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what galls Gelernt now, after seeing the Times report about the inspector general’s investigation, is that his suspicions were right all along: Separating families was the objective of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, not a byproduct. The children were the targets of the policy, not collateral damage. “We need to take away children,” Sessions reportedly told the local U.S. attorneys.

When the number of immigrants surged at the border in 2014, President Barack Obama responded by building more detention facilities and holding families indefinitely — though still together — and faced a legal backlash.

But Trump’s policy was something altogether different. It was child abuse, plain and simple. “That’s why it’s so chilling,” Gelernt told me. “D.O.J. officials apparently declined to exempt even cases with a baby.

note what Rosenstein did not deny: That he refused his U.S. attorneys permission to automatically exempt undocumented immigrants with young children from prosecution.

what we have lately learned about Rosenstein is that he is a very canny political operator. He has a gift for threading needles that even a tailor would envy.

While serving in the Trump Justice Department, for instance, he wrote a memo recommending the removal of James Comey as the head of the F.B.I., and he later defended his boss, William Barr, after he misled the public about the results of the Mueller investigation

But he also had the presence of mind to appoint Robert S. Mueller in the first place — and, though he has denied it, to question Trump’s own presence of mind. (It has been reported that he suggested secretly recording Trump’s ravings in order to expose him as unfit to lead.)

when it was Rosenstein’s turn, he did nothing to stop government-orchestrated cruelty. Instead, he simply did his job.

This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations

In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.

Because Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.

Over a decade later, Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category.

Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products

Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp.

As a result of all this, would-be competitors can’t raise the money to take on Facebook. Investors realize that if a company gets traction, Facebook will copy its innovations, shut it down or acquire it for a relatively modest sum

Facebook’s dominance is not an accident of history. The company’s strategy was to beat every competitor in plain view, and regulators and the government tacitly — and at times explicitly — approved

The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.

Neither Instagram nor WhatsApp had any meaningful revenue, but both were incredibly popular. The Instagram acquisition guaranteed Facebook would preserve its dominance in photo networking, and WhatsApp gave it a new entry into mobile real-time messaging.

When it hasn’t acquired its way to dominance, Facebook has used its monopoly position to shut out competing companies or has copied their technology.

In 2014, the rules favored curiosity-inducing “clickbait” headlines. In 2016, they enabled the spread of fringe political views and fake news, which made it easier for Russian actors to manipulate the American electorate.

As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon)

I don’t blame Mark for his quest for domination. He has demonstrated nothing more nefarious than the virtuous hustle of a talented entrepreneur

It’s on our government to ensure that we never lose the magic of the invisible hand. How did we allow this to happen

a narrow reliance on whether or not consumers have experienced price gouging fails to take into account the full cost of market domination

It doesn’t recognize that we also want markets to be competitive to encourage innovation and to hold power in check. And it is out of step with the history of antitrust law. Two of the last major antitrust suits, against AT&T and IBM in the 1980s, were grounded in the argument that they had used their size to stifle innovation and crush competition.

It is a disservice to the laws and their intent to retain such a laserlike focus on price effects as the measure of all that antitrust was meant to do.”

Facebook is the perfect case on which to reverse course, precisely because Facebook makes its money from targeted advertising, meaning users do not pay to use the service. But it is not actually free, and it certainly isn’t harmless.

We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and by either measure it doesn’t come cheap.

The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.

The vibrant marketplace that once drove Facebook and other social media companies to compete to come up with better products has virtually disappeared. This means there’s less chance of start-ups developing healthier, less exploitative social media platforms. It also means less accountability on issues like privacy.

The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.

Facebook engineers write algorithms that select which users’ comments or experiences end up displayed in the News Feeds of friends and family. These rules are proprietary and so complex that many Facebook employees themselves don’t understand them.

What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.

In January 2018, Mark announced that the algorithms would favor non-news content shared by friends and news from “trustworthy” sources, which his engineers interpreted — to the confusion of many — as a boost for anything in the category of “politics, crime, tragedy.”

As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns.

No one at Facebook headquarters is choosing what single news story everyone in America wakes up to, of course. But they do decide whether it will be an article from a reputable outlet or a clip from “The Daily Show,” a photo from a friend’s wedding or an incendiary call to kill others.

Mark knows that this is too much power and is pursuing a twofold strategy to mitigate it. He is pivoting Facebook’s focus toward encouraging more private, encrypted messaging that Facebook’s employees can’t see, let alone control

Second, he is hoping for friendly oversight from regulators and other industry executives.

In an op-ed essay in The Washington Post in March, he wrote, “Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and I agree.” And he went even further than before, calling for more government regulation — not just on speech, but also on privacy and interoperability, the ability of consumers to seamlessly leave one network and transfer their profiles, friend connections, photos and other data to another.

I don’t think these proposals were made in bad faith. But I do think they’re an attempt to head off the argument that regulators need to go further and break up the company. Facebook isn’t afraid of a few more rules. It’s afraid of an antitrust case and of the kind of accountability that real government oversight would bring.

We don’t expect calcified rules or voluntary commissions to work to regulate drug companies, health care companies, car manufacturers or credit card providers. Agencies oversee these industries to ensure that the private market works for the public good. In these cases, we all understand that government isn’t an external force meddling in an organic market; it’s what makes a dynamic and fair market possible in the first place. This should be just as true for social networking as it is for air travel or pharmaceuticals.

Just breaking up Facebook is not enough. We need a new agency, empowered by Congress to regulate tech companies. Its first mandate should be to protect privacy.

First, Facebook should be separated into multiple companies. The F.T.C., in conjunction with the Justice Department, should enforce antitrust laws by undoing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and banning future acquisitions for several years.

How would a breakup work? Facebook would have a brief period to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp businesses, and the three would become distinct companies, most likely publicly traded.

Facebook is indeed more valuable when there are more people on it: There are more connections for a user to make and more content to be shared. But the cost of entering the social network business is not that high. And unlike with pipes and electricity, there is no good argument that the country benefits from having only one dominant social networking company.

others worry that the breakup of Facebook or other American tech companies could be a national security problem. Because advancements in artificial intelligence require immense amounts of data and computing power, only large companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon can afford these investments, they say. If American companies become smaller, the Chinese will outpace us.

The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.

But the biggest winners would be the American people. Imagine a competitive market in which they could choose among one network that offered higher privacy standards, another that cost a fee to join but had little advertising and another that would allow users to customize and tweak their feeds as they saw fit

The cost of breaking up Facebook would be next to zero for the government, and lots of people stand to gain economically. A ban on short-term acquisitions would ensure that competitors, and the investors who take a bet on them, would have the space to flourish. Digital advertisers would suddenly have multiple companies vying for their dollars.

The Europeans have made headway on privacy with the General Data Protection Regulation, a law that guarantees users a minimal level of protection. A landmark privacy bill in the United States should specify exactly what control Americans have over their digital information, require clearer disclosure to users and provide enough flexibility to the agency to exercise effective oversight over time

The agency should also be charged with guaranteeing basic interoperability across platforms.

Finally, the agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media

We will have to create similar standards that tech companies can use. These standards should of course be subject to the review of the courts, just as any other limits on speech are. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or live-stream violence.

These are difficult challenges. I worry that government regulators will not be able to keep up with the pace of digital innovation

I worry that more competition in social networking might lead to a conservative Facebook and a liberal one, or that newer social networks might be less secure if government regulation is weak

Professor Wu has written that this “policeman at the elbow” led IBM to steer clear “of anything close to anticompetitive conduct, for fear of adding to the case against it.”

Finally, an aggressive case against Facebook would persuade other behemoths like Google and Amazon to think twice about stifling competition in their own sectors, out of fear that they could be next.

The alternative is bleak. If we do not take action, Facebook’s monopoly will become even more entrenched. With much of the world’s personal communications in hand, it can mine that data for patterns and trends, giving it an advantage over competitors for decades to come.

This movement of public servants, scholars and activists deserves our support. Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can.

If viral aerosols from talking are the most common vector of COVID-19 transmission … we should encourage universal mask wearing, social distancing among people from different households, and quiet in public spaces.

- If symptomatic individuals don’t just talk but also often cough and sneeze … we should create a national quarantine system to separate them from their families and a contact-tracing system to identify potentially infected individuals and ask them to isolate.

- If a large number of infected people will be asymptomatic … we should invest early in a mass-testing apparatus to quickly identify silent carriers.

- If, no matter how well we respond, this pandemic is going to last for a while … we should encourage people to reclaim normalcy by spending as much time outside as possible, while still stressing the importance of mask usage and social distancing when gathering with those outside of one’s household.

To be fair to American leaders, or at least inclusive of non-American incompetence, it’s not just the U.S. where elites have made a mockery of their authority.

The World Health Organization took months to declare that the coronavirus was airborne in the first place.

after 500 years, a couple of scientific revolutions, scores of medical discoveries, and dozens of vaccines—not to mention nine months of 21st-century plague—too many American leaders are still practicing the equivalent of legislative bloodletting, as they oversee scientifically unsound and poorly explained laws that are immiserating the populations they’ve sworn to protect.

The public sector has failed to invest adequately or wisely, falling behind its peers in building infrastructure, especially the digital sort.

Penny-pinching is hard-wired into the state. In 2009, on Mrs Merkel’s watch, Germany hobbled itself with a constitutional amendment that makes it illegal to run more than a minute deficit. With interest rates so low, sensible governments ought to have been borrowing for investment, not fainting at the first spot of red ink.

Germany’s most severe domestic problem is a failure to reform its pension system. Germans are ageing fast, and the baby-boomers will place an even heavier burden on the budget later this decade as they retire

Germany has also been sluggish, and still emits more carbon per head than any other big EU country, not helped by Mrs Merkel’s shutdown of Germany’s nuclear industry after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.

The EU has not grappled sufficiently with the weakness of its indebted southern members. Only during the pandemic did it create a financial instrument that lets the EU issue jointly guaranteed debt, and dispense some of the cash as grants, rather than yet more loans.

Worse, the “stability” rules that will force countries back into austerity to shrink their stocks of debt are ready to revive, unless amended.

China is an increasingly challenging economic and strategic rival, Russia an unpredictable threat and America a distracted and uncertain ally.

Despite recent increases, it spends too little on defence. It cosies up to Beijing in the hope of better trading terms. It is giving Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, a chokehold over European energy supplies by backing the new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline which, as it happens, makes landfall in Mrs Merkel’s own constituency.

Comfortable, cautious Germans seem uninterested in serious debate about the future. Crisis-management has become a substitute for initiative. Candidates have no incentive to highlight their country’s looming problems.

One is a coalition headed by Mrs Merkel’s party, the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister-party (the CDU/CSU), led by Armin Laschet. The other is a coalition led by Olaf Scholz, of the Social Democrats (SPD), who is Germany’s finance minister. In either case, the coalition would be joined by the Greens and by the pro-business Free Democrats.

Sixteen years in power has been enough. The party has run out of ideas and drive, as its decision to choose the gaffe-prone and uninspiring Mr Laschet for chancellor makes clear. An affable lightweight, he has run a dismal campaign, and is predicted to lead his team to its worst result since the second world war. The polls say that Mr Scholz is preferred by twice as many voters.

The problem is that although he belongs to the business-friendly wing of his party, the SPD is stuffed with left-wingers.

They may try to drag him further in their direction than the Free Democrats will wear and enterprise can comfortably bear.

in March 2020 alone, users spent as much time on it as there has been since the stone age: 2.8bn hours, or nearly 320,000 years.

TikTok became the first app not owned by Facebook to cross the 3bn download mark. For context, there are 5.3bn mobile phone users worldwide.

All true. But the Americans also went straight to building roads, schools and governing institutions — in an effort to “win hearts and minds” — without first figuring out what values animate those hearts and what ideas fill those minds. We thus wound up acting in ways that would ultimately alienate everyday Afghans.

First, almost all representatives of Western governments — military and civilian — were required to stay “inside the wire,” meaning they were confined at all times to Kabul’s fortified Green Zone and well-guarded military bases across the country.

As it was, however, virtually the only contact most Afghans had with the West came via heavily armed and armored combat troops. Americans thus mistook the Afghan countryside for a mere theater of war, rather than as a place where people actually lived.

U.S. forces turned villages into battlegrounds, pulverizing mud homes and destroying livelihoods. One could almost hear the Taliban laughing as any sympathy for the West evaporated in bursts of gunfire.

From the point of view of many Afghans, Americans might as well have been extraterrestrials, descending out of the black sky every few weeks, looking and acting alien, and always bringing disruption, if not outright ruin.

The Marines I worked with were shocked, for example, to hear me exchanging favorite Koran verses with my fellow Afghans, mistaking this for extremism rather than shared piety

When talking to Afghan villagers, the Marines would not remove their sunglasses — a clear indication of untrustworthiness in a country that values eye contact.

In some cases, they would approach and directly address village women, violating one of rural Afghanistan’s strictest cultural norms.

Faux pas such as these sound almost comically basic, and they are. But multiplied over millions of interactions throughout the United States’ two decades of wheel-spinning in Afghanistan, they cost us dearly in terms of local support.

Sometimes, yes, we built good things — clinics, schools, wells. But when the building was done, we would simply leave. The Taliban would not only destroy those facilities, but also look upon the local community with greater suspicion for having received “gifts” from America.

This isn’t just about Afghanistan. When it comes to cultural illiteracy, America is a recidivist. We failed to understand Iraqi culture, too, so that now, many Iraqis see Iran as the lesser of two evils. Before that, we failed to understand Vietnam. And so on. Wherever our relentless military adventurism takes us next, we must do better.

imilar increases occurred at the same time for girls in Canada for mood disorders and for self-harm. Girls in the U.K. also experienced very large increases in anxiety, depression, and self-harm (with much smaller increases for boys).

Some have argued that these increases reflect nothing more than Gen Z’s increased willingness to disclose their mental-health problems. But researchers have found corresponding increases in measurable behaviors such as suicide (for both sexes), and emergency-department admissions for self-harm (for girls only). From 2010 to 2014, rates of hospital admission for self-harm did not increase at all for women in their early 20s, or for boys or young men, but they doubled for girls ages 10 to 14.

The available evidence suggests that Facebook’s products have probably harmed millions of girls. If public officials want to make that case, it could go like this:

from 2010 to 2014, high-school students moved much more of their lives onto social-media platforms.

National surveys of American high-school students show that only about 63 percent reported using a “social networking site” on a daily basis back in 2010.

But as smartphone ownership increased, access became easier and visits became more frequent. By 2014, 80 percent of high-school students said they used a social-media platform on a daily basis, and 24 percent said that they were online “almost constantly.”

2. The timing points to social media.

Notably, girls became much heavier users of the new visually oriented platforms, primarily Instagram (which by 2013 had more than 100 million users), followed by Snapchat, Pinterest, and Tumblr.

Boys are glued to their screens as well, but they aren’t using social media as much; they spend far more time playing video games. When a boy steps away from the console, he does not spend the next few hours worrying about what other players are saying about him

Instagram, in contrast, can loom in a girl’s mind even when the app is not open, driving hours of obsessive thought, worry, and shame.

3. The victims point to Instagram.

In 2017, British researchers asked 1,500 teens to rate how each of the major social-media platforms affected them on certain well-being measures, including anxiety, loneliness, body image, and sleep. Instagram scored as the most harmful, followed by Snapchat and then Facebook.

Facebook’s own research, leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, has a similar finding: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression … This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” The researchers also noted that “social comparison is worse” on Instagram than on rival apps.

4. No other suspect is equally plausible.

A recent experiment confirmed these observations: Young women were randomly assigned to use Instagram, use Facebook, or play a simple video game for seven minutes. The researchers found that “those who used Instagram, but not Facebook, showed decreased body satisfaction, decreased positive affect, and increased negative affect.”

Snapchat’s filters “keep the focus on the face,” whereas Instagram “focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle.

(Boys lost less, and may even have gained, when they took up multiplayer fantasy games, especially those that put them into teams.)

The subset of studies that allow researchers to isolate social media, and Instagram in particular, show a much stronger relationship with poor mental health. The same goes for those that zoom in on girls rather than all teens.

In a 2019 internal essay, Andrew Bosworth, a longtime company executive, wrote:While Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar. Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation.

Bosworth was proposing what medical researchers call a “dose-response relationship.” Sugar, salt, alcohol, and many other substances that are dangerous in large doses are harmless in small ones.

his framing also implies that any health problems caused by social media result from the user’s lack of self-control. That’s exactly what Bosworth concluded: “Each of us must take responsibility for ourselves.” The dose-response frame also points to cheap solutions that pose no threat to its business model. The company can simply offer more tools to help Instagram and Facebook users limit their consumption.

social-media platforms are not like sugar. They don’t just affect the individuals who overindulge. Rather, when teens went from texting their close friends on flip phones in 2010 to posting carefully curated photographs and awaiting comments and likes by 2014, the change rewired everyone’s social life.

Improvements in technology generally help friends connect, but the move onto social-media platforms also made it easier—indeed, almost obligatory––for users to perform for one another.

Public performance is risky. Private conversation is far more playful. A bad joke or poorly chosen word among friends elicits groans, or perhaps a rebuke and a chance to apologize. Getting repeated feedback in a low-stakes environment is one of the main ways that play builds social skills, physical skills, and the ability to properly judge risk. Play also strengthens friendships.

When girls started spending hours each day on Instagram, they lost many of the benefits of play.

First, Congress should pass legislation compelling Facebook, Instagram, and all other social-media platforms to allow academic researchers access to their data. One such bill is the Platform Transparency and Accountability Act, proposed by the Stanford University researcher Nate Persily.

The wrong photo can lead to school-wide or even national infamy, cyberbullying from strangers, and a permanent scarlet letter

Performative social media also puts girls into a trap: Those who choose not to play the game are cut off from their classmates

Instagram and, more recently, TikTok have become wired into the way teens interact, much as the telephone became essential to past generations.

f those platforms. Without a proper control group, we can’t be certain that the experiment has been a catastrophic failure, but it probably has been. Until someone comes up with a more plausible explanation for what has happened to Gen Z girls, the most prudent course of action for regulators, legislators, and parents is to take steps to mitigate the harm.

Correlation does not prove causation, but nobody has yet found an alternative explanation for the massive, sudden, gendered, multinational deterioration of teen mental health during the period in question.

Second, Congress should toughen the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. An early version of the legislation proposed 16 as the age at which children should legally be allowed to give away their data and their privacy.

Unfortunately, e-commerce companies lobbied successfully to have the age of “internet adulthood” set instead at 13. Now, more than two decades later, today’s 13-year-olds are not doing well. Federal law is outdated and inadequate. The age should be raised. More power should be given to parents, less to companies.

Third, while Americans wait for lawmakers to act, parents can work with local schools to establish a norm: Delay entry to Instagram and other social platforms until high school.

Right now, families are trapped. I have heard many parents say that they don’t want their children on Instagram, but they allow them to lie about their age and open accounts because, well, that’s what everyone else has done.

She now faces up to 20 years in prison for each count, although legal experts say she is unlikely to receive the maximum sentence.

The jury deadlocked on three remaining charges, which a federal judge anticipates dismissing as part of a mistrial ruling that could come as early as next week. The split verdicts are “a mixed bag for the prosecution, but it’s a loss for Elizabeth Holmes because she is going away to prison for at least a few years,” said David Ring, a lawyer who has followed the case closely.

They also provided up to three meals a day for children, with some offering prepared meals for mothers to take with them when they picked up their kids.

“The ones that we often hear about were the ‘model’ day nurseries that were set up at airplane factories [on the West coast],” says Michel. “Those were ones where the federal funding came very quickly, and some of the leading voices in the early childhood education movement…became quickly involved in setting [them] up,” she says. 

For these centers, organizers enlisted architects to build attractive buildings that would cater to the needs of childcare, specifically. “There was a lot of publicity about those, but those were unusual. Most of the childcare centers were kind of makeshift. They were set up in [places like] church basements.”

When the World War II childcare centers first opened, many women were reluctant to hand their children over to them. According to Chris M. Herbst, a professor of public affairs at Arizona State University who has written about these programs in the Journal of Labor Economics, a lot of these women ended up having positive experiences.

As the war ended in August 1945, the Federal Works Agency announced it would stop funding childcare as soon as possible. Parents responded by sending the agency 1,155 letters, 318 wires, 794 postcards and petitions with 3,647 signatures urging the government to keep them open. In response, the U.S. government provided additional funding for childcare through February 1946. After that, it was over.

This was during the Cold War, a time when anti-childcare activists pointed to the fact that the Soviet Union funded childcare as an argument for why the United States shouldn’t. President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, arguing that it would “commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”

U.S. history that the country came close to instituting universal childcare.

a different trend covered in the Peltzman paper: the persistent happiness advantage enjoyed by married couples over the unmarried, which has slightly widened since the early 1970s and now sits at around 35 points on a scale running from -100 to 100.

Over that same period, Americans have become much less likely to be married overall. In 1970, just 9 percent of people ages 25 to 50 had never tied the knot; in 2018, it was 35 percent.

the simplest possible explanation for declining happiness: For women maybe first, and for men too, eventually, less wedlock means more woe.

Barbieland itself is a female-first utopia that looks fundamentally dystopian — plastic, denatured, death-denying, cut off from love and procreation. The way that Barbiedom marginalizes images of pregnancy and motherhood, to say nothing of literal baby dolls, is a running preoccupation of the film

Is the Greta Gerwig movie proudly feminist, crypto-conservative or somewhere in between?

The simplest reading is the feminist one. The movie depicts a dolltopia where Barbies occupy every important job and office (with their Kens as arm candy) and tell themselves that their example has solved all of women’s problems in the real world, too — only to discover, when Margot Robbie’s “stereotypical Barbie” goes on a quest into our own contemporary reality, that sexism still exists, the patriarchy is disguised but maybe still resilient, the board of Mattel is proudly “feminist” but all male, and early 21st-century women are being asked to do it all for meager recompense.

Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire claims, “conservative, anti-feminist, pro-family, pro-motherhood” themes

In part, the conservative spin comes from the sheer fun of Gosling’s performance

I want to talk about these findings in the light of the running debate about the true ideological perspective of the billion-dollar box-office juggernaut “Barbie.”

Ken’s plight is treated sympathetically — he’s mostly running his coup to impress Barbie, and what are men for in the post-sexual-revolution landscape, anyway?

Barbie’s own arc is away from the female-dominated dystopia and back toward embodied womanhood, the real world with all its patriarchal holdovers

“Barbie” is a movie with a feminist default, but also complicated and sometimes muddled feelings about what the sexual revolution has done and where feminism ought to go.

It’s against the resilient patriarchy, but wary of the girlboss alternative

It wants womanhood and motherhood, but it doesn’t want the Kens back in charge, and it doesn’t really know what purpose men should serve.

In each narrative, the one way that the current dissatisfactions of women and men can’t be resolved is with the happy ending that even stories about the battle of the sexes used to take for granted — not a rearrangement of political power but a romantic partnership, not one sex’s rule but both sexes’ contentment.

so the movie ends — again, spoiler — with Barbie out of Barbieland but on her own, seeking out some sort of reproductive destiny at the gynecologist with a mother-daughter cheerleading squad beside her and no Ken in sight.

There’s an interesting parallel to the ending of Lena Dunham’s series “Girls,”

A guy can literally organize a revolution and it still isn’t enough to make Barbie see him as a lover, a romantic partner, an erotic object, a husband or a father.

In the movie they made, “Barbie and Ken” is a statement of reverse subordination, female rule and male eclipse. But in reality, nothing may matter as much to male and female happiness, and indeed, to the future of the human race, as whether Barbie and Ken can make that “and” into something reciprocal and fertile — a bridge, a bond, a marriage.

They had become disillusioned with what they saw as an outmoded way of working. “It wasn’t how I imagined the future of architecture,” says He, who worked in OMA’s Rotterdam office before moving to China to oversee construction of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange building. “The design and construction processes were so traditional and lacking in innovation.”

XKool is at the bleeding edge of architectural AI. And it’s growing fast: over 50,000 people are already using it in China, and an English version of its image-to-image AI tool, LookX, has just been launched. Wanyu He founded the company in 2016, with others who used to work for OMA

“The problem with architects is that we almost entirely focus on images,” says Neil Leach, author of Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. “But the most revolutionary change is in the less sexy area: the automation of the entire design package, from developing initial options right through to construction. In terms of strategic thinking and real-time analysis, AI is already way beyond what human architects are capable of. This could be the final nail in the coffin of a struggling profession.”

It’s early days and, so far, the results are clunky: the Shenzhen hotel looks very much like it was designed by robots for an army of robot guests.

XKool aims to provide an all-in-one platform, using AI to assist with everything from generating masterplan layouts, using given parameters such as daylight requirements, space standards and local planning regulations, right down to generating interiors and construction details. It has also developed a tool to transform a 2D image of a building into a 3D model, and turn a given list of room sizes into floor plans

She and her colleagues were inspired to launch their startup after witnessing AlphaGo, the first computer program to defeat a human champion at the Chinese board game Go in 2016. “What if we could introduce this intelligence to our way of working with algorithmic design?” she says. “CAD [computer aided design] dates from the 70s. BIM [building information modelling] is from the 90s. Now that we have the power of cloud computing and big data, it’s time for something new.”

“We have to be careful,” says Martha Tsigkari, head of applied research and development at Foster + Partners in London. “It can be dangerous if you don’t know what data was used to train the model, or if you haven’t classified it properly. Data is everything: if you put garbage in, you’ll get garbage out

The implications for data privacy and intellectual property are huge – is our data secured from other users? Is it being used to retrain these models in the background?”

Although the actual science needed to make such things possible is a long way off, AI does enable the kind of calculations and predictive modelling that was impossibly time-consuming before

Tsigkari’s team has also developed a simulation engine that allows realtime analysis of floor plans – showing how well connected one part of a building is to another – giving designers instant feedback on the implications of moving a wall or piece of furniture.

One told me they now regularly use ChatGPT to summarise local planning policies and compare the performance of different materials for, say, insulation. “It’s the kind of task you would have given a junior to do,” they say. “It’s not perfect, but it makes fewer mistakes than someone who hasn’t written a specification before.”

Others say their teams regularly use Midjourney to help brainstorm ideas during the concept phase. “We had a client wanting to build mosques in Abu Dhabi,” one architect told me. “I could quickly generate a range of options to show them, to get the conversation going. It’s like an instant mood board.”

“I like to think we are augmenting, not replacing, architects,” says Carl Christiansen, a Norwegian software engineer who in 2016 co-founded AI tool Spacemaker, which was acquired by tech giant Autodesk in 2021 for $240m, and then rebranded as Forma. “I call it ‘AI on the shoulder’ to emphasise that you’re still in control.” Forma can rapidly evaluate a large range of factors – from sun and wind to noise and energy needs – and create the perfect site layout. What’s more, its interface is designed to be legible to non-experts.

“If a boy expresses too much emotion or too much need for connection, is too giddy, is too joyful, what we say to that boy is, ‘What are you, a sissy? What are you, a girl? What are you, gay?’” Greene said. “It’s your job to dominate those around you, or you will lose status, and that will increase the number of individuals above you who can dish out dominance to you. And what we find is that in that system, in that structure, men are constantly in competition with each other and constantly driven by this sense of anxiety.”

many boys are raised with what she called “the cowboy mentality — ‘I can do it myself, I don’t need others,’” often perpetuated by “the father wanting the son to man up and not be so soft. … The whole model of getting help is part of so-called femininity.”

As a result, she said, “Women end up being the therapist for their husband, and more are getting sick of it.”

some men are looking for alternatives, and some are finding them in fellowship organizations with names like EvryMan, the ManKind Project and the Journeymen, the group doing breathwork that night in D.C.

“We have all these groups that are just spontaneously coming into being, as men say, ‘I want a circle of men that I can call my brothers, I want a circle of men that I can express what’s going on for me emotionally, and I want a circle of men who will hold me accountable in positive ways,’”

The theme of the Journeymen’s gathering in April, their first in-person meeting in D.C. since the pandemic, was “heartbreak and grief.” As the sky turned cobalt, Williamson implored the men to sense their emotions and “let them flow freely,” to raise their voices and “release them into the darkness.”

“People here have gone through a lot in our lives, some in the last few months. As we move through the world as men, sometimes it can be hard to have a sense of that,” he said. “All that which has been unnamed and unfelt, it’s actually been felt, it just hasn’t been dealt with. We put up a stiff arm and won’t let the other guy into our lane of traffic, we don’t want to make eye contact because if we did, we’d have to let him into our lane and show up really differently in the world.”

As a man, he said, “you can sense that there are deeper things that are happening in men’s lives, but when you bring it up the subject is changed. If guys’ lives are a house, they only let you see the living room with the plastic on the furniture. And you’re like, ‘Hey, I’m hearing some baying in the basement.’ But we don’t talk about that.”

Going around the circle, they began to talk about what lurked in the basement. One had lost his sister a few months earlier. Many talked of fraught or violent relationships with their fathers — or of not having a father around.

The toll of American loneliness is steep. The condition can increase the risk of premature death to a degree comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and correlates with an increased risk of heart disease, stroke and dementia. “Humans are wired for social connection,” said Murthy, the surgeon general, “but we’ve become more isolated over time.”

“I saw guys suffering with their sense of identity, their sense of self-worth, their sense of belonging, their sense of their rights to their pain,” he said. “I’d see a guy who’d be drinking really heavily. … They’d come over and start talking about their relationship or lack of relationship. Next minute they’d sober up, they didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Cogan, now 47, had been working through his own personal difficulties: the end of a previous relationship; his at-times fraught relationship with his father; the bullying he had suffered as a child. Now, he said, he was often the only man his male friends were talking to. “My intuition is that I was modeling openness,” he said. “They saw me talk about my relationship, crying, going to therapy. They saw me as a safe harbor.”

For many men, he said, “The world isn’t safe. There’s no expectation that a guy in our culture can say, ‘I’m scared, I’ve got fear.’ There’s no expectation that a guy can ask for safety in our culture. A lot of the guys I know, they can’t even do this with their partner.”

in recent years, Way said, men have witnessed societal movements such as the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter, which also challenged old paradigms. “Then covid happens, and we hit the bottom of the barrel on connections,” she noted. “We can’t walk out of our homes. We woke up to see we are a mess, and we’re not having the connections we want, and we’re not actually happy.

that’s particularly true on the I.R.A., which has to build all these things in the real world.

we’re trying to do industrial physical transformation at a speed and scale unheralded in American history. This is bigger than anything we have done at this speed ever.

The money is beginning to move out the door now, but we’re on a clock. Climate change is not like some other issues where if you don’t solve it this year, it is exactly the same to solve it next year. This is an issue where every year you don’t solve it, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere builds, warming builds, the effects compound

Solve, frankly, isn’t the right word there because all we can do is abate, a lot of the problems now baked in. So how is it going, and who can actually walk us through that?

Robinson Meyer is the founding executive editor of heatmap.news

why do all these numbers differ so much? How big is this thing?

in electric vehicles and in the effort, kind of this dual effort in the law, to both encourage Americans to buy and use electric vehicles and then also to build a domestic manufacturing base for electric vehicles.

on both counts, the data’s really good on electric vehicles. And that’s where we’re getting the fastest response from industry and the clearest response from industry to the law.

ROBINSON MEYER: Factories are getting planned. Steel’s going in the ground. The financing for those factories is locked down. It seems like they’re definitely going to happen. They’re permitted. Companies are excited about them. Large Fortune 500 automakers are confidently and with certainty planning for an electric vehicle future, and they’re building the factories to do that in the United States. They’re also building the factories to do that not just in blue states. And so to some degree, we can see the political certainty for electric vehicles going forward.

in other parts of the law, partially due to just vagaries of how the law is being implemented, tax credits where the fine print hasn’t worked out yet, it’s too early to say whether the law is working and how it’s going and whether it’s going to accomplish its goal

EZRA KLEIN: I always find this very funny in a way. The Congressional Budget Office scored it. They thought it would make about $380 billion in climate investments over a decade. So then you have all these other analyses coming out.

But there’s actually this huge range of outcomes in between where the thing passes, and maybe what you wanted to have happen happens. Maybe it doesn’t. Implementation is where all this rubber meets the road

the Rhodium Group, which is a consulting firm, they think it could be as high as $522 billion, which is a big difference. Then there’s this Goldman Sachs estimate, which the administration loves, where they say they’re projecting $1.2 trillion in incentives —

ROBINSON MEYER: All the numbers differ because most of the important incentives, most of the important tax credits and subsidies in the I.R.A., are uncapped. There’s no limit to how much the government might spend on them. All that matters is that some private citizen or firm or organization come to the government and is like, hey, we did this. You said you’d give us money for it. Give us the money.

because of that, different banks have their own energy system models, their own models of the economy. Different research groups have their own models.

we know it’s going to be wrong because the Congressional Budget Office is actually quite constrained in how it can predict how these tax credits are taken up. And it’s constrained by the technology that’s out there in the country right now.

The C.B.O. can only look at the number of electrolyzers, kind of the existing hydrogen infrastructure in the country, and be like, well, they’re probably all going to use these tax credits. And so I think they said that there would be about $5 billion of take up for the hydrogen tax credits.

But sometimes money gets allocated, and then costs overrun, and there delays, and you can’t get the permits, and so on, and the thing never gets built

the fact that the estimates are going up is to them early evidence that this is going well. There is a lot of applications. People want the tax credits. They want to build these new factories, et cetera.

a huge fallacy that we make in policy all the time is assuming that once money is allocated for something, you get the thing you’re allocating the money for. Noah Smith, the economics writer, likes to call this checkism, that money equals stuff.

EZRA KLEIN: They do not want that, and not wanting that and putting every application through a level of scrutiny high enough to try and make sure you don’t have another one

I don’t think people think a lot about who is cutting these checks, but a lot of it is happening in this very obscure office of the Department of Energy, the Loan Program Office, which has gone from having $40 billion in lending authority, which is already a big boost over it not existing a couple decades ago, to $400 billion in loan authority,

the Loan Program Office as one of the best places we have data on how this is going right now and one of the offices that’s responded fastest to the I.R.A.

the Loan Program Office is basically the Department of Energy’s in-house bank, and it’s kind of the closest thing we have in the US to what exists in other countries, like Germany, which is a State development bank that funds projects that are eventually going to be profitable.

It has existed for some time. I mean, at first, it kind of was first to play after the Recovery Act of 2009. And in fact, early in its life, it gave a very important loan to Tesla. It gave this almost bridge loan to Tesla that helped Tesla build up manufacturing capacity, and it got Tesla to where it is today.

EZRA KLEIN: It’s because one of the questions I have about that office and that you see in some of the coverage of them is they’re very afraid of having another Solyndra.

Now, depending on other numbers, including the D.O.E., it’s potentially as high as $100 billion, but that’s because the whole thing about the I.R.A. is it’s meant to encourage the build-out of this hydrogen infrastructure.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m never that excited when I see a government loans program turning a profit because I think that tends to mean they’re not making risky enough loans. The point of the government should be to bear quite a bit of risk —

And to some degree, Ford now has to compete, and US automakers are trying to catch up with Chinese EV automakers. And its firms have EV battery technology especially, but just have kind of comprehensive understanding of the EV supply chain that no other countries’ companies have

ROBINSON MEYER: You’re absolutely right that this is the key question. They gave this $9.2 billion loan to Ford to build these EV battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee. It’s the largest loan in the office’s history. It actually means that the investment in these factories is going to be entirely covered by the government, which is great for Ford and great for our build-out of EVs

And to some degree, I should say, one of the roles of L.P.O. and one of the roles of any kind of State development bank, right, is to loan to these big factory projects that, yes, may eventually be profitable, may, in fact, assuredly be profitable, but just aren’t there yet or need financing that the private market can’t provide. That being said, they have moved very slowly, I think.

And they feel like they’re moving quickly. They just got out new guidelines that are supposed to streamline a lot of this. Their core programs, they just redefined and streamlined in the name of speeding them up

However, so far, L.P.O. has been quite slow in getting out new loans

I want to say that the pressure they’re under is very real. Solyndra was a disaster for the Department of Energy. Whether that was fair or not fair, there’s a real fear that if you make a couple bad loans that go bad in a big way, you will destroy the political support for this program, and the money will be clawed back, a future Republican administration will wreck the office, whatever it might be. So this is not an easy call.

when you tell me they just made the biggest loan in their history to Ford, I’m not saying you shouldn’t lend any money to Ford, but when I think of what is the kind of company that cannot raise money on the capital markets, the one that comes to mind is not Ford

They have made loans to a number of more risky companies than Ford, but in addition to speed, do you think they are taking bets on the kinds of companies that need bets? It’s a little bit hard for me to believe that it would have been impossible for Ford to figure out how to finance factorie

ROBINSON MEYER: Now, I guess what I would say about that is that Ford is — let’s go back to why Solyndra failed, right? Solyndra failed because Chinese solar deluged the market. Now, why did Chinese solar deluge the market? Because there’s such support of Chinese financing from the state for massive solar factories and massive scale.

EZRA KLEIN: — the private market can’t. So that’s the meta question I’m asking here. In your view, because you’re tracking this much closer than I am, are they too much under the shadow of Solyndra? Are they being too cautious? Are they getting money out fast enough?

ROBINSON MEYER: I think that’s right; that basically, if we think the US should stay competitive and stay as close as it can and not even stay competitive, but catch up with Chinese companies, it is going to require large-scale state support of manufacturing.

EZRA KLEIN: OK, that’s fair. I will say, in general, there’s a constant thing you find reporting on government that people in government feel like they are moving very quickly

EZRA KLEIN: — given the procedural work they have to go through. And they often are moving very quickly compared to what has been done in that respect before, compared to what they have to get over. They are working weekends, they are working nights, and they are still not actually moving that quickly compared to what a VC firm can do or an investment bank or someone else who doesn’t have the weight of congressional oversight committees potentially calling you in and government procurement rules and all the rest of it.

ROBINSON MEYER: I think that’s a theme across the government’s implementation of the I.R.A. right now, is that generally the government feels like it’s moving as fast as it can. And if you look at the Department of Treasury, they feel like we are publishing — basically, the way that most of the I.R.A. subsidies work is that they will eventually be administered by the I.R.S., but first the Department of the Treasury has to write the guidebook for all these subsidies, right?

the law says there’s a very general kind of “here’s thousands of dollars for EVs under this circumstance.” Someone still has to go in and write all the fine print. The Department of Treasury is doing that right now for each tax credit, and they have to do that before anyone can claim that tax credit to the I.R.S. Treasury feels like it’s moving extremely quickly. It basically feels like it’s completely at capacity with these, and it’s sequenced these so it feels like it’s getting out the most important tax credits first.

Private industry feels like we need certainty. It’s almost a year since the law passed, and you haven’t gotten us the domestic content bonus. You haven’t gotten us the community solar bonus. You haven’t gotten us all these things yet.

a theme across the government right now is that the I.R.A. passed. Agencies have to write the regulations for all these tax credits. They feel like they’re moving very quickly, and yet companies feel like they’re not moving fast enough.

that’s how we get to this point where we’re 311 days out from the I.R.A. passing, and you’re like, well, has it made a big difference? And I’m like, well, frankly, wind and solar developers broadly don’t feel like they have the full understanding of all the subsidies they need yet to begin making the massive investments

I think it’s fair to say maybe the biggest bet on that is green hydrogen, if you’re looking in the bill.

We think it’s going to be an important tool in industry. It may be an important tool for storing energy in the power grid. It may be an important tool for anything that needs combustion.

ROBINSON MEYER: Yeah, absolutely. So green hydrogen — and let’s just actually talk about hydrogen broadly as this potential tool in the decarbonization tool kit.

It’s a molecule. It is a very light element, and you can burn it, but it’s not a fossil fuel. And a lot of the importance of hydrogen kind of comes back to that attribute of it.

So when we look at sectors of the economy that are going to be quite hard to decarbonize — and that’s because there is something about fossil fuels chemically that is essential to how that sector works either because they provide combustion heat and steelmaking or because fossil fuels are actually a chemical feedstock where the molecules in the fossil fuel are going into the product or because fossil fuels are so energy dense that you can carry a lot of energy while actually not carrying that much mass — any of those places, that’s where we look at hydrogen as going.

green hydrogen is something new, and the size of the bet is huge. So can you talk about first just what is green hydrogen? Because my understanding of it is spotty.

The I.R.A. is extremely generous — like extremely, extremely generous — in its hydrogen subsidies

The first is for what’s called blue hydrogen, which is hydrogen made from natural gas, where we then capture the carbon dioxide that was released from that process and pump it back into the ground. That’s one thing that’s subsidized. It’s basically subsidized as part of this broader set of packages targeted at carbon capture

green hydrogen, which is where we take water, use electrolyzers on it, basically zap it apart, take the hydrogen from the water, and then use that as a fue

The I.R.A. subsidies for green hydrogen specifically, which is the one with water and electricity, are so generous that relatively immediately, it’s going to have a negative cost to make green hydrogen. It will cost less than $0 to make green hydrogen. The government’s going to fully cover the cost of producing it.

That is intentional because what needs to happen now is that green hydrogen moves into places where we’re using natural gas, other places in the industrial economy, and it needs to be price competitive with those things, with natural gas, for instance. And so as it kind of is transported, it’s going to cost money

As you make the investment to replace the technology, it’s going to cost money. And so as the hydrogen moves through the system, it’s going to wind up being price competitive with natural gas, but the subsidies in the bill are so generous that hydrogen will cost less than $0 to make a kilogram of it

There seems to be a sense that hydrogen, green hydrogen, is something we sort of know how to make, but we don’t know how to make it cost competitive yet. We don’t know how to infuse it into all the processes that we need to be infused into. And so a place where the I.R.A. is trying to create a reality that does not yet exist is a reality where green hydrogen is widely used, we have to know how to use it, et cetera.

And they just seem to think we don’t. And so you need all these factories. You need all this innovation. Like, they have to create a whole innovation and supply chain almost from scratch. Is that right?

ROBINSON MEYER: That’s exactly right. There’s a great Department of Energy report that I would actually recommend anyone interested in this read called “The Liftoff Report for Clean Hydrogen.” They made it for a few other technologies. It’s a hundred-page book that’s basically how the D.O.E. believes we’re going to build out a clean hydrogen economy.

And, of course, that is policy in its own right because the D.O.E. is saying, here is the years we’re going to invest to have certain infrastructure come online. Here’s what we think we need. That’s kind of a signal to industry that everyone should plan around those years as well.

It’s a great book. It’s like the best piece of industrial policy I’ve actually seen from the government at all. But one of the points it makes is that you’re going to make green hydrogen. You’re then going to need to move it. You’re going to need to move it in a pipeline or maybe a truck or maybe in storage tanks that you then cart around.

Once it gets to a facility that uses green hydrogen, you’re going to need to store some green hydrogen there in storage tanks on site because you basically need kind of a backup supply in case your main supply fails. All of those things are going to add cost to hydrogen. And not only are they going to add cost, we don’t really know how to do them. We have very few pipelines that are hydrogen ready.

All of that investment needs to happen as a result to make the green hydrogen economy come alive. And why it’s so lavishly subsidized is to kind of fund all that downstream investment that’s eventually going to make the economy come true.

But a lot of what has to happen here, including once the money is given out, is that things we do know how to build get built, and they get built really fast, and they get built at this crazy scale.

So I’ve been reading this paper on what they call “The Greens’ Dilemma” by J.B. Ruhl and James Salzman, who also wrote this paper called “Old Green Laws, New Green Deal,” or something like that. And I think they get at the scale problem here really well.

“The largest solar facility currently online in the US is capable of generating 585 megawatts. To meet even a middle-road renewable energy scenario would require bringing online two new 400-megawatt solar power facilities, each taking up at least 2,000 acres of land every week for the next 30 years.”

And that’s just solar. We’re not talking wind there. We’re not talking any of the other stuff we’ve discussed here, transmission lines. Can we do that? Do we have that capacity?

ROBINSON MEYER: No, we do not. We absolutely do not. I think we’re going to build a ton of wind and solar. We do not right now have the system set up to use that much land to build that much new solar and wind by the time that we need to build it. I think it is partially because of permitting laws, and I think it’s also partially because right now there is no master plan

There’s no overarching strategic entity in the government that’s saying, how do we get from all these subsidies in the I.R.A. to net zero? What is our actual plan to get from where we are right now to where we’re emitting zero carbon as an economy? And without that function, no project is essential. No activity that we do absolutely needs to happen, and so therefore everything just kind of proceeds along at a convenient pace.

given the scale of what’s being attempted here, you might think that something the I.R.A. does is to have some entity in the government, as you’re saying, say, OK, we need this many solar farms. This is where we think we should put them. Let’s find some people to build them, or let’s build them ourselves.

what it actually does is there’s an office somewhere waiting for private companies to send in an application for a tax credit for solar that they say they’re going to build, and then we hope they build it

it’s an almost entirely passive process on the part of the government. Entirely would be going too far because I do think they talk to people, and they’re having conversations

the builder applies, not the government plans. Is that accurate?

ROBINSON MEYER: That’s correct. Yes.

ROBINSON MEYER: I think here’s what I would say, and this gets back to what do we want the I.R.A. to do and what are our expectations for the I.R.A

If the I.R.A. exists to build out a ton of green capacity and shift the political economy of the country toward being less dominated by fossil fuels and more dominated by the clean energy industry, frankly, then it is working

If the I.R.A. is meant to get us all the way to net zero, then it is not capable of that.

in 2022, right, we had no way to see how we were going to reduce emissions. We did not know if we were going to get a climate bill at all. Now, we have this really aggressive climate bill, and we’re like, oh, is this going to get us to net zero?

But getting to net zero was not even a possibility in 2022.

The issue is that the I.R.A. requires, ultimately, private actors to come forward and do these things. And as more and more renewables get onto the grid, almost mechanically, there’s going to be less interest in bringing the final pieces of decarbonized electricity infrastructure onto the grid as well.

EZRA KLEIN: Because the first things that get applied for are the ones that are more obviously profitable

The issue is when you talk to solar developers, they don’t see it like, “Am I going to make a ton of money, yes or no?” They see it like they have a capital stack, and they have certain incentives and certain ways to make money based off certain things they can do. And as more and more solar gets on the grid, building solar at all becomes less profitable

also, just generally, there’s less people willing to buy the solar.

as we get closer to a zero-carbon grid, there is this risk that basically less and less gets built because it will become less and less profitable

EZRA KLEIN: Let’s call that the last 20 percent risk

EZRA KLEIN: — or the last 40 percent. I mean, you can probably attach different numbers to that

ROBINSON MEYER: Permitting is the primary thing that is going to hold back any construction basically, especially out West,

right now permitting fights, the process under the National Environmental Policy Act just at the federal level, can take 4.5 years

let’s say every single project we need to do was applied for today, which is not true — those projects have not yet been applied for — they would be approved under the current permitting schedule in 2027.

ROBINSON MEYER: That’s before they get built.

Basically nobody on the left talked about permitting five years ago. I don’t want to say literally nobody, but you weren’t hearing it, including in the climate discussion.

people have moved to saying we do not have the laws, right, the permitting laws, the procurement laws to do this at the speed we’re promising, and we need to fix that. And then what you’re seeing them propose is kind of tweak oriented,

Permitting reform could mean a lot of different things, and Democrats and Republicans have different ideas about what it could mean. Environmental groups, within themselves, have different ideas about what it could mean.

for many environmental groups, the permitting process is their main tool. It is how they do the good that they see themselves doing in the world. They use the permitting process to slow down fossil fuel projects, to slow down projects that they see as harming local communities or the local environment.

ROBINSON MEYER: So we talk about the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA. Let’s just start calling it NEPA. We talk about the NEPA process

NEPA requires the government basically study any environmental impact from a project or from a decision or from a big rule that could occur.

Any giant project in the United States goes through this NEPA process. The federal government studies what the environmental impact of the project will be. Then it makes a decision about whether to approve the project. That decision has nothing to do with the study. Now, notionally, the study is supposed to inform the project.

the decision the federal government makes, the actual “can you build this, yes or no,” legally has no connection to the study. But it must conduct the study in order to make that decision.

that permitting reform is so tough for the Democratic coalition specifically is that this process of forcing the government to amend its studies of the environmental impact of various decisions is the main tool that environmental litigation groups like Earthjustice use to slow down fossil fuel projects and use to slow down large-scale chemical or industrial projects that they don’t think should happen.

when we talk about making this program faster, and when we talk about making it more immune to litigation, they see it as we’re going to take away their main tools to fight fossil fuel infrastructure

why there’s this gap between rhetoric and what’s actually being proposed is that the same tool that is slowing down the green build-out is also what’s slowing down the fossil fuel build-out

ROBINSON MEYER: They’re the classic conflict here between the environmental movement classic, let’s call it, which was “think globally, act locally,” which said “we’re going to do everything we can to preserve the local environment,” and what the environmental movement and the climate movement, let’s say, needs to do today, which is think globally, act with an eye to what we need globally as well, which is, in some cases, maybe welcome projects that may slightly reduce local environmental quality or may seem to reduce local environmental quality in the name of a decarbonized world.

Because if we fill the atmosphere with carbon, nobody’s going to get a good environment.

Michael Gerrard, who is professor at Columbia Law School. He’s a founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law there. It’s called “A Time for Triage,” and he has this sort of interesting argument that the environmental movement in general, in his view, is engaged in something he calls trade-off denial.

his view and the view of some people is that, look, the climate crisis is so bad that we just have to make those choices. We have to do things we would not have wanted to do to preserve something like the climate in which not just human civilization, but this sort of animal ecosystem, has emerged. But that’s hard, and who gets to decide which trade-offs to make?

what you’re not really seeing — not really, I would say, from the administration, even though they have some principles now; not really from California, though Gavin Newsom has a set of early things — is “this is what we think we need to make the I.R.A. happen on time, and this is how we’re going to decide what is a kind of project that gets this speedway through,” w

there’s a failure on the part of, let’s say, the environmental coalition writ large to have the courage to have this conversation and to sit down at a table and be like, “OK, we know that certain projects aren’t happening fast enough. We know that we need to build out faster. What could we actually do to the laws to be able to construct things faster and to meet our net-zero targets and to let the I.R.A. kind achieve what it could achieve?”

part of the issue is that we’re in this environment where Democrats control the Senate, Republicans control the House, and it feels very unlikely that you could just get “we are going to accelerate projects, but only those that are good for climate change,” into the law given that Republicans control the House.

part of the progressive fear here is that the right solutions must recognize climate change. Progressives are very skeptical that there are reforms that are neutral on the existence of climate change and whether we need to build faster to meet those demands that can pass through a Republican-controlled House.

one of the implications of that piece was it was maybe a huge mistake for progressives not to have figured out what they wanted here and could accept here, back when the negotiating partner was Joe Manchin.

Manchin’s bill is basically a set of moderate NEPA reforms and transmission reforms. Democrats, progressives refuse to move on it. Now, I do want to be fair here because I think Democrats absolutely should have seized on that opportunity, because it was the only moment when — we could tell already that Democrats — I mean, Democrats actually, by that moment, had lost the House.

I do want to be fair here that Manchin’s own account of what happened with this bill is that Senate Republicans killed it and that once McConnell failed to negotiate on the bill in December, Manchin’s bill was dead.

EZRA KLEIN: It died in both places.ROBINSON MEYER: It died in both places. I think that’s right.

Republicans already knew they were going to get the House, too, so they had less incentive to play along. Probably the time for this was October.

EZRA KLEIN: But it wasn’t like Democrats were trying to get this one done.

EZRA KLEIN: To your point about this was all coming down to the wire, Manchin could have let the I.R.A. pass many months before this, and they would have had more time to negotiate together, right? The fact that it was associated with Manchin in the way it was was also what made it toxic to progressives, who didn’t want to be held up by him anymore.

What becomes clear by the winter of this year, February, March of this year, is that as Democrats and Republicans begin to talk through this debt-ceiling process where, again, permitting was not the main focus. It was the federal budget. It was an entirely separate political process, basically.

EZRA KLEIN: I would say the core weirdness of the debt-ceiling fight was there was no main focus to it.

EZRA KLEIN: It wasn’t like past ones where it was about the debt. Republicans did some stuff to cut spending. They also wanted to cut spending on the I.R.S., which would increase the debt, right? It was a total mishmash of stuff happening in there.

That alchemy goes into the final debt-ceiling negotiations, which are between principals in Congress and the White House, and what we get is a set of basically the NEPA reforms in Joe Manchin’s bill from last year and the Mountain Valley pipeline, the thing that environmentalists were focused on blocking, and effectively no transmission reforms.

the set of NEPA reforms that were just enacted, that are now in the law, include — basically, the word reasonable has been inserted many times into NEPA. [LAUGHS] So the law, instead of saying the government has to study all environmental impacts, now it has to study reasonable environmental impacts.

this is a kind of climate win — has to study the environmental impacts that could result from not doing a project. The kind of average NEPA environmental impact study today is 500 pages and takes 4.5 years to produce. Under the law now, the government is supposed to hit a page limit of 150 to 300 pages.

there’s a study that’s very well cited by progressives from three professors in Utah who basically say, well, when you look at the National Forest Service, and you look at this 40,000 NEPA decisions, what mostly holds up these NEPA decisions is not like, oh, there’s too many requirements or they had to study too many things that don’t matter. It’s just there wasn’t enough staff and that staffing is primarily the big impediment. And so on the one hand, I think that’s probably accurate in that these are, in some cases — the beast has been starved, and these are very poorly staffed departments

The main progressive demand was just “we must staff it better.”

But if it’s taking you this much staffing and that much time to say something doesn’t apply to you, maybe you have a process problem —ROBINSON MEYER: Yes.EZRA KLEIN: — and you shouldn’t just throw endless resources at a broken process, which brings me — because, again, you can fall into this and never get out — I think, to the bigger critique her

these bills are almost symbolic because there’s so much else happening, and it’s really the way all this interlocks and the number of possible choke points, that if you touch one of them or even you streamline one of them, it doesn’t necessarily get you that f

“All told, over 60 federal permitting programs operate in the infrastructure approval regime, and that is just the federal system. State and local approvals and impact assessments could also apply to any project.”

their view is that under this system, it’s simply not possible to build the amount of decarbonization infrastructure we need at the pace we need it; that no amount of streamlining NEPA or streamlining, in California, CEQA will get you there; that we basically have been operating under what they call an environmental grand bargain dating back to the ’70s, where we built all of these processes to slow things down and to clean up the air and clean up the water.

we accepted this trade-off of slower building, quite a bit slower building, for a cleaner environment. And that was a good trade. It was addressing the problems of that era

now we have the problems of this era, which is we need to unbelievably, rapidly build out decarbonization infrastructure to keep the climate from warming more than we can handle and that we just don’t have a legal regime or anything.

You would need to do a whole new grand bargain for this era. And I’ve not seen that many people say that, but it seems true to me

the role that America had played in the global economy in the ’50s and ’60s where we had a ton of manufacturing, where we were kind of the factory to a world rebuilding from World War II, was no longer tenable and that, also, we wanted to focus on more of these kind of high-wage, what we would now call knowledge economy jobs.That was a large economic transition happening in the ’70s and ’80s, and it dovetailed really nicely with the environmental grand bargain.

At some point, the I.R.A. recognizes that that environmental grand bargain is no longer operative, right, because it says, we’re going to build all this big fiscal fixed infrastructure in the United States, we’re going to become a manufacturing giant again, but there has not been a recognition among either party of what exactly that will mean and what will be required to have it take hold.

It must require a form of on-the-ground, inside-the-fenceline, “at the site of the power plant” pollution control technology. The only way to do that, really, is by requiring carbon capture and requiring the large construction of major industrial infrastructure at many, many coal plants and natural gas plants around the country in order to capture carbon so it doesn’t enter the atmosphere, and so we don’t contribute to climate change. That is what the Supreme Court has ruled. Until that body changes, that is going to be the law.

So the E.P.A. has now, last month, proposed a new rule under the Clean Air Act that is going to require coal plants and some natural gas plants to install carbon capture technology to do basically what the Supreme Court has all but kind of required the E.P.A. to do

the E.P.A. has to demonstrate, in order to kind of make this rule the law and in order to make this rule pass muster with the Supreme Court, that this is tenable, that this is the best available and technologically feasible option

that means you actually have to allow carbon capture facilities to get built and you have to create a legal process that will allow carbon capture facilities to get built. And that means you need to be able to tell a power plant operator that if they capture carbon, there’s a way they can inject it back into the ground, the thing that they’re supposed to do with it.

Well, E.P.A. simultaneously has only approved the kind of well that you need to inject carbon that you’ve captured from a coal factory or a natural gas line back into the ground. It’s called a Class 6 well. The E.P.A. has only ever approved two Class 6 wells. It takes years for the E.P.A. to approve a Class 6 well.

And environmental justice groups really, really oppose these Class 6 wells because they see any carbon capture as an effort to extend the life of the fossil fuel infrastructure

The issue here is that it seems like C.C.S., carbon capture, is going to be essential to how the U.S. decarbonizes. Legally, we have no other choice because of the constraints the Supreme Court has placed on the E.P.A.. At the same time, environmental justice groups, and big green groups to some extent, oppose building out any C.C.S.

to be fair to them, right, they would say there are other ways to decarbonize. That may not be the way we’ve chosen because the politics weren’t there for it, but there are a lot of these groups that believe you could have 100 percent renewables, do not use all that much carbon capture, right? They would have liked to see a different decarbonization path taken too. I’m not sure that path is realistic.

what you do see are environmental groups opposing making it possible to build C.C.S. anywhere in the country at all.

EZRA KLEIN: The only point I’m making here is I think this is where you see a compromise a lot of them didn’t want to make —ROBINSON MEYER: Exactly, yeah.EZRA KLEIN: — which is a decarbonization strategy that actually does extend the life cycle of a lot of fossil fuel infrastructure using carbon capture. And because they never bought onto it, they’re still using the pathway they have to try to block it. The problem is that’s part of the path that’s now been chosen. So if you block it, you just don’t decarbonize. It’s not like you get the 100 percent renewable strategy.

ROBINSON MEYER: Exactly. The bargain that will emerge from that set of actions and that set of coalitional trade-offs is we will simply keep running this, and we will not cap it.

What could be possible is that progressives and Democrats and the E.P.A. turns around and says, “Oh, that’s fine. You can do C.C.S. You just have to cap every single stationary source in the country.” Like, “You want to do C.C.S.? We totally agree. Essential. You must put CSS infrastructure on every power plant, on every factory that burns fossil fuels, on everything.”

If progressives were to do that and were to get it into the law — and there’s nothing the Supreme Court has said, by the way, that would limit progressives from doing that — the upshot would be we shut down a ton more stationary sources and a ton more petrochemical refineries and these bad facilities that groups don’t want than we would under the current plan.

what is effectively going to happen is that way more factories and power plants stay open and uncapped than would be otherwise.

EZRA KLEIN: So Republican-controlled states are just on track to get a lot more of it. So the Rocky Mountain Institute estimates that red states will get $623 billion in investments by 2030 compared to $354 billion for blue states.

why are red states getting so much more of this money?

ROBINSON MEYER: I think there’s two reasons. I think, first of all, red states have been more enthusiastic about getting the money. They’re the ones giving away the tax credits. They have a business-friendly environment. And ultimately, the way many, many of these red-state governors see it is that these are just businesses.

I think the other thing is that these states, many of them, are right-to-work states. And so they might pay their workers less. They certainly face much less risk financially from a unionization campaign in their state.

regardless of the I.R.A., that’s where manufacturing and industrial investment goes in the first place. And that’s where it’s been going for 20 years because of the set of business-friendly and local subsidies and right-to-work policies.

I think the administration would say, we want this to be a big union-led effort. We want it to go to the Great Lakes states that are our political firewall.

and it would go to red states, because that’s where private industry has been locating since the ’70s and ’80s, and it would go to the Southeast, right, and the Sunbelt, and that that wouldn’t be so bad because then you would get a dynamic where red-state senators, red-state representatives, red-state governors would want to support the transition further and would certainly not support the repeal of the I.R.A. provisions and the repeal of climate provisions, and that you’d get this kind of nice vortex of the investment goes to red states, red states feel less antagonistic toward climate policies, more investment goes to red states. Red-state governors might even begin to support environmental regulation because that basically locks in benefits and advantages to the companies located in their states already.

I think what you see is that Republicans are increasingly warming to EV investment, and it’s actually building out renewables and actually building out clean electricity generation, where you see them fighting harder.

The other way that permitting matters — and this gets into the broader reason why private investment was generally going to red states and generally going to the Sunbelt — is that the Sunbelt states — Georgia, Texas — it’s easier to be there as a company because housing costs are lower and because the cost of living is lower in those states.

it’s also partially because the Sunbelt and the Southeast, it was like the last part of the country to develop, frankly, and there’s just a ton more land around all the cities, and so you can get away with the sprawling suburban growth model in those citie

It’s just cheaper to keep building suburbs there.

EZRA KLEIN: So how are you seeing the fights over these rare-earth metals and the effort to build a safe and, if not domestic, kind of friend-shored supply chain there?

Are we going to be able to source some of these minerals from the U.S.? That process seems to be proceeding but going slowly. There are some minerals we’re not going to be able to get from the United States at all and are going to have to get from our allies and partners across the world.

The kind of open question there is what exactly is the bargain we’re going to strike with countries that have these critical minerals, and will it be fair to those countries?

it isn’t to say that I think the I.R.A. on net is going to be bad for other countries. I just think we haven’t really figured out what deal and even what mechanisms we can use across the government to strike deals with other countries to mine the minerals in those countries while being fair and just and creating the kind of economic arrangement that those countries want.

, let’s say we get the minerals. Let’s say we learn how to refine them. There is many parts of the battery and many parts of EVs and many, many subcomponents in these green systems that there’s not as strong incentive to produce in the U.S.

at the same time, there’s a ton of technology. One answer to that might be to say, OK, well, what the federal government should do is just make it illegal for any of these battery makers or any of these EV companies to work with Chinese companies, so then we’ll definitely establish this parallel supply chain. We’ll learn how to make cathodes and anodes. We’ll figure it out

The issue is that there’s technology on the frontier that only Chinese companies have, and U.S. automakers need to work with those companies in order to be able to compete with them eventually.

EZRA KLEIN: How much easier would it be to achieve the I.R.A.’s goals if America’s relationship with China was more like its relationship with Germany?

ROBINSON MEYER: It would be significantly easier, and I think we’d view this entire challenge very differently, because China, as you said, not only is a leader in renewable energy. It actually made a lot of the important technological gains over the past 15 years to reducing the cost of solar and wind. It really did play a huge role on the supply side of reducing the cost of these technologies.

If we could approach that, if China were like Germany, if China were like Japan, and we could say, “Oh, this is great. China’s just going to make all these things. Our friend, China, is just going to make all these technologies, and we’re going to import them.

So it refines 75 percent of the polysilicon that you need for solar, but the machines that do the refining, 99 percent of them are made in China. I think it would be reckless for the U.S. to kind of rely on a single country and for the world to rely on a single country to produce the technologies that we need for decarbonization and unwise, regardless of our relationship with that country.

We want to geographically diversify the supply chain more, but it would be significantly easier if we did not have to also factor into this the possibility that the US is going to need to have an entirely separate supply chain to make use of for EVs, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries potentially in the near-term future.

, what are three other books they should read?

The first book is called “The End of the World” by Peter Brannen. It’s a book that’s a history of mass extinctions, the Earth’s five mass extinctions, and, actually, why he doesn’t think we’re currently in a mass extinction or why, at least, things would need to go just as bad as they are right now for thousands and thousands of years for us to be in basically the sixth extinction.

The book’s amazing for two reasons. The first is that it is the first that really got me to understand deep time.

he explains how one kind of triggered the next one. It is also an amazing book for understanding the centrality of carbon to Earth’s geological history going as far back as, basically, we can track.

“Climate Shock” by Gernot Wagner and Marty Weitzman. It’s about the economics of climate change

Marty Weitzman, who I think, until recently, was kind of the also-ran important economist of climate change. Nordhaus was the famous economist. He was the one who got all attention. He’s the one who won the Nobel.

He focuses on risk and that climate change is specifically bad because it will damage the environment, because it will make our lives worse, but it’s really specifically bad because we don’t know how bad it will be

it imposes all these huge, high end-tail risks and that blocking those tail risks is actually the main thing we want to do with climate policy.

That is I think, in some ways, what has become the U.S. approach to climate change and, to some degree, to the underlying economic thinking that drives even the I.R.A., where we want to just cut off these high-end mega warming scenarios. And this is a fantastic explanation of that particular way of thinking and of how to apply that way of thinking to climate change and also to geoengineerin

The third book, a little controversial, is called “Shorting the Grid” by Meredith Angwin

her argument is basically that electricity markets are not the right structure to organize our electricity system, and because we have chosen markets as a structured, organized electricity system in many states, we’re giving preferential treatment to natural gas and renewables, two fuels that I think climate activists may feel very different ways about, instead of coal, which she does think we should phase out, and, really, nuclear

By making it easier for renewables and natural gas to kind of accept these side payments, we made them much more profitable and therefore encouraged people to build more of them and therefore underinvested in the forms of generation, such as nuclear, that actually make most of their money by selling electrons to the grid, where they go to people’s homes.