The first thing that struck me about this year’s most talked-about policy book, Abundance (perhaps you’ve heard of it?), is a detail almost no one talks about.

The book’s cover art sketches a future where half of our planet is densely woven with the homes, clean energy, and other technologies required to fill every human need, liberating the other half to flourish as a preserve for the biosphere on which we all depend — wild animals, forests, contiguous stretches of wilderness.

It’s a beautiful ecomodernist image, suggesting that protecting what we might crudely call “nature” is an equal part of what it means to be prosperous, and that doing so is compatible with continued economic growth. It’s a visual rebuke to those who argue that we must choose between the two.

How would we do it?

The US and its peer countries today are spectacularly rich — unimaginably so, from the vantage of nearly any point in human history — and it might be tempting to think that we have grown enough, that our environmental crisis is so grave that we should save our planet by shrinking our economy and freeing ourselves from useless junk. I understand the pull of that vision — but it’s one that I think is illusory and politically calamitous, not to mention at odds with human freedom. A world where economic growth goes into reverse is a world that would see ever more brutal fighting over shrinking wealth, and it is far from guaranteed to benefit the planet.

Yet that doesn’t change the essential problem: Climate change and the destruction of the natural world pose grave immediate threats to humans, and to the nonhuman life that is valuable in itself. And we are not on track to manage it.

It’s not easy to reconcile these realities, but it is possible and necessary to do so in a way that’s consistent with liberal democratic principles. Instead of deliberately shrinking national income, we can seek out the areas of greatest inefficiency in our economy and chart a path that gets the most economic gain for the least environmental harm. If growing the economy without torching the planet is feasible in principle — and I think it is — then we should fight for it to grow in the best direction possible.

Inside this story

• Meat and dairy, plus our extreme dependence on cars, are two huge efficiency sinks: they produce a big share of emissions and devour land, and they aren’t essential to economic growth or human flourishing.

• Shifting diets toward plant-based foods and freeing up land could act like a giant carbon-capture project, buying time to decarbonize.

• Reducing car dependence would slash transport emissions, make land use more efficient, and make Americans healthier and safer — without sacrificing prosperity.

We’ll need to build out renewables at breakneck speed and electrify everything we can, of course. But some of the most powerful levers we have to decouple economic growth from environmental impact challenge us to do something even harder — to begin outgrowing two central fixtures of American life that are as taken-for-granted as they are supremely inefficient: our extreme dependence on meat and cars.

Changing those realities is so culturally and politically heretical in America that this case is almost never made in climate politics, but it deserves to be made nonetheless. And doing so will require examining the trade-offs that we too often treat as defaults.

Two great efficiency sinks

It’s probably not news to you that cars and animal-based foods are bad for the planet — together they contribute around a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions both globally and within the US. Animal agriculture also devours more than a third of habitable land globally (a crucially important part of our planetary crisis) and 40 percent of land in the lower 48 US states, while car-dependent sprawl fragments and eats into what’s left at the urban fringe.

We obviously need food and transportation, but meat and cars convert our planet’s resources into those necessities much more wastefully than the alternatives: plant-based food, walking, public transportation, and so on. And in a climate-constrained economy that still needs to grow, we don’t have room to waste. Beef emits roughly 70 times more greenhouse gases per calorie than beans and 31 times more than tofu; poultry emits 10 times more than beans and four to five times more than tofu. Mile-for-mile, traveling by rail transit in the US emits about a third as much as driving on average, while walking doesn’t emit anything.

For all that resource........

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