The chapter argues that climate change, like housing, scrambles familiar left–right politics: preserving a livable climate requires massive action, not restraint. It critiques “degrowth” as a sweeping anti-materialist philosophy that is politically infeasible on the timelines climate science demands; attempts to impose rapid scarcity tend to trigger backlash, empower far-right politics, and ultimately risk more drilling and burning.

Instead, the authors emphasize that human well-being has historically risen with energy access, and that energy inequality remains a core global injustice. Because fossil fuels are deadly through both climate change and air pollution, the path to shared prosperity is not less energy but clean energy—made plausible by steep cost declines in solar and wind, evidence that rich countries can grow while cutting per-capita emissions, and emerging possibilities like advanced nuclear and even fusion.

Turning that possibility into reality requires an enormous building agenda: “electrify everything” by replacing roughly a billion household and transportation machines (cars, furnaces, stoves, dryers) with electric alternatives, while simultaneously replacing fossil-based electricity generation and greatly expanding total supply. The authors stress that decarbonization also demands vast new land for wind/solar and a dramatically larger transmission grid—projects that are as much political and permitting challenges as engineering ones.

To show what goes wrong when America tries to build, the chapter uses California high-speed rail as a case study: decades of planning, voter approval, federal support, and gubernatorial backing still produced delays, ballooning costs, and shrinking ambition—from a San Francisco–Los Angeles line to a threatened Merced–Bakersfield segment. Ezra’s tour in Fresno highlights how eminent domain fights, seasonal freight-rail constraints, and never-ending environmental review and litigation cause time to become the main cost driver, eroding public trust and political support.

The chapter broadens the diagnosis with evidence that construction productivity has stagnated or declined since around 1970, and that the problem is not simply “government” or unions. Drawing on Mancur Olson’s theory of interest-group proliferation and Nicholas Bagley’s critique of America’s “procedure fetish,” it argues that affluent democracies have accumulated veto points, paperwork, and lawsuit-driven governance that makes even beneficial projects hard to complete. The “Green Dilemma” is that 1970s-era environmental laws designed to slow harmful development now also slow the clean-energy build-out; the chapter ends by calling for a culture and legal framework that can fast-track climate-critical infrastructure while still balancing legitimacy, accountability, and fairness.