Brian Stone Jr. is a professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and director of the Urban Climate Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His most recent book is “Radical Adaptation: Transforming Cities for a Climate Changed World” (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Strolling past the residential buildings at East 112th Street and Madison Avenue in East Harlem, one might fail to see what makes them remarkable. Each is flanked by community gardens and staircases leading to an elevated greenspace, much like entrances to the city’s celebrated High Line linear park — a bit unusual, but familiar. Less familiar is what is happening at roof level: Virtually every square foot of a mezzanine garden and the rooftops of three adjacent buildings was designed to absorb sunlight and rainwater to lower residents’ utility bills.
The 709-unit community, called Sendero Verde, is an affordable housing development. It is also a clue to a longstanding riddle: How do we make Americans care about climate change?
A version of this riddle is being posed by proponents of the emergent “abundance” movement, a drive for political change that is gaining attention in progressive policy circles. But the endorsed solutions fail to anticipate how climate change is altering the economics of everyday life.
As journalist Ezra Klein and others promoting the abundance idea argue, the key question of the moment is, What do we need more of and how do we get it? Their response is a long list of national, largely middle- and working-class needs, including an expanded national electrical grid powered by inexpensive, carbon-free energy; greatly extended transit systems; affordable housing; and a renewed construction base that will supply a wealth of good-paying jobs. As for how to get it, abundance proponents call for an aggressive reduction of regulatory red tape to enable the rapid development of the needed infrastructure.
The movement has been rightly praised for its potential for effective coalition building on the political left. If there is a single lesson to be observed from the present moment, it lies in the galvanizing energy of swift and decisive governmental action, even when its object is a dismantling of national economic, cultural and moral power. But a key response to the What do we need element of the abundance equation is overlooked.
We need not just carbon-free energy but a meaningful resilience to climate disruption — both physical and economic. The abundance theorists are largely silent on this point, but it may be the strongest card in their hand.
Climate Economics
It is increasingly evident that Americans do not view climate change as an urgent issue. While nearly 70% acknowledge that global warming is happening, only about a third believe it to be a major problem — a proportion that has fallen in recent years. In fact, few Americans rank climate change among even the 10 most challenging issues confronting the nation. Economic issues, such as inflation and the cost of healthcare, top that list.
Lurking behind rising inflation, however, is a clear climate-related signal. Insurance rates for autos and housing are climbing at unprecedented rates due, in no small part, to a rising incidence of climate-driven natural disasters. The cost of the average auto insurance policy increased by an ominous 31% over the past two years and has emerged as one of the leading drivers of core inflation. Also sensitive to destructive weather events, the average cost of homeowner insurance policies increased by 24% over the most recent three-year period. Inflation in the cost of food, due in part to climate-driven losses in agriculture production, is projected to reach up to 3% annually over the next decade.
Another issue high on the list of critical national challenges, according to public opinion, is the national deficit. In 2024, the four most costly items in the U.S. budget — social security, federal health insurance programs, defense spending and interest payments on the national debt — accounted for more than 100% of our annual tax revenues, leaving the rest of the budget to be financed through deficit spending. Of the remaining, non-discretionary items, disaster relief in 2024, accounting for a budgeted $68 billion and an additional $110 billion in emergency appropriations, exceeded almost every budget category, including total annual spending on transportation, public health and nutritional assistance programs.
Only weeks after Congress passed the largest disaster-related supplemental funding bill in U.S. history, the Los Angeles wildfires surpassed Hurricane Katrina as the most costly natural disaster to date, requiring an estimated $250 billion for rebuilding. The federal share of this bill is not yet established, but the rising economic toll of climate-driven disasters promises to be an era-defining political issue.
“We need not just carbon-free energy but a meaningful resilience to climate disruption — both physical and economic.”
The emerging economic threat of climate change suggests a somewhat surprising outcome: The long-delayed realization that what was once considered our grandchildren’s problem is now our own is arriving not in the form of hurricane-force winds, but as a letter of assessment from an insurer. Climate change may not pose an immediate danger to the lives of most Americans, but it is starting to chip away at our economic well-being.
This suggests an additional response to the What do we need more of formulation of abundance proponents. We need greater climate resilience in our homes, communities and economic systems. The green energy infrastructure positioned at the center of the abundance movement, no matter how vast, accelerated and carbon-free, will not alone deliver the necessary physical and economic resilience to the climate-driven disruptions we face.
The Sendero Verde Model
To see why, let’s return to the Sendero Verde community in East Harlem. Fast-tracked through a city program providing funding and technical expertise for the construction of all-electric housing projects, the community addresses the critical need for more affordable housing in New York. More than 10% of the units are set aside for formerly homeless residents, and all units meet income thresholds for affordability.
Were the apartments to be fully powered by renewable energy generated off-site, this would be a model project for the abundance movement. But power generation is only half of the carbon-free energy equation. More noteworthy than the source of green energy to power the apartments is how little is needed.
Sendero Verde is the world’s largest certified passive house project, a style of construction that achieves high energy efficiency. Equipped with triple-glazed windows, advanced air-sealing construction, ventilation systems and highly efficient heat pumps, each apartment uses 50% to 60% less energy for heating and cooling than conventional affordable housing units.
This halving of energy costs both increases long-term affordability for residents and renders them less vulnerable to fluctuating prices over time. Utility costs are further reduced through the collection, storage and use of stormwater on site, limiting the volume of municipal water needed for irrigation and stormwater utility fees.
Sendero Verde’s location is an additional source of economic resilience for residents, who live just blocks from a subway stop and can take advantage of Manhattan’s vast walkability. Going car-free in a city today allows people to allocate 20% of their monthly income to other expenses. Sendero Verde was also designed to provide greater protection against extreme weather conditions. As a byproduct of high-efficiency insulation, indoor temperatures change very slowly in response to power disruptions in both hot and cold weather.
The threat of displacement due to flooding is low as well, as all units are at least two stories above ground level, along with essential mechanical systems. And there is almost no ambient noise from the city streets thanks to the sound insulation of passive house construction.
In a climate-changed world, these benefits — a stability of household expenses, reduced risk of displacement from natural disasters and the ability to weather long power outages during heat waves — will soon be viewed as essentials of contemporary life. None of these core elements of climate resilience is provided by carbon-free energy alone.
It is in this simplified formulation — equating the whole of climate change management to the narrower goal of a clean energy grid — that the abundance theorists fail to fully leverage the power of their critique. If it is to accrue a broader base of support, the movement needs a better story than a carbon-free grid; Sendero Verde is a good first draft.
The Politics Of Resilience
Climate change progressives have underestimated the power of resilience as a compelling political narrative for decades. As a graduate student in the 1990s, I was surprised to discover just how much warming in cities was attributable to the urban heat island effect (the concentration of buildings and heat-absorbing materials) as opposed to the global greenhouse effect. Both forces, to be sure, have an accelerating influence on urban temperatures, but only one can be moderated through local action alone. Why not address the warming challenge on both fronts by working to minimize the intensity of urban heat and reduce planet-warming emissions?
“Climate change may not pose an immediate danger to the lives of most Americans, but it is starting to chip away at our economic well-being.”
To present such a proposal at an academic conference back then was often viewed as aligning with the propaganda machinery of the “American oil cartel.” The logic there, I came to understand, was that any alternative strategy for reducing the threat of extreme temperatures in cities was a distraction from the core aim of carbon emissions reduction.
This thinking relied on a wager that has yielded few dividends in the intervening years. The potential to avert dangerous levels of heat, flooding, drought and wildfire through aggressive (or even moderate) emissions reductions has not been realized.
We have now passed the absolute global warming threshold set by the Paris Climate Agreement for the avoidance of highly destabilizing climate impacts, and the consequences are upon us. In response, abundance theorists emphasize the need for a clean energy transition — which, even in the most optimistic scenarios, will yield almost no protection from extreme weather for many decades.
Without equally advocating for climate resilience, they fail to grasp the reality of what Americans need more of right now. It is true that reducing emissions is the only route to solving the climate crisis, but these reductions are best delivered as the quiet army inside a Trojan Horse of climate and economic resilience.
Consider, for example, the titling and composition of the largest climate-related bill ever enacted by Congress, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The emissions reductions it sought were delivered not in the form of clean energy mandates, but as incentives for better performing vehicles, lower operating cost HVAC systems and green manufacturing jobs. The Biden Administration’s decision to emphasize the consumption side of the carbon-free economy was based, in part, on the spectacular failure of emissions-related bills dating back to the Clinton Administration, such as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003 and the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.
Few Americans may care to understand the inner workings of the global greenhouse effect or the technological processes through which electricity is generated and delivered to their homes. But they do care about affordable housing, jobs and, increasingly, avoiding displacement and bankruptcy from extreme weather events.
Reimagining Urbanization
My concern with the abundance movement’s call for a dramatic acceleration in the pace and scope of infrastructure development is not with the scale of its ambition, but with the modesty of its aims. To rapidly construct millions of new affordable housing units without ensuring that they lower the demand for energy through their construction, moderate the risk of flooding through their design and enhance the quality of life within their communities is to set one’s sights too low.
Yes, we urgently need more affordable housing, high speed rail and cheap renewable energy. We also need accelerated investments in these areas to respond to the inexorable reality of a rapidly changing climate: housing that is more resilient to weather extremes, layered and redundant networks for transportation and building-integrated power generation that can operate during periods of grid disruption.
We must do more than expedite our permitting processes; we must reimagine urbanization. It is in this reimagining that we find a compelling story for climate politics.
For the techno-optimists like Klein and other abundance advocates, emerging technologies for generating abundant, carbon-free energy (such as nuclear fusion) and scrubbing the atmosphere of carbon dioxide are an exciting and future-oriented platform for managing climate change and amassing political power.
An ostensible benefit of these innovations, as with most technology, is that they require no fundamental changes to how we design and experience our communities. Fusion reactors can be sited outside of cities, avoiding the need to transform our homes into small-scale power plants; machines for sequestering carbon dioxide negate the need to change how we commute to work, structure our food systems or incorporate nature into our neighborhoods.
But avoiding change can also mean continuing harmful patterns. Cheap, abundant energy enables us to drive our cars without worrying about how our auto dependency impacts our well-being and amplifies climate risk. The same argument can be made for technological change in the form of hyper-connectivity, reduced social engagement and remote learning.
Perhaps more than any other environmental challenge, climate impacts are only moderately responsive to technological fixes. A recent study of heat stress in large cities assessed the capacity of an array of strategies — both technological and design-based — to cool down urban neighborhoods during hot weather. Not only were nature-based solutions, such as an expansion of street trees, found to be more effective than shading buildings with solar panels or repaving streets with reflective materials, green design outperformed technology in the hottest settings by a factor of four.
“We must do more than expedite our permitting processes; we must reimagine urbanization. It is in this reimagining that we find a compelling story for climate politics.”
The same is generally true for flooding, drought and wildfires: Designing our communities to absorb and retain more rainwater and to limit expansion into high-risk areas is more effective in managing the impacts of extreme climate events than any technology presently available or in development.
An additional downside of the techno-optimist worldview is that it tends to concentrate power in private hands. The project of retrofitting our cities for climate resilience will be long lasting, uneven in deployment and costly (albeit less so than the constant rebuilding it positions us to avoid). It is also a project fully within the purview of local governments and community institutions.
Outsourcing climate change management to corporate energy companies, auto manufacturers and, soon enough, AI companies risks allowing these entities to impede progress when it suits other market or political objectives (see: Elon Musk).
The long-term project of a physical redesign of our cities for climate resilience properly positions political control within the communities confronting intensifying risk. Abundance proponents should acknowledge a truism well known to community planners: Technology centralizes power; human-scaled design disperses it.
Herein lies an expanded narrative for the abundance movement. The most effective means of responding to climate change also enhances our physical and economic resilience: affordable housing that generates its own power and requires less energy use, communities redesigned to support a diversity of inexpensive transportation options, public greenspaces that double as critical infrastructure for heat regulation and flood management, the opportunity to grow your own food. The early returns from communities designed to deliver these amenities show them to be popular, with a growing number of U.S. cities adopting policies to integrate their affordable housing and climate resilience investments.
Catalyzing this movement through an acceleration of public investment and regulatory approval is no less imperative than an infrastructure agenda focused on renewable power transmission and conventional approaches to affordable housing. A resilient abundance differs only in delivering more of what Americans say they want.
The abundance theorists are correct to call for a renewed national approach to undertake big projects, but there is an austerity to their ambitions. Our crossing of the planetary threshold for tolerable warming has fundamentally changed the political moment: Moving forward, there is no economic resilience to be had for most Americans absent a climate resilience. This is a story still waiting to be told.
