“Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city,” former President Barack Obama rhapsodized in April 2009. “No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination.”

It’s a curious statement to find one-third of the way into a book titled “Abundance.” Not 10% of Americans live or work in the middle of a city within walking distance of a passenger train station, but as coauthors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson quickly make clear, their focus is on “the land that matters … in the hearts of our cities,” by which they mean the giant coastal metropolitan areas where one-quarter of the public live.

They make it clear as well that they’re writing for fellow liberals. They expect 4 to 6 degrees Celsius of global warming, a high-side estimate in my view, and assert confidently that “the stocks of fossil fuels are finite,” even though fracking has shown that innovation can vastly increase the amounts recoverable. They decry “closing our gates to immigrants,” ignoring the nearly 1 million new U.S. citizens every year.

Nevertheless, “Abundance” is full of thoughtful analysis and useful perspectives on “the pathologies of the broad left.”

In the process, they tell the story of how the government in the 1970s vastly improved the quality and healthiness of air and water — a story little appreciated today because conservatives don’t like crediting the government, and environmentalists like to raise money by lamenting that things are worse than ever. Unhappily, federal and many state laws allowed, even encouraged, lawsuits challenging environmental infringement. Thus began, with leadership from many of my law school contemporaries, the environment-lawsuit-industrial complex.

Klein and Thompson point to what great things they think must be accomplished. We need more solar and wind energy and high-transmission lines — they admit red Texas does better than blue California on this — and to double the electric grid because of artificial intelligence. Those solar and wind devices will require land the size of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee, plus Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Then, “electrify everything,” replacing 1 billion machines “within the next few years.”

You will have to replace your accustomed gas stove with electric induction and your gas heat with an electric heat pump, both of which, they assure you, will work better. One suspects that the several-thousand-dollar outlays will not be voluntary, at least for nonmembers of “everything bagel” constituencies. But just when you start wondering whether such things will ever happen, you read that the nation’s largest wind farm in Wyoming, which “if all goes well from here … will be completed in 2026 — eighteen years after it was proposed.”

“The arc of history does not always bend toward our beliefs,” the authors admit in their conclusion. Americans are not lining up to turn in their gas stoves, and it’s apparent California’s electric car mandate won’t be met by 2035.

I guess that Klein and Thompson (briefly a next-door neighbor, and a very nice one, in my Washington apartment building) wrote this book to show their fellow liberals the need to change, to stimulate on national issues the innovative success urban liberals have scored on revising big-city zoning to allow more housing.