By Alex Trembath
Last week, fifteen cohosts, nine sponsoring organizations, and over 600 people convened for Abundance 2025 in Washington, DC. This was the second annual Abundance conference, and I had the privilege to help organize each. Below I’m publishing a slightly edited version of the short remarks I gave on stage, in which I pushed back on utterly rejected the accusation that abundance is an “astroturfed” movement. As I said, “Abundance is bottom-up. We were not herded and orchestrated: we found each other.”
It’s been a pleasure getting to know my esteemed colleagues in the abundance coalition over the last few years. I think it was around three years ago at this point that a bunch of us started talking about what it would look like, and the work it would do in the world, to convene this nascent, tenuous thing called the abundance movement. I was happy to help launch this event last year and am genuinely stunned to look out tonight at what this conference, and this coalition, have so quickly grown into.
Because I know many of us among the cohosts and sponsors of the conference—and I’m sure many of you in housing, energy, governance, tech, and other spaces—feel like we’ve been doing abundance since long before there was a movement or an agenda or a book. Breakthrough was founded almost twenty years ago to create an environmentalism that builds. The Federation of American Scientists, one of our cohosts, was founded 80 years ago and obviously represents a critical undercurrent of abundance, which is the liberatory power of science and technology. What we now think of as state capacity has been building momentum for years, drawing on ideas from dynamism and civic-tech reform. And I know my YIMBY friends have been doing housing abundance for over a decade at this point, and have really set the high-water mark for what mass-appeal, boots-on-the-ground abundance activism can look like.
I like to say that the different abundance factions use different nouns but similar verbs: build, densify, unleash, expand. But what I think brings us all together is not just a generic vocabulary or even just a broadly shared agenda.
We face an entirely new set of challenges in American politics and culture. It was one thing to build a more abundant society at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, or during the New Deal or the postwar era. Today, abundance faces novel headwinds, and it’s not just NIMBYs and degrowthers. Incumbency dynamics, regulatory bloat from decades of administrative inertia, technological stagnation, and what economists call cost-disease effects have made it difficult to deploy effective state capacity, to afford essential but labor-intensive goods and services like education and childcare, and to imagine let alone build a future more technologically advanced and, well, abundant than our own.
I think that’s why we’re all here. Exceptional circumstances brought us together.
And so I feel the need to take a moment to address a certain report published by the Revolving Door Project. Because even accounting for my pro-abundance bias, I’m left a bit nonplussed by much of the criticism levied at abundance. The American Prospect described this coalition—literally, many of the cohosts of Abundance 2025—in pretty conspiratorial terms, writing suggestively that our groups “have connections to corporate interests” with “financial ties to crypto, AI, Big Tech, and oil.” A writer in the New International accused the abundance coalition of employing an “astroturf” strategy. Revolving Door Project released a whole report “on the people and orgs behind this movement, hopefully shedding some light on this mysterious bunch.” The implication of all this criticism is clear: abundance is not a legitimate movement.
And if I leave you with one takeaway, I hope it’s this: that accusation is totally, categorically false. Abundance is not this astroturfed conspiracy. In fact just the opposite: abundance is emergent. Abundance is bottom-up. We were not herded and orchestrated: we found each other.
The people and ideas in this ballroom pull on strands from multiple fields—think tanks, activists, organizers, elected officials, journalists, philanthropists, technologists and entrepreneurs and investors—and multiple ideological traditions—liberalism (classical and otherwise), urbanism, supply-side progressivism, state capacity libertarianism, industrial conservative populism, ecomodernism, humanism, effective altruism, and beyond. There are, as we learned this morning, many Varieties of Abundance. We’re all here not because we agree on everything that our corporate overlords tell us to believe, but to do the messy work of figuring out what unites us across differences, how we can collaborate to solve real material problems in the world, and whether this audacious thing called Abundance can meaningfully change American politics and culture.
We each have our own story of how we got to this room. And the reason you know it’s not some astroturfed conspiracy is because I don’t think any of us knows exactly where it’s going from here. Last week I had to pause Marshall Kosloff’s podcast because he said something I found so inspiring, he said because abundance “is so unsettled, people can actually contribute.” To me that’s what’s most exciting, and vital, about abundance, and about this crowd.
My contribution is that I’ve dedicated my career to modernizing environmental politics for the 21st century. Your contribution may be quite different from mine. But if anything could bring together nuclear and solar advocates, housing activists, scientists, AI researchers, state capacity reformers, Congressional representatives and comptrollers, and beyond, it would have to be an idea as capacious and compelling as abundance.