The Abundance Movement’s Deregulatory Deceit

The nation’s halting and uneven clean energy rollout—exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s hostility to anything green—threatens our prosperity, our climate, and our communities. Left unchecked, rising temperatures—driven largely by fossil fuels and the industries that burn them—will destroy ecosystems, disrupt our economy, and destabilize our society.

Some opportunistic politicians think they have a solution in the latest media fad, the so-called “Abundance” movement. They argue that the rules and regulations put in place to protect the environment are in fact obstacles impeding our ability to build the clean energy our climate needs. Their logic is nonsensical: Cut environmental regulations to protect the environment and unleash energy abundance.

But we’ve been down this path, and it leads not to abundance, but impoverishment. We’ve seen the havoc that unrestricted exploitation of nature brings to our health, our communities, and our environment: Barren hillsides. Air too dangerous to breathe. Workers’ lives devastated, and too often lost. Toxic rivers and underground fires.

In 1971, damage like this led Pennsylvanians to rise up and demand the passage of the state’s Green Amendment. Led by visionary State Sen. Franklin Kury, Pennsylvania became the first state in the nation to enshrine in its constitution a revolutionary recognition of the People’s right to pure water, clean air, and healthy environments, and to create a constitutional obligation for leaders to protect these rights. Pennsylvania’s Green Amendment is now being used to ensure that industry—including a vibrant clean energy sector—is able to advance while also protecting Pennsylvanian’s inalienable right to a clean, safe, and healthy environment, and all the economic benefits that flow therefrom.

Rather than regulatory rollbacks, we need a reorientation—one that advances clean energy abundance without empowering fossil fuels.

But in pushing a stale deregulatory agenda, the Abundance movement threatens to undo the balance healthy environments provide and open the door to a fossil fuel industry more focused on profits than people—an industry that has always overpromised on job creation and economic benefits, while consistently downplaying the harm it causes to our environment and our health.

And make no mistake, the harms are significant. Pollution and environmental degradation can impose debilitating costs through higher rates of childhood cancer, heart disease, asthma, and Alzheimer’s, on top of a broader economic burden and loss of personal well-being.

Moreover, regulatory rollbacks proposed under the false promise of “abundance” will let industry off the hook for its failures while doing nothing to stop companies from attempting to increase profits by foisting the costs of environmental abuses on to the communities they harm. Indeed, far from pushing these companies to meaningfully address project shortcomings, a deregulatory agenda allows them to continue blaming regulation for their failures, however specious the case.

Take for example, the PennEast pipeline, a proposed natural gas pipeline cancelled in 2021. Deregulation advocates blame the inability to secure permits for the project’s failure, but the real issue was a lack of demand. In the absence of genuine need, there was no way to justify the investment, seizure of private property, or harm the project would unleash on the community’s health, economy, or environment.

Faulting regulations that protect communities and prevent wasteful investment for the fossil fuel industry’s failure to deliver is misplaced. Reforming the way that environmental permitting works, even removing the requirement to secure these permits entirely, won’t solve the industry’s fundamental duplicity.

Indeed, in today’s environment—with a federal government that is actively hostile to clean energy, that believes climate change is a hoax, and is fully in thrall to monied interests bent on extracting every dollar possible from the natural world, whatever the consequences to our health, our communities, or our environments—advocating that states roll back environmental protections and shut communities out of the decision-making process is laughably naive at best, and complicit in the resulting harms at worst.

Removing the ability of communities to push back on these harms, and instead counting on the fossil fuel industry to police itself, will not result in abundance for all, but profits for a select few.

Rather than regulatory rollbacks, we need a reorientation—one that advances clean energy abundance without empowering fossil fuels. We must undergird our system with a recognition that all Americans have an inherent right to pure water, clean air, and a healthy environment. That is how Green Amendments will support economic progress while also protecting our environment.