experience or knowledge. As an advisor put it, “You have to learn 99% of what you’ll need to know on the job as an entrepreneur anyway, so why limit your ambition to the 1% you already know?” Who cares if you’ve been a writer before or not? Or an engineer. Or a researcher. Why can’t you learn?2

I’ve worked as a wildlife biologist, a conservationist at the largest environmental NGO in the world, and a capital allocator at a wealth management firm. I’m no stranger to picking up new skills or trying to conquer new frontiers. But I’ve never been part of a group that believed in doing so as fervently as the progress community.

Existing know-how is not a prerequisite. What matters is what you’d be happiest to see become reality. Because when things get hard, and they will, the purpose and joy in your vision is what gets you through.3

Courage

It’s one thing to have a vision. It’s another to chase it. To paraphrase Scott Alexander on The Dwarkesh Podcast, “most people writing on the internet are within 1% of not having the courage to do so.” I had no idea how true this is until I went through the Roots of Progress Institute Fellowship.

The necessity for courage often shows up in mundane ways. I’d written plenty and been on podcasts for work, but I’d never written anything under my own name for public consumption when I applied to the Fellowship. I was Grant Mulligan of Insert Organization Here. The ideas may have been mine, but I was speaking on behalf of an organization. I never really had to declare myself. I had no clue how difficult that transition would be.

Now before I can be legible to others, I have to be legible to myself. What do I want to declare? Which of my ideas are worth sharing? What do I really believe? Sharing my vision for environmentalism was hard enough, but through the program I was encouraged to share more personal anecdotes (like this post). Inserting myself into the story requires getting over a significant cringe factor. Hyperlegibility may be our new reality, but it requires courage.

The sheer difficulty of writing requires courage in its own right. Writing is hard.4 In weekly Draft Gyms, the fellows would edit each others’ work. We’d watch each other struggle and fumble over our pieces. We’d start in on an idea, write thousands of words, and still couldn’t get it right. But then, more often than not, something would click, the fellow would find their voice, and the piece would come together. Getting to see a brilliant article before it’s brilliant was the coolest part of being a fellow.

Before the Fellowship, I’d read an article on Substack or Works in Progress and thought it must be the product of genius or divine inspiration. Far more common is smart people with the courage to keep grinding. They believe they’ll figure it out. Again, this is not a novel idea. I was no stranger to hard work before the Fellowship. But there’s something uncommonly relentless about the Progress community.

Talent

Each time my ambition and courage have taken a major leap, it's been in response to a catalyst. I needed a professor to believe in me and bring me to Yale. I needed my girlfriend, now wife, to tell me I should apply for an internship in Peru, that traveling there didn’t need to be relegated to fantasy; it’s a place I could really go. I needed the Roots of Progress Fellowship to reveal the invisible and arbitrary thresholds holding me back.

I’m sure not all talent requires a catalyst, that’s probably part of what makes the most talented people special. But there’s bound to be others like me who need a little push, a little encouragement to have a bigger vision for themselves and the world. Many people don’t realize how talented they are, or at the very least, could be. That there is vast, latent talent waiting for a catalyst has become one of my most fundamental and strongly held beliefs.5

That belief is at the core of my fascination with progress studies. My hope is that Progress Studies is the catalyst, a meta-discipline for raising human ambition and unlocking untapped talent. What vision could activate all that talent? What would happen if we activated all that talent? How much better could the world be?

Let’s find out.

The Fellows

For all I learned from the Fellowship, like most things in life, it all comes back to the relationships and people you meet along the way. The advisors were great; I got to meet many of my personal heroes.6 But the real magic of the program was without a doubt the other fellows. Thank you to each fellow for, well, the fellowship.

The fellows in my cohort are brilliant thinkers and writers. You should subscribe to their blogs (mine too, button below)! To learn more about each fellow and subscribe to their blog, go here. See my thread on X or Substack Notes for my favorite articles from each fellow.

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Thank you to Brendan Mulligan, , , , Simonelli, and Kaylee Mulligan for their comments on earlier drafts.

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It is not so simple a thing to feed the world. Yet most of us eat three meals a day and think little of it. If you do give the calories you consume much thought, I’m guessing you spend far more time worrying about how to avoid eating too many than you do worrying about whether you’ll get enough.

The last sentence should awe you. Do not skim past it. The fact that many of our bellies are overfull is one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

Consider this graph:

If you allow yourself the time to sit with this graph and all that it means, what do you feel? I feel an appreciation for all the nights, and I mean all, that I’ve gone to bed without hunger pangs. I feel grateful that my children were born into a world where they can push away fresh vegetables in the winter without a second thought. In all of human history, how many ages could even make sense of that sentence? Full enough to be picky, discarding nutritious food, fresh in winter?! I rejoice in lives made healthier, taller — possible. I see previously unimaginable wealth.

If that graph doesn’t make you feel as fortunate as I do, consider this one:

I find this graph astonishing for two reasons. First, each red bar represents the wretchedness and death of millions; it represents misery on an spectacular scale.1 Second, it shows how drastically, quickly, and recently our human condition has changed. In 1945, it was estimated that roughly half of the global population didn’t have access to enough calories. Today, the number of people without enough calories to eat is down to nearly 1 in 10. That’s an incredible improvement in less than 100 years. Poverty and hunger were, for almost all of human history, the default. No longer. We escaped this trap when we learned how to grow more food from less land. Our ability to raise agricultural yields, and all it enabled, is the quintessential example of what I mean when I say progress.2

Where Progress Comes From

In his excellent essay, Breakfast for Eight Billion,3 Charles C. Mann highlights three major breakthroughs that led to the massive increase in crop yields that characterize modern agriculture: fertilization, irrigation, and genetics. I’ll add two more: mechanization and energy.

Fertilization

Nitrogen is the limiting factor to plant growth. Historically, farmers used fire, manure, and crop rotations as ways to increase nitrogen in soils, but these techniques weren’t sufficient to overcome nitrogen as a constraint on yields. Then, in the early 1900s, came the discovery of how to make synthetic nitrogen at an industrial scale via the Haber-Bosch process. In Thomas Hager’s book about the discovery of Haber-Bosch, Alchemy of Air, he estimates that roughly 50% of the nitrogen found in our bodies comes from nitrogen made available by the process. That is to say, if we are what we eat, roughly half of what we consume was grown with the assistance of synthetic fertilizer made possible by Haber-Bosch. What does this mean, practically? Billions of us alive today owe our very existence to this technology.

Irrigation

As anyone with a house plant knows, plants are thirsty. Less than 1% of the water on earth is freshwater accessible and usable by humans, and we use around 70% of that limited freshwater supply to support agriculture. Harvests used to depend on the whims of nature to supply water in sufficient quantities, at the right time. Heavy spring rains didn’t help a farmer that needed water in the late, sweltering days of summer. Limited or poorly timed water availability, limited or no harvest. Now, with dams and pumps, farmers have much more access and control over when water can be applied to a field. This ability to irrigate is a major driver of yields; roughly 40% of global production depends on irrigation.

Genetics

The potential yield of any individual plant is a function of its genetic makeup. Plant genes are like human genes, they impact traits like height and health. In short, better genes equal a higher potential yield. Norman Borlaug figured out how to breed wheat that was not only disease resistant (plants struck by pests and disease don’t produce as much), but could also produce far more grain if fertilized and irrigated. This variety of wheat, called dwarf wheat, allowed crop yields to quadruple in some places. Billions of people are alive because Borlaug figured out how to feed them.

When we combine the power of fertilizer, irrigation, and genetics we get amazing outcomes like this one described by Mann:

Between 1961 and 2003, Asian irrigation more than doubled, from 182 million acres to 417 million acres, and fertilizer use went up by a factor of more than twenty, from 4 to 87 million tons. Combined with the new rice strains, the consequence was a near-tripling of Asian rice production.

⁠In the 1970s, much of South and East Asia were plagued by hunger. By the twenty-first century, Asians had an average of 30 percent more calories in their diet. Millions upon millions of families had more food, and with that came so much else. Seoul and Shanghai, Jaipur and Jakarta; shining skyscrapers, pricey hotels, traffic-choked streets blazing with neon: all are built atop a foundation of laboratory-bred rice.⁠

Mechanization

Mechanization dramatically reduces the amount of labor required on a farm and allows that labor to be applied elsewhere; this is one of the reasons the industrial revolution was possible in the first place. Adam Smith saw it happening: “By means of the plough two men, with the assistance of three horses, will cultivate more ground than twenty could do with the spade.”

What Smith didn’t envision is how far tractors and other machinery would take this trend. The decreasing need for labor is what allowed Borlaug to leave his family farm and pursue the education that would lead to his wheat breakthrough. Mechanization not only improved yields directly, but it allowed for the processing, transport, and storage of bumper yields that characterize modern agriculture supply chains.

Energy

It’s hard to overstate the importance of energy. Modern agriculture requires copious amounts of energy (coal, oil, gas, renewables) to produce fertilizer, make cement for dams, and fuel tractors, to name only a few uses. Remember how I said that roughly half of what we consume was grown with the assistance of synthetic fertilizer made possible by Haber-Bosch? Making that fertilizer consumes around 2% of global energy. It is no coincidence that as energy consumption grew, agricultural land use per person fell. Abundant, cheap energy very directly translates into more food. Without that energy, billions would starve.

Why we still need more progress

For all the progress we’ve made, so much more is necessary. That graph of agricultural land use per person that gave me all the warm and fuzzies? It also adds a tremendous urgency to push further. There are three primary reasons why more agricultural progress is needed: progress has not reached everyone, agriculture’s environmental impact, and population growth.

Progress is not evenly distributed

We can now grow enough food, on a per calorie basis, to feed the world. Yet billions of people are still plagued by low agricultural productivity and hunger, regardless of what the global average has to say. There are still roughly three billion people on this earth who don’t have to imagine the tragedies that people like me in the developed world have largely left behind. They’re still living in it. Progress has undeniably reduced suffering, but it clearly hasn’t eliminated it.

It should be no surprise that low agricultural productivity leads not only to hunger, but poverty. In Sub-Saharan Africa where agricultural productivity significantly lags the rest of the world, 40% of people live below the international poverty line. The poorest of the poor are farmers. 76% of working adults in extreme poverty are employed in agriculture. These numbers were very similar in France, Italy, and the UK — in the early 1800s. Today, 4% or less of the workforce in these countries is employed in agriculture, agricultural yield per worker is at least 30% higher, and those living in extreme poverty have plummeted.

The adoption of the same breakthrough technologies that define modern agriculture would be a great place to start. Africa uses more than 5x less fertilizer than the global average. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, less than 1% of cropland is irrigated. Use of high yield crop varieties, mechanization, and energy are all among the lowest in the world. Extending the means and benefits of modern agriculture would pay enormous dividends.

The challenge is that the spread of modern agriculture has been handicapped by the lack of fundamental economic modernization — things like roads and land tenure, let alone basic security from war. Sub-Saharan Africa needs agriculture focused reforms, infrastructure, and technologies tailored to the region’s context. It’s not enough to wait on general economic development that trickles into agriculture when people are going hungry today. Creating the enabling conditions for increasing yields must be a priority. There is no route to progress, no route to relieving the ongoing suffering associated with hunger and poverty, that doesn’t include increasing agriculture yields.

Environmental Impact

There is no human activity that has more impact on the environment than agriculture. Consider only two of the many concerns. First, nearly half of the earth’s surface is used to grow food (or food for our food), at a direct cost to forests and grasslands. Second, agriculture accounts for roughly 25% of global emissions. Each challenge, land use and emissions, benefits from increased efficiency. The more food we can grow with fewer inputs, agricultural productivity in a nutshell, the better we address local and global environmental problems.

Thankfully, we have met or are approaching the point where we can grow enough food per acre to feed the world and take land out of production to be returned to nature. The challenge will be increasing yields quickly enough, especially where they’re lagging, to avoid massive habitat loss. There is no greater opportunity for environmental protection and restoration than enhancing agriculture yields.

Population growth

The global population is expected to peak at a little over 10 billion in 2084. That means that in less than sixty years we need to be able to feed an additional 2 billion people every day. The challenge is only exacerbated by the fact that many of these people will likely be born in areas with currently low agricultural productivity. Whether we advance one of our greatest achievements will determine whether or not future souls will know literal feast or famine.

Agricultural progress deserves more attention

All of this is to say, agricultural progress matters. But I fear that a general lack of appreciation for the achievement that is modern agriculture, the want of understanding of what makes the achievement possible, has resulted in a stalling of the agricultural progress humanity still desperately needs. We cannot lose sight of all that progress has made possible and all that progress can still make possible.

With that in mind, I’m envisioning this as the first post in a series on agriculture and progress. To start, the next posts will cover the interplay of agriculture and the environment, barriers to progress, and how to fund agricultural progress. More to come!

Thank you to Brendan Mulligan, , , , and Kaylee Mulligan for their comments on earlier drafts.

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From my earliest grade school memories, lessons on the environment were uniformly focused on how humans were destroying the planet. We were driving species to extinction and creating holes in the ozone. 

The environmental stories being taught from grade schools to graduate programs largely haven’t changed in more than sixty years. A student in 1970 would have cited many of the same authors and arguments as a student today. Silent Spring is still taught as a clarion call to address pollution. John Muir’s defeat at Hetch Hetchy remains the classic example of how wilderness and beauty are destroyed in the name of economic advancement. And despite years of empirical evidence disproving their theories, Malthus’ and Erhlich’s warnings that human consumption will outstrip the earth’s ability to provide remain pillars of environmental 101 courses. A student today might learn about the BP oil spill instead of Exxon Valdez and climate change instead of acid rain, but the core message hasn’t changed - humanity’s relationship with nature is fundamentally broken and in our pursuit of progress we have left the natural world a husk of its former self. 

But the world has changed, and environmentalism needs to change with it. In contrast to the traditional narrative, we have actually been remarkably successful at solving environmental challenges. This environmental progress has occurred without requiring a step backwards in human prosperity. In fact, growing wealth and technological advancement are fundamental conditions for environmental progress. We’ve proved it’s possible to decouple emissions and GDP growth in the highest income countries. As Hannah Ritchie says in Not the End of the World, “in rich countries carbon emissions, energy use, deforestation, air pollution and water pollution are falling while these countries continue to get richer.”1 This is largely because rich countries can afford to care, invest in new, expensive technologies, and bring them down the cost curve. For all the urgency and challenges that remain, there’s good evidence that things are getting better, dramatically better, and we should be much more optimistic about humanity’s relationship with nature.2 

Consider climate change. While we still have a long way to go, considerable headway is being made. In only ten years, the projection for global temperature increase by 2100 has dropped by a full degree. 

Source: Cipher

This rapid improvement in our expected fortunes doesn’t fully account for the exponential growth in clean energy generation and storage. Solar is being installed at a clip that has wildly exceeded expectations. Battery storage is doubling every year. 

Source: The Economist

Improvements aren’t just energy and carbon related. Deforestation peaked in the 1980s, several places around the world have seen reforestation, and there’s been a major bounceback in European mammal populations. As technology allows for increasing crop yields, we need less land for agriculture and can return it to nature.3 Even the switch from horses to cars was a boon for New England forests. 

Yet, no matter how much the evidence suggests otherwise, mainstream environmentalism has been unable to ditch the negative vibes.4 It’s time to update our priors. Human and environmental progress are not competing in a zero-sum game. Instead of considering consumption as the fundamental sin responsible for the extraction of earth’s finite resources, environmentalism should focus on progress - and creating a world where both humans and the environment can thrive together. We need a positive-sum environmentalism.5 

In a zero-sum game, players compete over a fixed pool of resources. What one player wins, the other loses. Positive-sum is the opposite. Instead of fighting over a limited pie, in a positive-sum game the pie can grow - each player can end better off. 

It is not an idle distinction. It matters because zero-sum environmentalism has artificially excluded potential solutions. A pernicious example of zero-sum environmental thinking is the pushback against electric vehicles because they will require a significant increase in lithium mining. Classic environmentalism sees limited known reserves, supply constraints, and dirty refining technology and instinctively responds with calls to halt. But as we’ve seen time and time again, economic incentives and technological breakthroughs can address these problems. We’ve already seen this with lithium. Known reserves are up as people are incentivized to find it, investment led to supply exceeding demand by over 10% in 2023, and new technologies are making it cheaper and cleaner to mine. All of these factors have lowered battery prices by 99% over the last thirty years and accelerated the clean energy transition. 

Crucially, zero-sum thinking tends to evaluate solutions on a hyperlocal rather than global scale, overlooking base rates and tradeoffs. Fossil fuels require significantly more mining than critical minerals needed for the energy transition and air pollution from burning fossil fuels kills more than 3 million people per year. Even if lithium isn’t perfect, it’s a heck of a lot better than the alternatives. We can’t let perfect be the enemy of good. 

Positive-sum environmentalism on the other hand offers us expanded possibilities for progress. We could expand the use of genetically modified crops to not only reduce malnutrition and improve subsistence farmer livelihoods, but also return agricultural land to forests or grasslands to benefit biodiversity. We could streamline permitting to build new transmission lines that could connect gigawatts of renewable energy to the grid. That clean, abundant, and cheap energy could be used to desalinate water that pumped up to a river head would eliminate water scarcity as it journeys back down towards the ocean. The list of ways for nature and humanity to thrive together could go on and on, and they aren’t pie in the sky hypotheticals. We don’t need major technological breakthroughs to make them possible. We need an environmentalism that values dynamism over stasis and presents a compelling vision of abundance that people can get behind. 

The next generation of environmentalists can’t be zero-sum thinkers - it leads to a solution set of one. In a word, degrowth. What we need now is an optimistic, positive-sum environmentalism.

Thank you to Rob Tracinski, Steve Newman, Lauren Gilbert, and Brendan Mulligan for their edits and suggestions.

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