Unlike Li Keqiang, whose 2023 death at 68 felt shocking to both an American political system under gerontocracy and a Chinese political system where leaders all seem to survive for a long, long while, Zhu lived to 97.

Some outlets (like Bloomberg) got that number wrong in their rush to push out an obituary, saying that he was 98 when he passed.1 The irony in that error for me is that my encounters with Zhu Rongji are largely about the imperative to know things well and not get numbers wrong. In Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts, Zhu sets the bar with five epigraphs: on quantified governance; information environment; pollution and mining accidents; overcapacity, slums and ghost cities; and falsification. The man was quotable.

In October 2002, Zhu visited the National Bureau of Statistics, alongside other officials including Wen Jiabao, who would replace him as premier the following year. Zhu left the statisticians with a clear message: do not produce false figures.2 He gave a similar message to accountants, leaving an inscription with them at the Shanghai National Accounting Institute: don’t make false accounts.

As often happens when people die in this social media age, the ways that the departed intersects with the moment bubble up. Calvin Quek and Yaqiu Wang both shared reflections on X today.

Here are a couple of those epigraphs from Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts:

The obituary of high Chinese official is apparently a major genre of this substack. Here is my remembrance of Li Keqiang.

This post is my goodbye to Jiang Zemin as well as thinking through the A4 anti-covid protests of November 2022.

Finally, thanks for reading. I’ve been up to many things this summer, traveling and writing at the top of the list. I look forward to sharing much of that writing with you over the weeks and months ahead as the various essays are published. And I’ll assure you that I’m hard at work on my next book, Green Giant.

Here’s a Bluesky post:

Here’s a tagline: China’s journey from villain to climate hero.

If you need a little more:

If you would like it in the form of a Simpsons quote:

If you’re more of an Avatar: The Last Airbender person:

So much more will be coming.

With apologies to Mr. Frost, two men converged in a yellow room, and sorry I could not tune it out.

Now, if the image below were reality — and to be very clear it is not (a still from an AI video that was going around a couple days ago), perhaps there’d be more to talk about:

It is quite possible that many consequential things will happen in the summit. There’s lots of commentary about what might happen and the parsing of word choices. This makes sense because states are ultimately constituted of people in roles who make decisions with words. The difference between “not supporting” something and “opposing” it matters. I’ve contributed to this discourse myself (look out for a new episode of the Shift Key podcast tomorrow) and will have more thoughts afterwards. But the conversations between Xi and Trump and their retinues will largely ignore the core interests of this newsletter: China’s green tech revolution and the evolution of our economies facing the climate crisis. I recently wrote an essay I’m quite proud of comparing America and Chinese economies for the Break-Down: Capacity Returns [gift link]. My last post was about it.

From one vantage point, an interesting possible outcome would be about an openness or encouragement of Chinese investment in the US, particularly in the EV sector where Chinese leadership is globally acknowledged (though see below). The politics of such investments are dicey on all sides but also offer genuine opportunities to provide benefits to actors on both sides of the Pacific. American consumers might get access to cheaper, cleaner, better cars. American workers might have their employers pushed to actually compete in these growing sectors rather than coasting in an ICE island protected by “connected cars” rules and tariff walls. Chinese firms might find a slice of the very profitable American auto sector to help stabilize their often sketchy finances. I’m writing about this now but am waiting for the summit to finish to share any deeper thoughts.

The optics of summits give the illusion that these individuals represent the societies that they ostensibly rule over. And of course there is a bit of truth to that illusion, but both Xi and Trump are wobbly leaders dealing with frustrated publics. The US discussions lean into this — Trump’s disastrous Gulf War 3 took his already negative approval ratings straight into the toilet. Xi, by contrast, is being portrayed as if things are great in the middle kingdom, and while there are macro- and micro-economic bright spots, unemployment remains high and the real estate downturn refuses to bottom out.

The Trump administration remains committed to stubbing America’s toes.

The Trump administration is not backing down from its discriminatory policies for approving wind and solar projects. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum testified to Congress on Wednesday that his agency would appeal a recent district court ruling blocking it from enforcing these policies.

To translate the multi-layered legal negatives above — lots of wind and solar projects have been blocked by discriminatory policies from the Administration. Those decisions have been thrown out by a number of different judicial rulings at various points in time. Burgum is insisting that they will appeal those rulings and hence keep the bans in place. Solar, wind, and batteries are the heart of the clean energy transition — the green tech revolution — and belittling them does not change their economics. Keeping America from taking advantage of their efficiency only makes us poorer and our air dirtier (and fills the pockets of their friends in fossil fuels by taking money out of ours).

I’ve already had my say about the dubious Climate Realism Initiative from CFR but recently came upon their Nov. 2025 report Ranking National Contributions to Global Energy Innovation, which encapsulates so much of what is wrong in the think tank / climate innovation space that friends described it as “peak western neolib slop” “copefrogging” and more that aren’t advisable in this family-friendly newsletter.

The idea that Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway are leading the world in energy innovation is — with apologies to my Scandinavian friends for their real efforts to make things better — hogwash. The technical flaw in methodology here is that most contributions are normalized by a country’s economic size. But emissions are just in the atmosphere. The climate crisis doesn’t slow down because the emissions intensity of GDP goes down. Real bulk changes in the material reality of how we live are lives is what this requires, and big countries cause more problems though also tend to be where solutions come from. That’s why we care when their leader’s meet in yellow rooms. The deeper pathology of this report and line of thinking is that innovation is the key to responding to climate change. There was a time, perhaps twenty years ago, when this made a lot of sense. But for the past decade, the technologies that will do the majority of the heavy lifting in reducing emissions have been apparent: solar, wind, batteries, and EVs. Deploying those technologies and further improving their economics is the main story.

And one way in which improved economics arises is process innovation. Building a million solar panels teaches people and firms a lot about how to do it better. Reports like this one need to go away or innovate into a better model of the political economy of the climate crisis.

Finally, and tying things back to Capacity Returns, building factories matters. And despite a lot of great ideas emerging from the US, we consistently lag in making them real and significant. In China, I repeatedly heard that the US remains the best in the world at going from zero to one but China is still where 1 becomes many.

Leapfrogging is not the solution. If you do not have an ecosystem that supports the construction of industrial capacity, people with ideas will choose to build factories in places that value factories.

Here’s yet another version of that story.

US battery startup builds factory in China after nixing Kentucky plant

With $300M in new funds, EnerVenue says China is in fact the best spot to scale its NASA-inspired tech

People come together, and they go. The problems facing us are rising, as are the number and breadth of solutions. We live our days on this planet. May there be many good ones ahead of us.

Go read my new essay, Capacity Returns (gift link), in The BREAK—DOWN. Below are some related thoughts, extensions, and oddities on and around the themes of the essay.

In 1989 the late Russian leader Boris Yeltsin famously visited an American supermarket and was astounded by the abundance of it all.

Life under communism meant persistent shortages, but the incentives of American capitalism triumphantly provided. Yet in 2026, shortages pervade the American economy. While the Abundance discourse has focused on NIMBYism and regulations as the source of shortages, especially in housing, this perspective ignores critical industrial shortages arising from a very different source. Americans are increasingly under the thumb of powerful corporations and financiers sabotaging society by choosing profits over production.

Returns to capital lay at the cornerstone of the American economy. Money flows to projects, companies, and ideas where it can be most profitable and generate the greatest financial return to the investors and lenders who funded those initial flows. On the other hand, areas lacking strong expected returns will struggle to raise money and remain unbuilt. In China, capital is not so beholden to profit expectations. Capital is comparatively undisciplined and flows absent high expectations on returns.

Lack of capital discipline is traditionally seen as a problem for perhaps obvious reasons: without discipline, capital will be allocated inefficiently. Money travels towards purposes that produce smaller returns than it theoretically could if the capital were allocated more efficiently. The Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) is the classic example of this phenomenon. For decades these firms have received preferential treatment from state-controlled banks and capital markets despite producing mediocre returns. This phrasing is the polite language of World Bank reports and UN analyses. The bare truth is that often these firms just lit money on fire with huge workforces making products that the market did not demand.

In today’s debates about the Chinese economy, both inside and outside the country, arguments have shifted. The problem is still the capital going to places where it fails to produce returns for investors and lenders. However, rather than emphasizing differences between an inefficient state-owned sector and an efficient private sector, we instead focus on individual sectors which are characterized as being plagued by “overcapacity” or involution (内卷), destructive hypercompetition. Real estate, steel, EVs, polysilicon, solar panels, and more all operate in worlds where profits have evaporated because of intense competition amidst massive supply capacity. Where are the returns to capital if firms have no profits?

At the same time as concerns are raised about their profitability, some of the firms in these sectors have grown to world-changing proportions. While these investments may generate minimal returns to capital, they do produce substantial benefits even if those benefits don’t all accrue to their debt or equity holders. Workers get jobs, consumers get cheap products, and competition helps push technologies forward. Cheap solar, batteries, and EVs might even help save the world. Having excess capacity smells like resilience, which might be particularly valuable in a world with a Nero-like would-be-king atop the hegemon determined to burn the global order to the ground and an increasingly chaotic climate system fueled by carbon emissions pushing similarly towards entropy.

Critiques of American financialization are common as are those of Chinese overcapacity. But rarely are these two pathologies examined together. American capitalism struggles to build while Chinese capitalism can’t stop itself from building too much. A possible synthesis requires more than meeting in the middle but questioning the purposes that underlie them.

It is time that we expand our perspective on returns. Investment necessarily involves expenses today for production, and returns, tomorrow. But whose returns should we consider? Beyond returns to capital, there are also what we could call returns to capacity. What are the implications -- economically and politically -- if we take this expanded view of returns more seriously?

Again, go read the full essay. (If the gift link isn’t working now, you could subscribe and / or wait until they drop the paywall soon.)

There was enough going on in the essay that I left out a ton of things, which is what substack posts are for. Here’s a short list with some riffing: Gulf War 3, varieties of capitalism, capital controls, and bankers as planners.

Gulf War 3 makes even more plain that demand for various goods is not fixed, and shocks to demand — such as the boost in demand for electrotech as fossil fuel supplies are pinched off and prices skyrocket — are real. Decisions that looked financially dicey three months ago may turn out to pay out after all. Resilience can read as fat, with leaner firms winning, until things shift. At the individual and firm level, insurance is taken for granted that we don’t think about it. But the market dynamics of insurance itself are shaped by the state because left to pure market forces, they will collapse. The healthy avoid paying into insurance until they are older, which leads premiums to rise on those needing care, which leads even more to opt out given a calculus of guaranteed high costs compared with probabilistic economic disaster. States intervene, requiring coverage in ways that can be annoying and generate pushback but really just leave everyone off in a more resilient place. Yet at the sectoral level, we have very little. The US government does not mandate firms have at least a few days, weeks, or months of inventory in case of disaster or market dislocation. It hasn’t even mandated ramping up of production in sectors where shortages pervade the market.

Gulf War 3 might provide a temporary boost to firms in China’s overbuilt electrotech sectors in ways that help push off a day of reckoning into the future. Whether that will help or hurt the Chinese government’s plans for anti-involution or merely delay them remains to be seen.

Varieties of capitalism exist. The Hall and Soskice volume with that title remains worth reading but isn’t precisely where I land. Capitalism is a worthy subject of study, and it has multitudes. Chinese capitalism is not American capitalism. Obviously the essay tries to make more sophisticated points about the nature and evolution of those differences, and exceptions to them, but if people only take away the most basic point, I’d still consider that a win.

In a very nice episode of the Rhodes Center podcast, Mark Blyth interviews Erik Peinert about his new book, Monopoly Politics. It covers deep shifts in how capitalism operated in France and the United States in the 20th Century. From the OUP description:

Using original archival evidence from the United States and France, and borrowing insights from microeconomics, bureaucratic politics, sociology, psychology, and law, Peinert demonstrates how government policy towards competition and monopoly changes at key moments in the 20th century. Centrally, policy changes as a result of the interaction between staff turnover in policy circles and the diminishing returns to policy regimes.

As policy regimes across different arenas such as antitrust, intellectual property, trade, and industrial policy push consistently either in favor of competition or monopoly, they generate diminishing returns. Unsustainably pushing for competition suppresses profits and destabilizes markets, whereas pushing to defend market power will raise prices, stifle innovation, and concentrate profits in stagnant monopolies. However, with policy regimes locked in by committed policymakers who have invested time, reputation, or the careers into implementing one approach to policy, government policy only changes through their replacement with non-committed officials willing to reconsider policy.

Competition policy is an existing legal framework that countries have used to try to manage the profitability of firms to promote social ends. We have tool boxes, and they are powerful. That being said, most of the usual tools in those boxes do not map easily onto the Chinese and American problems I wrote about. It’s not really competition policy’s place to generate startups to challenge lazy incumbents sitting on their laurels. Nor does it tend to propose mergers and acquisitions to turn the fire down on competition that is far beyond the boiling point. Both of those problems are assumed to be solved by market actions. In the former, ambitious entrepreneurs should sense that the incumbents have created an opportunity for a new entrant to disrupt the existing market and grab profits. In the latter, loss-making firms are assumed to be killed by financial pressures rather than remain stumbling around as zombies kept “alive” by local governments scared to see them disappear completely.

Capital controls. One could ask the question, why is Chinese capitalism not American capitalism? Not at the level of policy inside each of these states, but why do the dynamics of capitalism as a global set of ideas and practices not lead to homogenization? If capital tends to produce greater returns in the United States than in China, why does the capital not flow to the United States? Capital controls are load bearing for China’s development model today as they were in the pre-2020 real-estate centered economy. The desire for control and the fear of capital flight also has explanatory power over why Xi and his cronies so strongly prefer an industrial upgrading and innovation growth model to a consumer-led one. Consumers — citizens — are many; firms are few. And controlling what those firms do with their funds is difficult but still much easier than dealing with the myriad ways in which citizens might try to exfiltrate their money out of the country, even if they were doing so not as prelude to emigration (rùn 润 as meme) but as individual-level hedging. The potential of capital flight and the seriousness of what it could do to the Chinese economy (and its politics) are why I remain skeptical of RMB internationalization stories, for all of the possibility of an electroyuan.

Bankers as planners. I’m excited to read Against Money by J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev. They had a great conversation in an episode of the Climate Pod. Mason has published a ton of fascinating pieces recently, including one that I can’t find at the moment sitting in a hotel room in Beijing that discussed bankers as planners, so I’ll just link to his piece about NYC Housing after the freeze. My recollection of the bankers as planners piece (which might have been a bluesky post) is just the realization that bankers when they fund a new idea are not operating in a typical market environment but instead placing a bet on an idea and a view of how that idea, its potential costs of production and estimates of the demand curve, will operate in the world before that idea is material. Which isn’t that far off from what we imagine an economic planner might be doing.1

To be completely clear, I am not arguing that China is doing things correctly and the US needs to adopt Chinese policies. What I am suggesting is that there is much to be learned about how we do and can govern ourselves by closely examining the dynamics of the status quo in diverse places. More, much much more, to come.

Obviously I’m biased, but I think the index of my most recent book, Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts, shows the book to be a bit weirder than you might imagine. Ronald Reagan (pp. 209-210) is mentioned, but only as the windup for landing a punch at Jimmy Carter for holding more responsibility for launching neoliberalism than he’s usually given credit / demerits for. Chinese leaders are mentioned so much in the book that there are subsections, such as Hu Jintao, leadership style of (pp. 105-6) [“rarely seen as a charismatic politician”]. Which gets me to Mao Zedong. Specifically: Mao Zedong, death of (p. 12, 19, 44, 50, 60). The death of Mao receives this many mentions in the book because it is almost singularly momentous for Chinese politics. On p. 50 is where I actually paint a scene:

On September 9, 1976, Chinese around the country wept upon hearing the news that the Great Helmsman had “gone to meet Marx.” Mao had led the Party for forty-one years, from a conclave’s decision in 1935 in Zunyi until his death. At its height, his cult of personality included daily loyalty dances and inspired flights of fancy as ludicrous as venerating a mango that he had purportedly touched, as well as a belief that as a seventy-two-year-old he had broken records while swimming across the Yangzi. Mao’s words were definitive for political elites, intellectuals, and the people. His successor as Communist Party chairman, Hua Guofeng, had been appointed vice-chairman in April 1976 and was said to be blessed by Mao with the following refrain: “[W]ith you in charge, my heart is at ease” (你办事，我放心). On October 8, 1976, Hua orchestrated the arrest of the radical Gang of Four from their high positions within the regime, consolidating his authority, albeit temporarily.

I didn’t dwell on the most salacious bits of late Mao’s life because it was outside of the scope of the arguments even though the strange realities and palace intrigue clearly mattered to the top leaders.

There are endless stories, but let’s just go with the story of the Zhang Yufeng. From Wikipedia:

Early life

Zhang was born on 9 January 1945 into a poor family in Manchukuo. Her father was a trader, according to other sources, a railway employee. The family consisted of eight children, and Zhang was the fourth among them. She graduated from primary school after six grades. At the age of 14, she began working as a conductor on the Mudanjiang-Beijing railway. In 1963, she was assigned as a conductor on Mao Zedong’s personal train.^[1]

Personal secretary of Mao Zedong

According to Russian sinologist Alexander Pantsov, Mao’s acquaintance with Zhang happened at the end of 1962:^[2] “Naive and shy, like many young Chinese women, she at the same time had a very strong character, was quick-witted and sharp-tongued. And most importantly - amazingly beautiful!”

Zhang Yufeng was introduced to Mao by his personal bodyguard Wang Dongxing. After the first meeting, Wang asked Mao if he wanted Zhang to serve in his compartment. Mao agreed and after that, their rapprochement took place very quickly. Zhang Yufeng accompanied Mao on his travels around the country, and soon she became his trusted secretary and, as reported by many Western and Chinese media, began to play the role of his main companion.

What aging national leader doesn’t have a beautiful teenager around as “his main companion.” Totally normal.

With those alarm bells blaring, let’s go a bit deeper into Mao’s decline.

At the height of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, Mao spent his free time surrounded by numerous seventeen and eighteen-year-old girls from time to time, but always spent most of his time with Zhang Yufeng. According to the French sinologist Alain Roux, until 1970, Mao had suspicions of Zhang, as he learned that her real father was supposedly a Japanese dentist and not a Chinese railway worker, and assumed that she could turn out to be a Japanese spy. But in 1970, she was appointed as Mao's secretary of household affairs. From that moment on, she constantly accompanied Mao.

Oh, sure. Obviously red flags are good in Communist China.

By 1973, Zhang Yufeng had become the main go-between Mao and the rest of the world. Even Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, could not visit her husband without Zhang’s permission. There was an instance when Zhang did not let the Premier of China Zhou Enlai see Mao.^[9][10]

Mao’s health declined in his last years, probably aggravated by his heavy chain-smoking. He developed Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, known in the United States as Lou Gehrig‘s disease. At this time, the political weight of Zhang especially increased because Mao’s speech became completely unintelligible due to illness, and only Zhang understood him well. From 1972, Zhang Yufeng helped Mao Zedong to eat and decided if he was able to receive visitors or not. By the summer of 1974, Mao’s state of health had deteriorated so much that Zhang was able to understand him by the movement of his lips and gestures. At the end of 1974, Zhang was formally appointed Mao’s secretary for critical and confidential assignments. She strictly controlled and restricted access to Mao. Jiang Qing, who desperately needed Mao’s support in the internal party struggle, tried to appease Zhang, but failed.^[11]

In 1974, according to the sinologist Jonathan Spence:^[12] She [Zhang] literally becomes Mao’s interface with the world, in fact the latter can no longer speak and she deciphers Mao’s stammerings by reading his lips.

The ostensible leader of the Party and the Country, then populated by over nine hundred million souls (a number which would have been closer to one billion if his disastrous Great Leap Forward had not killed 30 to 40 million people, not to mention the millions of deaths from the Cultural Revolution itself), was uncommunicative except through “the interface” of his ‘secretary.’ The political radicals that would come to be remembered by history as the Gang of Four (all later put on trial), including Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, attempted to and often did claim support of Mao in their factional warfare with their rivals.

Perhaps you can see where I’m heading here.

The war in Iran is not going well (for the United States, and Israel, and the GCC, and Lebanon, and the rest of the world). And despite arguably winning the war, it isn’t really going that well for Iran either. But the point I want to make here is the simply, silly one. The old leader that is ostensibly in charge of things is, increasingly it seems, becoming closer and closer to the end times Mao. While what came out of Mao’s lips was unintelligible, Trump can say words that everyone can hear make out as words. But they aren’t particularly intelligible. Now, this is “barely exaggerated:”

Trump is not staring at the complexities of this war. He is not going back and reading Daniel Yergin or listening to Odd Lots when it has Gregory Brew or Rory Johnston on. He’s watching a two-minute daily trailer for the war that mainly consists of the best explosions that the Department of War captured on video.

As ever Henry Farrell has a sharp version of a very related argument with his must read post, Gooning Towards the Führer.

Programmable Mutter

"Gooning Towards the Führer" as policy coordination

I’ve been thinking about this post for a few months, but haven’t wanted to write until I felt I had the argument right in my head. I think it gets at something useful, but it could very easily be misconstrued. It explains why the above (via Matthew Gertz…

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5 months ago · 218 likes · 40 comments · Henry Farrell

I don’t disagree with anything in Henry’s post, but what I will emphasize is that the current situation points to Trump’s chaotic “policy process” devolving into something even less coherent, less Trump-led than actions taken by his underlings that they have long hoped for and having convinced the old man is a good thing to put online (and into reality). Hegseth wants to be in front of cameras and talk about the viciousness of American violence and offer no quarter, Rubio desperately wants to enact regime change in Cuba, etc. The Gang of Coors has some ideas about what they’d like to do to this country and this planet we all inhabit.

In Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts, I argue that political regimes (I’m explicitly discussing authoritarian regimes) have constructed and contested identities shaped mostly by the individuals atop them and that we can better assess authoritarian politics by thinking through the key questions of regime maintenance. Who? How? and Why?

Who rules, who is an insider and who is an outsider, who is up versus down, who is in the “inner circle” or “ruling coalition” and who remains outside of it. “The primary dimension of divergent interests between the dictator and elites is the dictator’s personalization of power.”

The methods of rule — the how — are the verbs that generate acceptance, or at least acquiescence, on the part of the population and elites: to coopt, to coerce, and to convince.

The crude tools of power, the coercive barrel of the gun or the coopting bag of money (or nubile teenager), are expensive. Any leader reliant solely on spending or shooting their way to hold the throne will quickly be relieved of it. So convincing is necessary and requires considering why the regime rules. Propaganda does not have to be believed to be powerful. As Lisa Wedeen writes, citizens acting “as if” they are credulous still shapes their collective realities. Andrew Little argues that propaganda can successfully influence mass behavior even without affecting most citizens’ beliefs.” Yet, especially in information environments where the regime’s view is dominant, people do tend to conform and comply.

In the wake of Mao’s death, Hua Guofeng takes power and quickly shivs the gang of four. Zhang Yufeng testifies against Jiang and the other radicals. But Hua himself is displaced by Deng Xiaoping, who pushes forward a political line that quotes Mao to upend much of the ideological extremes of Maoism: to seek truth from facts (pp. 38-9, 51-52n29, 53, 58).

Tooze is reading Baudrillard for his class and reflecting on the juxtaposition.

Chartbook

Chartbook 435: All perversions have their acting out. Reading Baudrillard on the weekend of the attack on Iran.

And then, this morning, for seminar on Monday I find myself reading Jean Baudrillard’s extraordinary Consumer Society, published in 1970 amidst the Vietnam war…

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6 months ago · 133 likes · 32 comments · Adam Tooze

I, on the other hand, am reading Hu Anyan’s I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. Let’s try it.

Nine thoughts.

1. There are people working and living their lives unaware of what is happening in global geopolitics, even if the echoes of these wars will shake their lives in the days, weeks, months to come. Hu Anyan reads (and writes) despite the insane expectations and work hours of the various jobs that he has had, but he’s not following the news and writing up political economy analyses.

2. His labor — and those of millions of others like him — lubricates urban life, makes it possible in its current (and evolving) form. Some things, maybe even most, are quite simple — unpacking boxes, repacking them, putting them on etrikes/bikes and delivering them to individuals, their apartments, their complexes, etc. But often we’re in the world of spoilage — what do you do when no one answers the phone and the fruit you’re supposed to deliver (durian, it turns out) will roast in the sun? Do you leave it at the front door where it will spoil or be stolen? Move it into a locker where it will be shaded but not extremely convenient for your customer? It’s the just-in-time nature of the labor and of the fossil economy that resonates perhaps the most with me (outside of worrying about family members and others caught up in this conflict). I’ve heard for decades about the Strait of Hormuz, and maps confirm that it is both very close to Iran and that a huge amount of oil and gas flows transit it on the daily. The choke points of the industries of the future that my slice of the discourse has been obsessing over for the past year (critical minerals, rare earths) are certainly important components for many goods, but they aren’t literally the fuel for the country’s energy system. They don’t heat our homes and showers, nor do they keep our beer cold. The shale revolution has insulated the US from shocks to supply but not from price shocks, which are global in nature. Americans who didn’t expect a war last Wednesday might be pissed off when they fill up their SUVs gas tank tomorrow and pay $15 more than they had budgeted. Asian governments and grid operators might once again face the situation of Europeans buying LNG out from their “contracts.”

3. Getting ahead of ourselves is both the nature of worry and risk, but also can blot assessment. Javier Blas, never shy to take a jab at clean energy, suggests (1) that we’re not yet in the same class of LNG/gas crisis as we were four years ago, but also (2) that countries should think about coal (and maybe renewables).

4. The economics of the offense/defense balance in the Gulf do not favor the defensive states. This great thread from Kelly Grieco about the UAE’s shooting down hundreds of missiles and drones gets to brass tacks.

   Since Feb 28, Iran has fired at the UAE:
   
   165 ballistic missiles
   2 cruise missiles
   541 drones
   
   UAE knocked down 152 missiles, both cruise missiles, and 506 drones. A 92%+ intercept rate.

   But let's talk about what that actually costs.
   Iran's bill (estimated):
   
   165 ballistic missiles @ $1–2M each → ~$165–330M
   541 Shahed drones @ $20–50K each → ~$11–27M
   2 cruise missiles → ~$1.5M
   
   Iran's total outlay: ~$177M–$360M

   Now the UAE's side.
   
   Each PAC-3 MSE interceptor costs ~$4–5M. Assuming a two-shot doctrine to ensure ensure a kill,
   152 ballistic missile intercepts × 2 shots × $4–5M = ~$1.2B–$1.52B
   
   To counter ~$165–330M worth of missiles.

   The drones are where it gets truly punishing.
   Iran spent ~$11–27M on 541 Shahed drones.
   
   The UAE fired interceptors averaging $500K–$1.5M per drone kill against 506 of them.
   
   UAE drone defense cost: ~$253M–$759M

   But more than the economics, it’s the physical supply that’s the real problem. It is not clear to me how many more missile interceptors the UAE has stockpiled, but the scale/pace of production absolutely favors Iran here.

5. From Esfandyar Batmanghelidj:

6. The world continues to turn.

7. Escaping the fossil politics with a turn towards clean energy and electricity is so obvious from the climate perspective that it makes my brain hurt when people like Chris Wright talk about the only reliable source of energy being old dead plants. The reliability of gas and oil now will be shown to be weak, but it will also be a time of massive profits for those same industries. And beyond the industries the richest of the rich as individuals. As Isabella Weber shows:

8. This administration gets bored quickly and seemingly gets away with nearly everything. Launching a war in the Middle East is particularly galling given that they said that Harris would do such a thing and they never would. Now that they have done it — to be explicit: it = casually launch a war against a country that has been preparing for violence for over four decades where the world’s most significant fossil energy assets and geographies are within easy targeting distance — they will reap what they have sown. Perhaps this too will somehow pass quickly, like kidnapping Maduro or the earlier strikes on Iran. Or will simply be ignored for being inconvenient, like the genocide in Palestine.

9. There’s a deep worry that this administration does not care about democracy. That’s not the worry; that’s just a statement of the facts. The war is another example of this. Congress declares war, not presidents. And yet. Barely a word of this to the American people. No effort at persuasion, let alone deliberation. Just tossed on a USA hat and some middle-school stagecraft from a weekend golf trip to Mar-a-lago for a 3am announcement. The deep worry is that this administration cares so little about the will of the American people and their (our!) right to govern ourselves that they will kill us for trying to do so. Their most incompetent workers have done this in ICE facilities across the land, in Los Angeles and Minnesota. I see little preparation from them to do it more systematically in ways that will cow the population rather than enrage it (us!). Taking solace in that is the least comforting solace that I can have, or can offer.

In solidarity, as always.

The state and various drug cartels are fighting what amounts to a war in Mexico. Perhaps it’s the bumbling efforts of a criminally-overlooked Soderbergh/Damon joint.

More likely though, your thoughts turn to a group of put-upon oil producers taking power and profitability by working together. For decades, Western oil companies dictated terms to resource-rich nations, extracting wealth while host countries watched. Then came 1973. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) flipped the script, transforming themselves into market captains.

In so doing, they might have crashed a not insubstantial part of the world economy, spurred France’s decarbonizing transition to nuclear electricity generation, taught Americans to love Japanese cars, and more.

This is not what has happened in China’s polysilicon sector, where a similar gambit — making explicit reference to OPEC! — was attempted but failed to win the day or the battle, let alone the war.

To comprehend these dynamics, we’re going to dip our toes into the deep waters of involution and make sure we’re up to speed on Chinese solar manufacturing. The reward for doing so might be some insight about where China is and isn’t headed as its next Five Year Plan is released next month as part of the annual Two Sessions.

Involution

Chinese firms tend to exist in a frenzied state of hyper-competition. This “overly intense competition” is a good way to think of involution. The Chinese market tends to have plenty of firm entry, but little exit. Firms, banks, and local governments are eager to try their hands at business, especially in favored sectors, but are loathe to let firms truly fail. Rivals price their goods and services in a war for market share, pushing down your prices as well. Consumers benefit, while producers persist with wiped out profits. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics, to recoin a phrase.

These dynamics are sometimes styled as “overcapacity” abroad, often assumed as an intentional state-directed/concocted strategy to destroy production abroad, to deindustrialize the rest of the world and help augur in a Chinese century. While state policy plays a role here, things get quite complicated as the IMF recently pointed out. Deeper diagnosis of the various causes of involution in its different forms is for another essay, but two flavors can be seen in cement and solar.

Cement. China has constructed cement-laden dwellings, other buildings, and infrastructure at a phenomenal pace as part of its urbanization over the past 40 years. All required a lot of cement. Now that many buildings have been built and every road paved, there’s far too much cement production capacity in the country to match stepped-down demand. Profits have disappeared, and firms are beginning to as well.1

Solar. Solar is less about the past and more about the future. Solar, as many people are saying, might just save the world, and so if one were business-minded, an intuitive corollary might be to sniff out opportunities in the sector. Unfortunately for most of those who followed this logic, the path, gauntlet might more faithfully capture its nature, is beyond difficult. As the BNEF solar watcher Jenny Chase frequently points out, solar manufacturing is a horrible business. Other firms are constantly inventing and investing in new technologies that obsolete the prior generation with silicon-like speed (which makes sense since solar panels, like computer chips, are made of polysilicon).

Involution is a problem in China because it’s generating deflation but also that it could lead to individual firms, or whole sectors, losing their lead in a global productivity race. This is less of a concern in the cement space than in solar or EVs or batteries. With little profits, eventually firms will cut research and development to the bone or amputate it altogether in a bid to keep the company afloat. In such circumstances, leapfrogging could occur.

The solar piece of broccoli needed to understand the ill-fated polysilicon cartel has already been administered above. Polysilicon is the purified raw product upon which solar panels are constructed: gets sliced and diced and chemically doped more than a Tour de France rider of the mid-aughts to fully exploit its semi-conductive nature. Add some silver paste (still very pricey, but at least not at the catastrophic levels of peak metals speculation of last month), wiring, etc and bam. Cheapest electricity in the history of the world.

Polysilicon is the raw material of solar panels, the heart of the new engine that will power the world.

And the firms making solar polysilicon are not having a great time of things. Losses are endemic. Quintessential example of involution. And so, a proposal to tamp down the intensity of competition was proffered. A consortium of leading firms would pool money and buy out laggards.

This cartel seemed to be blessed and holding together despite all of the incentives to defect that can undermine such collective action. The growing confidence in the Chinese cartel helped push up domestic polysilicon prices in the second half of 2025.

Was this how involution would be solved? Powerful players could consolidate the market by putting money into a fund that then buys off the losers (and presumably helping the local governments that had nurtured them save some skin and some face). This would allow for more genteel competition to reign, with price regimes producers could profit under.

And then the world turned upside down. Despite earlier remarks that seemed approving, the State Administration for Market Regulation halted the plan, including $7 billion (50 billion RMB) consolidation fund, in early January. As PV Magazine wrote:

The plan involved China’s six largest polysilicon producers – Tongwei, GCL, Daqo, Xinte, East Hope, and Asia Silicon – and envisaged raising about CNY 50 billion ($7 billion) to buy and idle roughly one-third of the country’s polysilicon production. The six companies together have nearly 2.5 million metric tons (MT) of capacity; the rest of the industry accounts for 700,000 MT.

SAMR reportedly flagged monopoly risks linked to the stockpiling platform set up on Dec. 9 and said that since July 2025, participating companies had coordinated under the banner of “industry self-discipline” through commitment letters, consolidation plans, and dynamic supply adjustment measures.

This would not be how China solved the involution problem.

The Chinese government probably realized that while it doesn’t want to lose polysilicon, it has many more firms, jobs, and bets tied up with the consumers of polysilicon than in its manufacturers. Monopoly prices may mean profits for the base of the supply chain, but they would further squeeze the huge and powerful firms closer to the consumer end of things. And so, this move was nipped in the bud before it could take off.

Then a curious thing happened. Tongwei, the market leader, announced that it is purchasing #5 producer Lihao (Qinghai Lihao Qingneng Co.). Is consolidation back in the cards? Not as a cartel but as the firms individually?

Except Lihao isn’t a loser in the market but instead a rapidly rising star. Whereas Tongwei has been around for nearly two decades (and is the star of David Fickling’s narrative of how China won in solar), Lihao is five years old. Calling it Plan B for Tongwei, Bernreuter writes:

Qinghai Lihao has been the most successful new entrant in the polysilicon market since 2021. Not only has it quickly made it into the ranks of the world’s top ten manufacturers since its production start in August 2022, it has also become a recognized supplier of high-quality material for n-type ingots. A better asset is hardly imaginable.

For Qinghai Lihao, Tongwei may be the white knight in a difficult market environment. In 2024 Lihao was considering an initial public offering at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to raise around CNY1 billion (about US$140 million) as early as the second half of 2025. In a period when all leading Chinese polysilicon manufacturers were making losses, Lihao was obviously looking for a source of fresh capital.

Of course, Tongwei also was making losses — about $1.5 billion — last year, despite the cartel bump in prices. Will we see consolidation not via cartel but instead by sheer dominance of the main players? Will Tongwei and GCL try to buy up their peers until we have just 3 or 4 players who can sit around the table and agree that working together, silently perhaps this time, is a better strategy? Chinese hypercapitalism ends not via cartel but by oligopoly?

More to come.

Before that, though, since I’ve received multiple requestions on this point, I must make a statement. ALERT to media outlets that are looking for someone to confirm that, contra the President of the United States, feel free to quote me: China does install wind turbines on land and sea, and they do generate electricity that helps power their society. I have seen them in person in Ordos, near Shanghai, and a dozen other places in between. They are real, and they are spectacular.

I was on KQED’s Forum (live radio in 2026!) last week and appeared on the Science Friday podcast as well. Go listen if you prefer your analysis in audio.

Ok, now that we’ve taken care of that, down to business.

Why did I write Hot, Cheap, and Out of Control or China’s Renewable Energy Revolution Is a Huge Mess That Might Save the World? What’s the take away? Or the policy prescription that follows from its analysis?

At a basic level, I wrote them because I think that they are true even if they are not the easiest to sit with. We live in times when silos are difficult to spot or escape from. It is nothing to just wake up and read the feed that prior iterations of myself has curated (with extensive algorithmic assistance) and feel informed (and enraged and entertained and heartbroken and everything else). It takes effort to confront parts of our beliefs that may not stand up to strong scrutiny. There are many comfortable lies and inconvenient truths out there. I’ll hold off on my Mark Carney/greengrocer takes, but that notion of living within lies is a real one.

There are obvious lies or falsehoods — like Trump’s windmill crack or denial of climate change. Avoiding these should be easy for broad, big picture topics. But once one dives into the details of a specific legal/financial/social/economic/political situation, things can get messier.

By deeply tying the idea of the green tech revolution to the notion of chaos, I’m trying to provoke a reaction. To shake off a bit of complacency. Good things do not always go together. If and when they do, it might not always be in the way that one expects.

In that spirit, some takes.

Climate and Affordability

I was recently at an event with this title in DC bringing together policy people to discuss possibilities to move forward. There are many ways in which the current administration’s attacks on clean electrification are bad for both climate action and affordability. We mostly settled into railing against these kind of stupid policies (comfortable) instead of venturing into the more dangerous territory of tensions between these twin poles of 2026 political rhetoric on the left.

It happens to be the case that the meeting took place in the USian national capital, which is on the east coast of North America, where a good many of my fellow Americans reside. If offshore wind isn’t happening at all or cheap, then providing clean electricity to this important swath of the people and economy is tough. Looking at the Grid Status pages for PJM or ISONE regional transmission organizations shows how far behind they are compared to California or Texas. The thing is these regions suffer compared with CA and TX in resources. While they certainly should put up more solar and more wind, they are not blessed with the vast tracks of relatively empty1 land that solar and wind require.

I mean, just look at PJM (Upper Midwest) from Feb. 7 compared with ERCOT (Texas)

The PJM region abuts the MISO grid, and MISO is full of plentiful renewable electricity, especially wind. Transmission lines could bring some of that power to the east coast where it is desperately needed, but Sen. Josh Hawley and Trump didn’t like the “Grain Belt Express” line that tried to turn that idea into a reality and cancelled $5 billion funding for the project. It’s another example of an easy dual win for climate and affordability that Trump killed, but alas. Most people would prefer not to have a powerline built near their home, but if it saves you hundreds of dollars a year and can bring 5 nuclear plants worth of clean electricity to your state, it has some real value.

We’re still burning oil (!) in the Northeast and New York to generate electricity in the winter. Shutting down nuclear plants was a mistake. Connecting powerlines, including from HydroQuebec, are good ideas. But there can be thorny questions here too. Should the northeast have new LNG (liquid natural gas) hubs or connect to other gas infrastructure? These are way better than burning oil, which people currently do in their homes for heating plus the grid’s use. We need to shift away from all of this fossil infrastructure, but what about the next decade? Oil? Really?

To draw this out one more step, an electrified future is going to remake our electricity grid. Remember that we build the grid assuming that everyone can turn things on at a whim. Most grids in the US are summer peaking, because AC is electrified whereas most heating isn’t. But with EVs and heat pumps, grids will shift to having winter peaks. And they will be rough, especially for a clean grid. The sun is barely up, and often cloudy, snow piles up on solar panels, and so on. Heating can take a lot more energy than cooling in these places — consider the distance between a comfortable 72 and the 0 degrees outside that one might see in December, and compare that with a scorching 100 degree day and 72. Think how much shorter your range is in an EV in the winter than the spring. There are already some good programs like Vermont distributing batteries, but more is needed. Improving the efficiency of homes is a must.

Even here, though, the perfect can be the enemy of the good. There may be tradeoffs between more stringent new housing requirements and building more housing, especially in dense areas. To be clear, we don’t want lots of new energy profligate housing, but new houses (especially multifamily construction or row houses that share walls and warmth) often are replacing an existing housing stock that is older and even worse in energy terms. A similar discussion of stringent standards and safety sometimes takes place with the “single stair” debates, where advocates suggest the need for double-staired apartment buildings for fire safety is ridiculous waste of space that could provide better apartment designs with more space/windows. These debates get technical, I suppose, but few dispute that single-family homes are far more dangerous than new multi-family homes of almost any variety.

The hardest bullet to swallow under this heading is how far we are along in the solution space for clean electrification at affordable cost. Mark Jacobson (who was on the KQED Forum episode with me) has long advocated for 100% water, wind, and solar as a solved problem. His twitter presence consists mostly of posts about how California’s grid was fully powered by these technologies (plus batteries) for some portion of the day. Yet as the above discussion suggests, we’re not all in California, and even California isn’t yet at 100% clean.

There’s an unfortunate piece of legal history where scholarly criticism of Jacobson led him to pursue a lawsuit against the critics. RetractionWatch and Columbia’s Climate Litigation database have the details.

Jacobson is the most referenced source in Bill McKibben’s new book, Here Comes the Sun. I really enjoyed the book and have hopes of writing a review of it either alone or with others in the pile. Jacobson’s sunny analysis jives with McKibben’s activist call for more action, but while I’m very hopeful that renewables will get us most of the way to decarbonization, of the grid and of a lot of other things too (though not agriculture), there are hard parts.

There’s what seems to me to be a mistake/confusion in McKibben’s book about Dunkelflaute, the German word for dark doldrums describing periods of little wind or sun. On p. 59, there’s a quote suggesting a 4 hour battery can get a grid through a Dunkelflaute. And, obviously, that could be true for a short period with enough charge in a big enough battery. But the usual way that we talk about dark doldrums are on the scale of days, not hours. This discussion of Dunkelflauten mentions 30 and 54 day durations. And battery economics can fail if we are building them out to be used only once or twice a year. This reality of our climate system is a key reason why decarbonizing the grid with existing tech ninety-percent isn’t too hard, but the final 10% gets sharply more expensive. Storage (batteries?) that can shift energy from summer to winter, new clean firm technologies like enhanced geothermal, nuclear, etc all will help fill in the gaps without emitting more carbon, but figuring out those details matters. It doesn’t stop us from pursuing more wind, water, and solar today. We should! And rapidly. But it is important to remember that the final pieces remain a puzzle.

Minimum Viable Scale

Here I just want to share a link and make you go read the whole thing. It’s a paper in Science.

Joshua Lappen & Emily Grubert. Fossil energy minimum viable scale. Science 391, 449-452 (2026). DOI:10.1126/science.aea0972

Here’s the abstract:

The nascent global energy transition involves two parallel, mirrored processes: the retirement of existing fossil fuel-based infrastructure, and the widespread deployment of alternatives in its stead. Most energy transition research and policy have focused on the latter process of development, adoption, and buildout. Far less attention has been paid to the challenges and emergent behaviors associated with the decline of legacy fossil energy systems. We identify a risk of collapses in service availability as specific elements of fossil infrastructures reach what we term “minimum viable scale,” a level of throughput past which existing physical, financial, and managerial infrastructures can no longer effectively operate as expected. We establish a framework of different types of constraint that can impose a minimum viable scale and identify such constraints in several example fossil systems within the US. Evidence of widespread minimum viable scales should motivate a paradigm shift in system and decarbonization planning.

Transition is not a simple linear winding down of things like we might hope or model it to be. It is lumpy with particular facilities and assets vulnerable to movements that could produce non-linear responses.

Look at this.

Just as solar in China is spiraling from success to success, so too can fossil systems quickly go from working to collapsed. The difficulty, of course, is that we need these things, at least for now. We need to plan for how we will go from 130 refineries to 100 to 50 without things completely breaking. We need to plan for how to shift home heating away from gas towards electricity without breaking cities/utilities/consumers with bills as death spirals arrive.

Given that I mostly think about China, I came out of reading the paper and my own analysis thinking that coal as backup is actually desirable economically (if not ecologically). Compared to oil where refining and gas where distribution and transmission pipeline infrastructure are complicated interlocking systems to unravel, coal is just a rock that sits where you put it. It doesn’t ooze into the ground or evaporate into the atmosphere.

Battery Cannibalization

I already wrote about the excellent book The Price is Wrong for this humble newsletter.

My main complaint is that the price cannibalization of solar that he describes is partially fixed by batteries. Well, ERCOT returns with some mixed news on that front. Batteries seem to be cannibalizing their own revenues.

The story makes clear that part of this is weather. Extremes push the grid to higher prices, which batteries arbitrage, generating revenues. And last year was pretty mild in Texas. But the larger story is a good one that hurts a bit. The presence of batteries have stabilized the grid. This is amazing! Yet this benefit is not yielding great returns to the owners and developers of these batteries. Already deployed batteries are one thing, but for true decarbonization, we’ll need a lot more batteries (even to deal with the day-to-day fact of nightfall, let alone Dunkelflaute). If we’re seeing revenues crater now, what kind of pricing systems will we need to innovate/plan for moving forward?

China is asking the same questions and needs to figure out good answers that work out for everyone.

Good News on the Farm?

There’s a whole discussion about whether economic development can depend on the service sector that I was hoping to also include, but we’ll save that for the Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World review.

Let me end with a twist. Rather than just dwelling on the reality that all good things don’t go together, sometimes there are pieces of the story that fit surprisingly well together. The key example here is agrivoltaics. Putting solar in agricultural fields can be helpful! For agricultural productivity. For animal comfort. For soil health.

In Ordos, they hope that the panels can help reduce desertification. And it makes sense why it might turn out that way. Farmers in Maryland and Pennsylvania might find out that they can power PJM with solar without killing their crops. Good things can happen. We need to keep our eyes open to the messy reality around us, for good and ill.

Be well, safe, and true out there.

This is all to say that I hope you can forgive the nostalgia that seeps in then as I share with you my newest essay, published online at WIRED.com as part of their China Issue.

China’s Renewable Energy Revolution Is a Huge Mess That Might Save the World

Here’s the hook:

There’s a particular kind of sci-fi nerd who equates fusion tech with utopia. If we could only harness the engine of the stars, it would uncork near limitless energy and neatly sweep away a whole mess of humanity’s problems. But how would that work exactly? What would the transition look like?

You don’t have to wonder. It’s happening now. Solar panels and wind turbines capture the fusion of the sun and convert it to electricity. And at the scale and pace that China is producing them, plenty of things stand to be swept away—including, quite possibly, the once seemingly intractable problems of energy poverty and fossil-fuel dependence. In 2024, the total installed electricity capacity of the planet—every coal, gas, hydro, and nuclear plant and all of the renewables—was about 10 terawatts. The Chinese solar supply chain can now pump out 1 terawatt of panels every year.

“Ok, ok,” you might say. “That’s fine, Jeremy. Glad you got WIRED to publish it,” as you stifle a yawn. “Didn’t Bill McKibben already get a whole book out about solar taking over last year?” But here’s the twist:

But chroniclers of this green tech revolution almost always understate its chaos. At this point, it is far less a tightly managed, top-down creation of state subsidies than a runaway train of competition. The resulting, onrushing utopia is anything but neat. It is a panorama of coal communities decimated, price wars sweeping across one market after another, and electrical grids destabilizing as they become more central to the energy system. And absolutely no one—least of all some monolithic “China” at the control switch—knows how to deal with its repercussions.

By the end, I’m putting knifes into Bill Gates and Donald Trump, reminding you that it isn’t just Chinese solar firms that are operating without profits but world-leading EV maker BYD, and of course the grid death spiral in Pakistan that readers here will be familiar with as Chinese solar firms destroy the economics of Chinese-funded gas plants. And did I go for it? You bet I did:

Mao Zedong famously declared that a revolution is not a dinner party. It is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. The green tech revolution—whose violence is principally financial, a withering assault on the value of fossil firms’ assets—is not a dinner party. Nor is it inevitable. It could still be held back or slowed down. Yes, it is the result of the conscious choices made by people, firms, and governments, many of the most critical ones made in China. But it is happening now, and faster than our systems—electricity grids, industrial sectors, labor, geopolitics, and more—are ready for.

Go read the whole thing.

Sausage Making

The writing of this piece was quick. An editor at WIRED reached out to me worried that the China package that they’d put together was missing something important without an angle on the energy revolution (Zeyi Yang’s piece on the global nature of the battery sector is great with a nice set of infographics). Yet he wanted to make sure that it had a unique angle — not something that everyone else was already saying. As I talked with him on the phone on a chilly fall evening outside my daughter’s choir practice, I could hear the yawns as I talked about the speed and scale of the solar boom. It was the twist: “China” isn’t doing this; there isn’t some grand plan that the mandarins in Zhongnanhai worked out a decade ago in calligraphy hanging on the wall; it’s much more chaotic than we think. Then over the breeze, in an extended pause, I heard this meme. Let’s go. His favorite line was the idea of “spiraling from success to success.”

The writing itself came together quickly. It had to as the package needed to be assembled for the print issue, and I came into the process at the end. Deadlines work, my friends. Two issues: first, the editor thought that I leaned too heavily on the links to make the argument at various spots. And since the piece would be in print and people can’t just tap their finger on the dead tree of the magazine and see what I’m referring to, I had to rewrite a bit. Second, I was reminded to knock off on the jargon since most WIRED readers aren’t exactly China or energy nerds (unlike all of you). After that it was deemed “very clean” by a top editor.

What I have never experienced before, though, was Condé Nast fact checking. While the online piece has some links, it doesn’t have as many as I might like. I supplied a very linked up version for the fact checkers, who still came in with a lot of comments. Most just required an extra link or two to convince them that I wasn’t making shit up, they definitely caught something that was announced in 2025 that I misremembered as happening at the end of 2024. A skirmish about how to characterize Trump’s attacks on the US wind industry [“crushed” vs. “attempted to cancel”] was probably the most dramatic bit. I never really intended for my winking transition from Trump to Gates via their Jeffrey Epstein connection to be included. I did, however, really want to give Jigar Shah credit for his rant against Gates but apparently that got cut in the editing too.

The title of this post is what I’ve been told is what will be on the print version. Inked and glued in a physical magazine like the ones that I used to hold thirty years ago. I’m very fond of it, and think it could be taken up by a new generation of climate activists as we expand our imaginations of what the world looks like through and on the other side of this chaotic revolution. Onward.

The Ezra Klein Show episode with M. Gessen was beyond bleak. It also accurately reflects where we are an where Trump and his cronies would like to take the country and the planet. The major issue that I want to focus on is spectacle and attention, and political responses to it. MAGA explicitly points to the past when looking at the future, and Gessen literally has a book titled The Future Is History about Putin’s Russia. Their conversation covered the ground as you might expect it to, though I was a bit surprised by Klein’s idea that Trump is somehow hypermodern — in that he operates always and everywhere as an avatar, a character devoid of normal humanity, a creature of the screen, of the feed. And that it is becoming what others are doing as well, Kristi Noem in front of the prisoners at CECOT, for instance. Gessen took this observation in a good direction that we’ve covered here previously:

I think that’s a great observation. I do want to temper it a little bit because I think there’s a craziness to what we’re living through that has to do with how we got here — which is that politics should have spectacle. Politics should have a public dimension.

In the preceding, more “normal” administrations, we didn’t have that. The Biden administration was a bizarrely closed black box — bizarre for any administration but particularly for a Democratic administration. It was an administration that utterly failed to tell any kind of story.

I’m sure a lot of it had to do with Biden’s deterioration and his inability to really be in public. But really, it was like a closed management company that was just trying to get stuff done without being distracted by doing public politics.

This is what I was trying to get at a year ago in “Bidenism’s Frustrating Failures.”

In the end, I think my frustration with Bidenism was its reluctance to engage in debate and discussion. To listen broadly and deliberate publicly. Biden prided himself on getting things done, almost certainly. Leaks are bad; coherence is good. But what if what democracy needs gossip, not gossip really but opportunities for debate and detailed discussions and arguments about why something is happening rather than some other alternative. What if you need a few low-level staffers to talk with reporters about internal debates so that there’s something to write about other than just today’s press release? To argue for or against, to talk through the tradeoffs of things, rather than defer to the political expertise of the Biden team, which operated as if some kind of democratic centralism was at play. As if things were completely settled internally, that the Senate is the only thing that mattered and the public (and allies and companies and so on) could be ignored other than to be asked to vote at the appropriate time and maybe to clap from time to time.

Attentional politics matters, and Bidenism completely failed at it. But there is another layer here that I worry deeply about, and is something that I know I’m not alone in worrying about: that objective material reality does not matter, only the subjective experience of things matters. Gessen again:

For example, we talk about the scenario where Venezuela goes all wrong, and there are boots on the ground, and American soldiers are dying, and nothing is working as intended, and the oil wells are not sprouting fountains of gold that fund this whole operation and enrich the United States. When none of that is happening, does that have consequences for the midterm elections? That would be democratic metrics.

I very much doubt that it will have consequences for a couple of reasons. One is what has happened to the media universe. The pictures that MAGA voters, for lack of a better term, see, and the pictures that you and I see are completely different. Will people who need to see what’s happening in Venezuela have any idea about what’s happening there? Will people who don’t read The New York Times have any idea what’s happening there? I doubt it.

Obviously for a set of true believers this is the case, and about Venezuela, a place that exists solely through their screens for many of them and a place they’ve never been (I’ve never been) this is easy to believe. But what about jobs and prices? Things that people do experience? I think the election results that we’ve seen and the polling indicates that people are frustrated with what has not happened and blame Trump for his failures to deliver. I worry though still that the feed dominates all.

I tried these posts, but nothing went viral.

If material reality doesn’t matter compared to the feed, then perhaps big brains aren’t exactly the great evolutionary investment we led ourselves to believe.

If material reality doesn’t matter compared to the feed, then perhaps the Fermi paradox isn’t so paradoxical.

Gessen argued that there is perhaps an effort to switch from an “authoritarian bargain” where your life will improve just shut up about politics (similar to what I called the “technocratic mode” in China, though obviously neither Putin nor Trump evince technocracy) to a “totalitarian bargain” where your life might suck but your part of capital-G Greatness of imperial adventures and gold ballrooms. Joy through dominance and implied status, circuses with no promise of cheap bread.

Jay Kang gets at this today as well.

And so the need for more political imagination is something that many of us are circling around these days. Which is one reason why the Schumer / Jeffries tactic of not speaking or getting in the way of Trump torching his own popularity feels so frustrating. Dependence on thermostatic public opinion might win Democrats the 2026 elections, but it will never expand the political imagination of the American people. It also has the unfortunate problem of being adjacent to a Biden administration that was attentionally ignorant to the point of silence. And so Democratic politicians, whether they are in office or out of office, agree that the best way to be is to be quiet. This will not work.

More imagining is needed, individually and communally. Not just retvrn but building something new. Reconstruction, but by whom, in what order, and for what purpose requires deliberation and planning.

The desecration of these United States is not the only thing happening on this planet, and it is not the only force shaping the future. For instance, last year saw both India and China decrease their coal power generation, for the first time in over half a century.

These are the places that scholars have worried about most when thinking about the climate crisis. They account for well over 90% of the world’s emissions increases over the past decade. If they are turning the corner towards a green tech revolution, then there is more than just a little ray of hope shining our path towards a better future.

As part of that effort, I’m going to be doing my best this year to share some of my thinking about how we can get on that path, the challenges and choices we face in doing so, and the opportunities that it can provide for us. That’s the plan for this here newsletter into the year. As a key part of that effort, at least at the start, I’m going to be doing some reading and reviewing.

I’m still working on formats. These books obviously speak to each other, and I have my own reactions to each of them independently and jointly. I’ll likely write up more informal reviews of the books individually here and then stitch together things once I’m through this stack.

Are there other books I’m missing? What else should I be reading? As always, climate-related fiction recommendations are particularly welcome. I enjoyed Ministry for the Future and Deluge and The Water Knife and Weather, but would like to read more.

As I suggested in my last missive, I have a few other projects of my own that aren’t out yet but will be coming shortly. A couple of podcast episodes have been recorded and one piece for a new outlet for me is coming very soon. And, inshallah, something else sometime soon. But for now just remember that as we fight in the present to remember planning for the future and building it everyday.

Like the now defunct liberal international order (LIO) before it, the new National Security Strategy (NSS) promulgated in December by the Trump administration has the surprising if unfortunate characteristic of negating each of its constituent words. The LIO was less liberal, less international, and definitely less ordered than was often acknowledged (especially inside the DC beltway). Trump’s new NSS is not about the national but instead the personal, ignores all manner of material threats to security in favor of chasing psychological ones, and contains no strategy to speak of beyond creating space (maximizing optionality, as Henry Farrell put it) for the increasingly decrepit dealmaker in chief to make deals. Anne Applebaum deemed it a long suicide note. There are lots of takes, almost all of them as excoriating as hers. It’s bad.

It’s personal rather than national because with Trump it is always about the grift. Whether it’s truth social merging with a fusion firm (its own special kind of grift) or the various memecoins or Melania the movie or …. Security threats like climate change are simply ignored, and legal instruments and agreements which protect the national interest are forgotten. Strategy requires coherence and forethought, neither of which are in strong supply these days in DC. But you don’t need another lambasting of bad Trumpian politics when everyone else can offer that faster and sharper.

After all, the China Lab is a China and climate newsletter. On the former, there are those attacking the NSS for being too moderate in tons. Both Democrats and Republican politicians in 2025 have deep muscle memory of the bygone age of … 2024 when scrambling to be as hard on China as possible was viewed as winning politics. But for all of its many, many faults, the NSS reflects a practical and pragmatic modus vivendi with China. But I’ll dwell on that another day (I would have delved but then you might think that some silicon intelligence is drafting this for me—and it’s not).

On climate change, though, nothing good can be said. Indeed, let’s jump into the document itself and go through the singular mention of climate change.

Energy Dominance – Restoring American energy dominance (in oil, gas, coal, and nuclear) and reshoring the necessary key energy components is a top strategic priority. Cheap and abundant energy will produce well-paying jobs in the United States, reduce costs for American consumers and businesses, fuel reindustrialization, and help maintain our advantage in cutting-edge technologies such as AI. Expanding our net energy exports will also deepen relationships with allies while curtailing the influence of adversaries, protect our ability to defend our shores, and—when and where necessary—enables us to project power. We reject the disastrous “climate change” and “Net Zero” ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.

The energy dominance idea is not just bad environmentally, but a disaster in the medium-to-long term and not much better in the short run. As I argued here and here, the green tech revolution opens the door to a developmental path that is cheaper, cleaner, and better than the fossil powered world in which we’ve lived. Yes, these technologies are currently being made mostly in China (though not all, by a long shot). But that’s no reason to ignore the reality that they’re great technologies that will dominate when consumers are given a choice.

That being said, the competitive advantages of clean tech are clear yet the politics of taking this path can be difficult. Even in China, where there’s no concern about the Chinese production of these technologies, moving down the path rapidly is not happening; it can’t decide if it wants to be the electrostate that was promised.

Take this 2021(!) study: a specific plant-by-plant guide to how China could phaseout coal from its electricity system. That’s about 500 GW of solar ago, and yet China instead added over 100 GW of coal to its grid over the intervening four years rather than moving away from the black rock. One of the main reasons why is that it is difficult to place coal workers into slots in the new green tech economy. This 2025 study suggests only 15% of Chinese coal plant workers will find similar jobs, in large part because the geography of electricity generation shifts with the new technology.

Nils Gilman had a nice post about the ways that left and right see crises all around us. The left worried about the metabolic crisis of climate change and the right worried about a demographic crisis.

Given that the NSS is a document of the right, there’s much more material about demographics to digest than about climate.

Demographics

The civilizational collapse of Europe language in the document makes all but explicit that the demographic collapse concerns proffered by the administration and its specific authors (Michael Anton until he left the administration and then Stephen Miller, if bluesky is to be believed) is really about white people, not humanity. Global population is expected to grow for decades to come, but from the MAGA/Vance et al perspective, it is the wrong slices of the population that are growing. But beyond the obvious racism and “you will not replace us” vibes, there are additional layers of political complication. The United States, and even more so Europe, South Korea, Japan, and China, are aging rapidly. So the shape of the demographic pyramid in each is shifting. This is more than a symbol of large changes to come but reflects present dynamics that are material as well as psychological.

It is hard to plan for a future when you’re dead. Having a political class that is chronologically advanced — a gerontocracy — is never a great idea, for the obvious reasons as well as this one.

As the population ages, the demands of the economy move. Shifting sectoral composition of the labor force is a result of this demographic change, and here it is largely towards “care.” While smaller newborn cohorts reduce this effect on the other side, the labor intensity of caring for the aged is much higher than for little ones. Of course, the fact that these growing sectors are female-coded in the US more than most, makes big masculinity / trad hierarchy / misogyny mad. But policy pushing on demographics has been like pushing on a string. Very little happens.

Climate

On climate, Trump’s zero sum nature suffuses this document (and everything he touches). Again, there’s literally nothing here on climate. But one way that I think you can view the overall program is that it reads like an eco-fascist’s manifesto without any concern for the planet’s ecology. It is deeply concerned about those people coming here. (You know the ones, from the sh*thole countries.) Much of the (Stephen Miller-suffused) anti-immigrant actions are about racial animus, but there is a deep connection between these actions and climate change. Yet the NSS offers nothing to remedy the underlying problems in those locations that are pushing people to leave their homes and communities to become migrants.

Instead all of the efforts are about hardening the border, which deeply aligns with lifeboat ethics. They see a world falling apart, like a sinking ship, and whatever it takes to save those on the lifeboat is justified. Authoritarian temptations abound. Of course, for Trump and Miller, the authoritarianism is the point rather than a sacrifice.

But thinking deeply about how we can avoid the worst of climate change often runs into issues of planning and technocracy. This essay from Pierre Charbonnier (which I read the google translation of as my French is non-existant) reviews Abundance, Breakneck, and Karp’s The Technological Republic as a way of considering technocracy in the contemporary moment. More to think about in the coming year.

This NSS is toxic, born of enmity, understanding only force, valuing nothing of the slow boring of hard boards that brought us to our current plenty (which, admittedly, is deeply unequal in its distribution and far from universal in its experience and for some disappearing rather than developing), and caring only for today not tomorrow.

Year in Review

It’s now New Year’s Eve as I write this. The end of what is, certainly from a DC perspective, a shipwreck of a year. Republicans gutted the climate actions of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), undoing real moves that would have helped humanity and Americans as we transit to that cheaper, cleaner, and better path.

For me, it was a fine year. I joined a commission and affiliated with a think tank. I’m quite proud of many of the pieces that I wrote this year. That being said, I spent most of my writing time this year working on a couple of things that won’t see the light of day until later and so don’t show up on this kind of a list. Consider them seeds planted for the future. A future that we can hope to see and in which to flourish.

Academic Pieces

• Nomi Claire Lazar and Jeremy L. Wallace. 2025. “Resisting the Authoritarian Temptation.” Journal of Democracy. 36(1): 135-150.

• Nomi Claire Lazar and Jeremy L. Wallace. 2025. “A Reply to Our Critics.” Journal of Democracy. 36(1): 182-187.

Public Writing

• “China Can’t Decide if It Wants to Be the World’s First ‘Electrostate.’” Heatmap.

• “China’s New Gilded Age Comes to Life in ‘Breakneck’.” Foreign Policy.

• “The Looming Power of China’s Energy Megabases.” The Wire China.

• “The Real Problem with ‘Climate Realism.’” Heatmap.

• “Tariffs Can’t Stop China’s Clean Energy From Winning the Future”. Foreign Policy. (with Jonas Nahm)

Good Authority

• “China updates its climate commitments, in disappointing fashion.” 2025.09.26.

• “For the Trump administration, everything is an emergency.” 2025.06.17.

• “Trump’s energy dominance agenda faces three big hurdles.” 2025.03.25.

• “Can democracy solve the climate crisis?” 2025.01.07.

China Lab posts

That’s it for 2025. May we find each other in better climes again soon.

The Crucial Years

Whale Oil and Wind

Read more

10 months ago · 157 likes · 25 comments · Bill McKibben

In a world where I increasingly consume people that write far too much, too well, and too quickly, Bill McKibben remains at the top of the heap of large-scale industrial scribblers.

7 Takes from Bill Gates on Heatmap

Bill Gates is a private citizen with the financial firepower of a medium-sized state. He has devoted significant funds to climate action, but focuses on innovation over deployment. As an individual investor putting money towards pieces of the solution over the long run, this is somewhere between fine and great. But when he advises others to do the same (or others take him even farther and say to skip deploying today in favor of innovation), that’s a real problem. I wrote about one version of that kind of skip deploying today when I critiqued the CFR’s climate realism initiative.

The East is Read

Refuting Wen Tiejun

Wen Tiejun, economist and professor emeritus at Renmin University of China, is one of China’s best-known public intellectuals on rural affairs. Fluent and combative, this left-leaning thinker warns that, in a global economy wired by capital, technology and data, peripheral places—China’s countryside included—can be hollowed out by the city’s gravitation…

Read more

10 months ago · 16 likes · Yifan YAN and Yuxuan JIA

This is quite a powerful critique of a prominent rural economist, pointing out the problems of falling too deep into romanticizing the Chinese countryside. Other arguments, including dependency theory ideas that are underlying some green industrial policy thinking in the global south, will catch some strays if you read carefully.

Daniel Denvir Digs Zohran Mamdani

From the pun in the title, this pieces continues with one fun little thing after another about the podcast host and the young socialist that could change the city/future/world.

Programmable Mutter

What is civil society, and why should we care?

There are many possible stories about why American political conservatism is such an intellectual trainwreck. Here’s one. Conservatives used at least nominally to argue that it was important to protect civil society from the depredations of government, and many genuinely believed it. Some still do, but now, the dominant figures in political conservatism…

Read more

10 months ago · 93 likes · 18 comments · Henry Farrell

As ever Henry knocks it out of the park with thousands of words on a core concept in social science, explicating some of the key differences between Marxist left (and right!) and liberal conceptions of the term. One of many nice riffs:

There is also excellent reason to think that the left should be more appreciative of civil society too, and less prone to fantasies that everyone would change their politics if only this or that intellectual institution was controlled by the right people with the right way of thinking.

The Future of Magazines and the World

This is a beyond impressive interview with Thomas Meaney of Granta. Just the tiniest taste:

Literature is often most enduring not when it is most saturated with political ideals, but when it is not, and because it is not, it is.

Ok, one more:

Sartre put the matter well in Search for a Method: We still live in what Marx identified as the capitalist mode of production, and as long as we continue to live in it, there will be no going beyond Marxism. Everything that happens in our society—war, conquest, science, consumption, love, and child-rearing—are marked by the fact that they happen in capitalist time. To grasp this is to grasp what Marx called “the totality of social relations,” which is obscured by the very nature and interests of the capitalist order that underpins it.

Backfire

This ITIF report on Huawei brings receipt after receipt on the counterproductive nature of American efforts to destroy the Chinese tech firm.

How Things Work

Eugene Debs and All Of Us

On Saturday night, I witnessed a ballroom full of stout Midwesterners—railroad men and laborers, college professors and students, retirees and young parents—stand and say, in unison, “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not…

Read more

10 months ago · 169 likes · 51 comments · Hamilton Nolan

Terre Haute, my home town, in the news!

Steel Politics

Some nice argumentation though the piece goes a bit farther than I would in its call for state domination of the steel sector.

Here are some things I’ve been reading.

• Disaster Recovery Is Big Business. Eric Roston of Bloomberg on the Disaster Industrial Complex as a significant share of US economic growth. Compared with Keynes’s idea that we pay people to dig holes and then to fill them up, climate change is wrecking everything for us. Productivity and growth enhancing? Perhaps the scariest part of the story is that its the first in a series!

• The Return of the Energy Weapon. Jason Bordoff and Meghan O’Sullivan update their warnings about the energy transition in Foreign Affairs. As ever in that august publication, the framing tends to treat America as a victim of the global economy’s shift towards weaponization rather than the origin of the idea, but they make the point strongly that clean energy is secure energy, pushing back on Trumpian rejectionism.

• A new magazine you might like has emerged from the excellent Advait Arun.

  Caravanserai

  But the worth of a human can also persuade.

  Fall is in the air. So too, apparently, is affordability. The Twittersphere recently learned that Marjorie Taylor Greene is more than a little worried about rising healthcare costs. Zohran Mamdani and his promise of a rent-frozen New York just took over…

  Read more

  a year ago · 8 likes · Caravanserai

• Dan Davies did a joint review of Abundance and Breakneck that is worth your time. In case you missed it, my review of Breakneck is here.

  Hypertext

  What happens when Chinese resolve meets American rent-seeking?

  Abundance: How We Build a Better Future, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson…

  Read more

  a year ago · 55 likes · Dan Davies

• A Nobel for Innovation. Kevin A. Bryon has a nice writeup of the new Econ Nobel (ed: yes, we know) laureates, including his advisor, Joel Mokyr. Matt Zeitlin has a punchy piece on the climate change angle of the win.

• Speaking of awards, my colleague Hahrie Han is a certified genius, winning a MacArthur Grant. Fellow SAISer Henry Farrell has a nice writeup of her latest book, Undivided.

  Programmable Mutter

  What the left can learn from evangelical churches

  [Baptism by William B. Chappel, courtesy of the Met…

  Read more

  a year ago · 65 likes · 16 comments · Henry Farrell

That’s all for now. More in the works.

When lecturing about the puzzle of China’s economy, Lin is a great character. He trained in the West — Chicago even! — but worked in (and for) Beijing. Lin was the first person from a developing country to serve as the World Bank’s chief economist. In 2012, he published an English version of his Demystifying the Chinese Economy, which argued that China could expect 8% growth until 2030. His optimism could not be contained; Osnos’s profile is called “Boom Doctor” for a reason. That year as Lin was leaving the Bank to return to Peking University (Beida), the Bank put out a major report that was far less optimistic. The fact that the World Bank’s chief economist, on the topic that made his career, disagreed with a report that the Bank in concert with the Chinese State Council’s Development Research Center by being more optimistic than literally the government of China, speaks to the complicated nature of predictions and assessments about China’s economy moving forward.

Justin Lin -- or Lin Yifu -- was originally born not on the mainland but in Taiwan, where he served as a soldier. How did a Taiwanese soldier become a Beida professor? He defected. You read that correctly.

Here’s Osnos:

On the night of May 16, 1979, Lin walked to the water’s edge, stepped out of his shoes, and waded into the Taiwan Strait. The current was swift and strong, but he had been studying the sea, and he timed his departure to avoid being pushed back to shore by the rising tide. “You need to go when it’s receding,” he recalled. “You need to cross the middle, and then the rising tide will carry you all the way over to the other side.” …

Lin left behind Chen, who was pregnant, and their three-year-old son. It’s not clear how much Chen knew of the plan. (Wu Ho-Mou, a friend and an economist at Peking University who has discussed the matter with Lin, says, “He said goodbye to his wife only in his mind.”)

Osnos ends his writing on Lin with the following reflection:

But part of him would remain unknowable to me. I had been drawn to him years earlier by the audacity of his decision to defect. I had imagined it to be the act of an idealist. But, over the years, I had come to see a practical side to his choice as well. He was a man who believed, above all, in his own power to achieve his ambitions, and he would do whatever it took to do so. And that, I realized, was fitting. It was the energy of China’s boom distilled to its hardest truth: a solitary man who decided that he could realize his future only by going to the People’s Republic.

Osnos’s original profile came out in 2010, when China’s economy was turbocharged by Keynesian stimulus following the global financial crisis. His book, Age of Ambition, weaves together a number of his profiles was published four years later and deservedly won the national book award for nonfiction.

Why dwell on Lin and Osnos’s book a decade later? Because ambition — its presence but also its absence — remains core to my understanding of China today.

One Word: Unambitious

I was happy to participate at an event last week at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The event launched their Climate Clarity report, an important document pushing back on the new climate denialism, which can be seen in various statements by the Secretary of Energy and the President. Some, like CFR’s climate realism initiative, try to put a bit of lipstick on this pig, but I’ve already laid out my critiques of those ideas. Noah Gordon of Carnegie opened the conversation with a lightning round to ask the panel to give one word to summarize our impressions from the just-concluded NYC Climate Week. I gave “unambitious,” which was not a diss at my friends who hosted a range of exciting panels and parties but aimed at one person who only showed up on video: Xi Jinping, and in particular his announcement of China’s updated climate commitments as part of the Paris agreement (it’s nationally determined contribution or NDC because climate people are defenseless in the face of a good acronym).

Here’s what I said: Xi tried to replicate the positive acclaim that he received five years ago when he pledged that the country would be carbon neutral by 2060. And while the update is nothing like the denialism coming out of the Trump administration, it is a wholly unambitious set of targets that suggest the country has yet to decide if it is interested in winding down its dependence on coal, let alone has settled on how it will do so.

During climate week, I took a quick jaunt to New York and met with Heatmap’s Rob Meyer. I was ranting about the NDC along these lines when he paused, “are you pitching me right now?” Readers, that was not the intention, but that’s how what began as a rant became “China Is Deciding Not to Decide on a New Green Future.” Here’s perhaps my favorite part:

But China’s dithering is more than just an environmental failure — it is a governing mistake. China’s weak climate pledge isn’t just bad news for the world; it shows an indecisive leadership that is undermining its country’s own competitiveness by sticking with dirty coal rather than transitioning rapidly to a cleaner future.

The new pledge — known in UN jargon as a national determined contribution, or NDC — reveals a disconnect between the government’s official position and the optimistic discourse that now surrounds China’s clean energy sector. China today is described as the world’s first electrostate; we are told that it stands at the vanguard of the solar and EV revolution, ready to remake the world order against a coalition of petrostate dinosaurs.

The NDC makes it obvious that the Chinese government does not yet view itself in such a fashion. China might look like an adult, but it more closely resembles a gangly teenager who is still getting used to their body after a growth spurt. As the analyst Kingsmill Bond recently put it on Heatmap’s podcast Shift Key, Chinese clean tech manufacturers have unlocked a cleaner and cheaper path to economic development. It isn’t yet clear that China is brave enough to commit to it. If China is the adult in the room, in other words, we’re screwed.

Oh and this one too.

What is literally happening in these meetings? The government is bringing private actors into the same room to bang their heads together and deal with the reality that the current economic system is not working, largely because of intense competition — which is likely best solved by forcing some of the firms and production capacity to shrink. Firms are unprofitable because exuberant supply has zoomed past current demand, and the country’s markets and politics are unprepared to navigate neither the potentially needed bankruptcies nor their attendant fallout. So the government is intervening, designing actions to generate the outcomes it desires.

Yet there is something contradictory about the government’s approach. A decarbonized world, after all, will be a world without significant numbers of internal combustion vehicles, and traditional automakers will eventually need to shut down or shift into EVs — yet their executives aren’t being dragged in for the same scolding. Likewise, a decarbonized world will be a world without as many coal mines and coal-fired power plants. Firms in the power sector should be scolded for continuing coal production at scale.

We are in the mid-transition, as the scholars Emily Grubert and Sara Hastings-Simon have put it. But China is further along in this transition than other states, and so it could lead in the management and planning required for the transition as well.

And this perhaps is another space where ambition rears its head. There’s a lot of debate about involution these days. I’ll have more to say about it in future posts and pieces as well, but here I want to make clear that in China’s clean tech sectors we are seeing capitalist competition of such intensity that profits are going to zero while social benefits are large. Which doesn’t sound like that bad of a thing. Now, it’s more complicated than that, but firms and their leaders are ambitious. They want to wage and win these fights. Competition isn’t imposed on them by colonialism or American hegemony or anything else. They saw an opportunity and jumped for it, and now find themselves in a heavyweight bout. If cheap solar plus batteries allows for decarbonized global growth, the companies that make those products will be lauded and remembered. Seems like the kind of ambition we should reward.

The Messy Bits

Welcome to the sausage making. As ever, my lovely editors cleaned up the prose, snipping and trimming to make the arguments as sharp as possible and fit for purpose for the Heatmap audience. But for those of you here, I’m happy to share some of the messy bits that didn’t make it through the editing process.

My initial rant became some notes the day after Xi gave the NDC update. Then that was expanded and a full draft ready sometime last week. Then editing. In the interim, the International Energy Agency’s Renewables 2025 report came out. I had some thoughts that could have been folded in, but they complicated the flow of what was an already meaty piece. So, here are some thoughts about another great document full of valuable data and insights, including forecasts of renewables additions through 2030.

The report leaves me with a mix of optimism and pessimism. It ratchets down both US and China’s renewable buildout from the 2024 report. US down more than 40% (!) and China down about 5%.

But even with this slightly reduced estimate for China, the IEA’s main case is WAY ahead of China’s NDC. Its main case estimate has about 2100 GW of renewables added from 2026-2030. That would basically hit the 2035 target of 3600 GW that Xi outlined last week, by 2030 instead of 2035. The IEA forecasts roughly 400 GW of annual additions, whereas the NDC points towards around 200. I hope they are right, but that level of additions with slow economic growth would eviscerate coal. Again, I hope they are right! But as I say in the piece and above, the unambitious nature of the NDC does not give me a ton of confidence that they are prepared to tackle dismantling the coal sector in the next five years.

Ok, I promised messy bits. How about some methodological debates in linkedin comments? Michael Davidson, who Heatmap had on Shift Key to talk about the NDC, is a great scholar of China’s electricity grid. He shared a paper that he and co-authors had written about how to think about the NDC in the months leading up to the announcement. The study modeled Chinese grid decarbonization at approximately the 3600 GW level that comes out of the NDC, however, the model is pursuing a least cost solution for the grid, and sees an imbalance in favor of solar over wind compared with what might be a bit closer to optimal given assumptions of something close to a 50/50 mix of solar and wind. He briefly mentions this in the podcast episode — that there’s a need to add more of the higher capacity factor wind compared with just dumping ever more solar panels onto the grid.

But solar has been growing far faster than wind in China, and already has a much broader installation base. The IEA study forecasts 1 TW (that is 1000 GW) of wind capacity installed by 2030 in China, but more than 3 TW of solar by that date. It’s worth emphasizing this point because many of the big reports about net zero expect something similar. Wind and solar balance each other as wind tends to be more powerful in the evening and winter, complementing solar’s daytime/summer strength. Overall, a solar heavy mix that the market is providing isn’t the way that modelers traditionally envisioned the topology of a least cost electricity system.

And in the comments of that linkedin post, Lauri Myllyvarta of CREA comes in with specific questions about specifics of both the shift in technologies from solar to wind but also the rise in capacity factors that the modelling results rely on to help decarbonize the grid. Specifically, the Chinese Electricity Council (CEC) releases utilization data on how many hours the average solar panel/wind turbine generates electricity. China’s capacity factor estimates (14% for solar and 24% for wind for 2024) are very low compared to the US (23% and 34%, respectively). There are questions about CEC’s methodology — e.g., a solar farm that gets installed in March but only really connected in June might be zeroed out for months, which would drag the numbers down — and inefficiencies of Chinese grid connections and so on, but these details end up making a difference, especially when you’re talking about shifting 3 TW of generating capacity from 14% to 18%!

Curtailment data are also vastly underestimated, which should be good news meaning that there’s more power to grab and store and utilize, but also means that understanding what’s really going on is even harder. Chinese data quality is always a thing.

Where does this leave us? I think there’s no read of the NDC that isn’t deflating for those of us who think we’ve glimpsed the future of a cheaper, cleaner, better planet. I ended the essay reflecting a bit on my trip to Ordos, where the coal and clean energy systems are right next to each other. Coal employs tens of thousands of people, powers the economy today, and new industries like the disastrous coal-to-liquids sector are growing out of the dirty black rocks. But as I saw the trucks hauling rocks on highways around and outside of town, it felt so primitive compared to the shiny new clean energy facilities that were around — where we can simply move electrons around. The efficiencies are obvious, as are the benefits — on climate and otherwise. Yet, it looks as though Xi and the Chinese government aren’t so convinced.

Some people are more cautious, others love jumping ahead and making a splash. Perhaps its fitting that Justin Lin has a 2nd edition of Demystifying the Chinese Economy coming out this November. Despite a decade of slower growth, the boom doctor is still in.

I’ll be posting more regularly here this fall on China and climate and anything that touches on either of those topics (which is everything; everything touches on China and/or climate).

Reviews

First, I should share the review of Dan Wang’s bestselling Breakneck that Foreign Policy published over the weekend.

The book is certainly a step up from most discourse on China these days, even if I have my quibbles with it. Here’s a snippet from the beginning:

Much of the marketing for Dan Wang’s Breakneck portrays the book as filling this lacuna [by folding China into Abundance]. He even participated in the Abundance 2025 conference. As a sales pitch, it’s pretty compelling, as is the book’s tagline: “China is an engineering state; America is a lawyerly society.” The simplest version of its thesis is that China builds because it’s led by engineers who try to break down problems into simple, quantitative boxes and then solve them, piece by piece. While China does build, it also destroys. People, with all their hopes, dreams, and creativity, don’t do well in simple boxes, and sometimes they get smashed by the engineers’ plans. The United States’ lack of building is blamed on its lawyerliness—too much red tape getting in the way of American dynamism.

In many ways, this framing undersells what Wang is doing. Truth be told, the book contains very little about the United States, and so while one could dwell on the thinness of its arguments related to the political dilemmas that have caused American construction and infrastructural stagnation, they are beside the point.

On the other hand, there’s great value in what Wang has done with Breakneck: He’s crafted an approachable, well-written narrative that grapples with what China is really like for an American audience. The fact that doing so requires framing China as a foil for the United States speaks more to a problem with the audience than the author.

The review’s title (which author’s don’t get to choose, sigh!) gets my assessment backwards. A piece that I believe is missing from the book is thinking about inequality in either China or the United States rather than the book “bringing China’s gilded age to life.”1 But after a bit of drama at another publication, I’m very happy that Foreign Policy ran my review.

A second “review” is of the APSA Annual Meeting, in lovely (if distant and pricey) Vancouver. It was great to catch up with friends and colleagues from across the years and locations (at this point, a lot of years!). Political science may have its issues, but there are many wonderful political scientists in this world and spending time with them is a treat.

A final review of this important piece on climate politics, “It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics,” by the estimable writer David Wallace-Wells. As a fellow David wrote:

And I agree. The piece is wonderfully written and argued. It takes quite a while to get to China, but what he writes once he gets there is excellent.

And the other side of the great-power rivalry? China has made a different bet and is fast becoming what people in Silicon Valley, raised on science fiction, like to call the world’s first electrostate. A decade ago, those who saw themselves as energy realists would often argue that moving faster on decarbonization amounted to a self-imposed handicap that would benefit less scrupulous powers, like China. But the actual pattern of recent history has been the inverse: As the United States has moved more slowly on green tech, China has stormed ahead. In fact, if you had to name the single biggest development in climate geopolitics since Paris, it would be the startling rise of China as a green-energy superpower in the midst of what looked, at the outset of the period, like a global future still dominated by an indispensable United States.

Seventy-four percent of all global solar and wind projects are now being constructed in China or by Chinese companies, and in the 12-month period ending this June, China installed more solar power within its borders than America has ever brought online. So far this year, China has installed twice as much solar as the rest of the world put together, and the country’s command over the world’s green supply chain is now famous enough to be an energy-world cliché. Not just the world’s first electrostate, Princeton’s Jesse Jenkins wrote earlier this summer, China will be “the global clean tech hegemon,” whose ability to confer cheap clean energy has already become one unmistakably valuable source of soft power. Between 2019 and 2024, the country’s foreign investment in green manufacturing has grown more than 25-fold, and just since 2022, its green-tech industry has spent more abroad than the United States did on the Marshall Plan. As the former U.S. treasury secretary Lawrence Summers put it a few years ago, “There’s a growing acceptance of fragmentation, and — maybe even more troubling — I think there’s a growing sense that ours may not be the best fragment to be associated with.”

He even works in Tooze’s China turn (David Wallace-Wells is a Sinica subscriber?!):

And it does not appear that Pakistan is exceptional, only early. According to estimates from the think tank Ember, several dozen countries may be ready to make the same jump, though presumably with more directed support from their governments. According to a forthcoming report by the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins, the number is 50 — or perhaps even higher, its co-director Tim Sahay told me. In many countries across sub-Saharan Africa, imports of Chinese solar panels have grown tenfold since 2023; in a few, they’ve grown more than a hundredfold. “For the first time in two centuries, the West is no longer the leader in future technology but the follower,” Sahay recently wrote, with Kate Mackenzie, in the online journal Polycrisis. The historian Adam Tooze has taken to suggesting that the entire history of global modernity should be rewritten with the rapid recent development of China as the core analytic prism and narrative center.

So, I agree with all of this. Obviously. And as the 10 year anniversary of the Paris Agreement arrives, it makes sense to take stock of where we are and where we are going. The climate politics of diplomatic agreements feels like it has lost any strength that it once had. While that’s disappointing, I don’t think it is that surprising. The politics of climate change as a super wicked collective action problem were essentially impossible. Getting everyone to come together and agree to less, especially in a world where so many have so little, was always going to be Herculean, and we don’t have enough heroes.

But what was accomplished was something else. By pointing towards a cleaner future, inventors and investors (largely Chinese) made big bets and developed the technologies to power that future at massive scale and for only fractions of the costs we imagined. By doing so they have fundamentally remade climate politics from the unsolvable collective action problem where defection dominates to the difficult distributive problem it is today.

I’ve banged on this drum before:

To be clear though, and again returning to Hamilton’s post, these technologies do not solve the political problem of fighting climate change. They’ve simply changed the nature of the game away from the wicked problem conundrum that felt impossible to grapple with to something much more manageable. The politics and economics of transitioning all of our energy system isn’t easy, but it’s certainly easier to do so if you also don’t have to convince everyone to do so with a lot less of everything.

The story has shifted, and the way that we thought we would mitigate climate change is not the main narrative. The protagonists have names that many Americans struggle to pronounce. It won’t be the UN or even the financiers in NYC that will be the key players. But we are making and will continue to make progress.

Planning

Speaking of NYC, I’ll briefly be in that fair city to grab some before pictures for the inevitable Zohran comparisons to come.

Actually, I’ll be there for NYC Climate Week. In particular, I’m excited to be part of Commonwealth’s Green Planning Commission, which is launching on Thursday.

Thinking through the Chinese industrial policy success in solar in particular, how do we rate the role of the state’s planning apparatus? This was a question that Thea Riofrancos raised in her response to my piece with Nomi Claire Lazar about eco-authoritarian temptations. And the dismantling of the IRA by the coward Mike Johnson indicates that IRA 2.0 (this time with even more tax credits!) will not be enough. I don’t have answers yet, but engaging with a great group of brilliant minds about how to foster better climate politics in the USA, UK, and other developed countries is something for which I’m truly excited.

Plans

I plan to write more often here. I had an incredible summer, including an amazing month in China, where I learned so much that I will share with you here and other places on the internets.

Finally, I will ask that if you enjoy my posts here, please subscribe and share it with others. This is not meant as a threat, but Hank Green isn’t wrong. There’s probably an argument to be made that I should be posting TikToks and YouTube videos rather than text-posting here.

But not on this day. I have no plans to do so at this time. I have a face made for radio, and I like my voice when it is instantiated on screens or inked on pulped wood much more than when it is in my eardrums.

This post represents an effort to listen to my own advice and tries to pay most attention to the issues that I follow. As I put it on Day 3 of Trump 2.0:

So, my basic advice is to not just let it all wash over you but — if you can and to the extent that you can, remembering that it’s January 2025 — to stare at the ones most deeply felt in your space and continue to sound the alarm about them, while acknowledging that others have different lives and different perspectives. Give them solidarity and try not to compete about which is the greater harm (I realize this is difficult untraining for a policy debater).

That being said, even in the set of areas I cover, there’s a lot going on. This post will just scratch the surface of analysis across a range of topics rather than present a deep dive into any one of them. Think of it as some hors d’oeuvres to tide you over until the main dishes arrive.

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Coal

The FT ran a long story about coal with what I think was an unfortunately pessimistic framing.

I wrote a long thread on Bluesky here laying out my main issues with the piece.

There’s lots of data and quotes from the right sources — the IEA, the China energy analysis David Fishman, the China Climate Hub’s Li Shuo, and others. As ever, this story about the world is largely about China, which represents about half of global coal demand. But, strangely, the piece is more about the past than the future.

Ten years ago, there was a brief moment where many saw China, and hence the world, turning to post-coal growth. That period (2013-2016) turns out to have been a false turning point, and global/China’s demand for coal grew again as the economy turned back to investment and real estate in the late 2010s before the COVID shock and the three red lines and so on. And so the piece decries our failure before really analyzing trends going forward.

“No sign of peaking” is strange language to use when the IEA among others see a global peak this decade, when 65% of countries that use coal for power have seen there coal burning decline, when some countries have completely eliminated coal from their power mix, and when China is in the midst of building out massive renewable resources that have already reduced coal’s share of power generation and promise to displace more and more each year.

Indeed, the piece ends noting that China’s coal usage for electricity has been down in 2025 compared with 2024, which was true for each month of the year until May, which saw a 1% increase because of hydropower shortfalls (an increasingly common occurrence that likely connects back to climate impacts). Whether 2025 sees coal power decline in China remains up in the air, as hydro could again disappoint, wind is always a bit fickle, and the implications of China’s shift in renewable electricity pricing that started on June 1st will slow down deployments in the second half of the year. That all being said, as I summarized:

How do you think about a plateau? One could be disappointed that it didn’t happen a decade ago or that it isn’t the reversal we need to stay under 1.5C. Or one could think that turning the corner is one of the hardest parts, and now that we’re reversing the pace might pick up. I tend towards the latter. Maybe China will triple down on coal again in 2026 and make a fool of this prediction, but there’s a terrawatt of solar panel manufacturing capacity in China pumping out fusion energy collectors every day. There’s a lot of this planet that receives immense amounts of sun, and every month we’re seeing 50 GW or more of solar panels installed around the world. The idea that coal with all of its smoke and carbon is going to remain energy royalty feels ridiculous. I’m ready to see old king coal’s shattered visage buried deep in the sands.

NYC

It’s a shame that it took this long for Brad Lander to finally make waves in the NYC Mayor’s race. But putting his body in the way of ICE thugs illegally detaining New Yorkers is brave and worthy of the attention and praise that he received.

It’s also a shame that the NYT decided to go after the whole slate of candidates, especially Zohran Mamdani. The editorial board surely thought that they prefer Cuomo to Mamdani, are scared to say that, and are certainly too scared to say the opposite, so they punted. Ezra Klein did better, offering a full-throated column of support that Lander can lean on. He’s running third in the polling, but things move quickly. The cross-endorsement that Lander and Mamdani announced last week could be the key to pushing one of them over the Cuomo mountain. You can say it’s been a rollercoaster for Lander.

Los Angeles

It is good that we haven’t seen the US military open fire on Americans protesting Trump’s overreach. That such a statement needs to be said indicates how far we have fallen. A similar situation unfolded this spring when DOGE was sprinting around DC from government building to government building, and “I still have a job” was a text message that needed to be sent. Things that had felt solid melted into air. I used the escalating situation in LA as the way to open a recent piece on Trump’s abuse of emergency for Good Authority.

The people of Los Angeles and other cities are protesting the Trump administration’s aggressive wave of ICE raids. And the administration is raising the stakes by militarizing its attempt to crack down on protesters. This escalatory spiral highlights a principal tactic of the administration – a reliance on declaring an emergency.

Much of the policy action in Trump’s presidency to date has taken place through executive orders. The legal basis and authority of these orders has frequently rested on the concept of emergency powers, and the claim that the White House must address an urgent threat.

Go read the whole thing. True ChinaLab heads will realize that the emergency story connects with the surprising complication of coal rising alongside solar in PJM and MISO that I wrote about in my previous post here.

Political Limits of Bans on Chinese EVs

Americans often complain with the following, very telling phrase: why can’t we have nice things? That phrase was the title of Ezra Klein’s recent appearance on Jon Stewart’s show and of the first episode of writer and former Demos president Heather McGhee’s podcast. We say it a lot. And there’s a related meme.

The nice things we can’t have are items like universal health care, great transit, and walkable cities. Not items at all really but the products of systems. Americans are used to not having these systems in place despite the reality that other societies that aren’t as rich as ours building and sustaining them. Americans simply shrug and lament.

We’re at the beginning of Americans complaining about not having another nice thing: Chinese EVs. Unlike those complicated and integrated products of systems, this is a consumer product. Here’s two of my favorite people in my demographic (white American cis dudes in our 40s), Chris Hayes and Joe Weisenthal, letting loose as only happens about 50 minutes into a podcast:

Chris Hayes: … And the reason I’m thinking about this is when I think about like China’s BYD electric cars.

Joe Weisenthal: Yes.

Chris Hayes: And I like look at them, I’m like I want to buy one of those.

Joe Weisenthal: Yes, me too.

Chris Hayes: They have dope ass electric cars for like $20,000.

Joe Weisenthal: Yes.

Chris Hayes: And you can’t get them as an American.

Joe Weisenthal: No, it’s crazy too. And I do think like the more I think about it, the more angry I feel about that. Like, I’m an American, I should be able to buy the best car in the world. Like it does not, that feels very wrong, and it feels like kind of ahistorical, not ahistorical in a --

Chris Hayes: I agree.

Joe Weisenthal: -- judgment in way, but in a way that feels like it’s an unusual moment in American society.

Chris Hayes: Why are you telling me I can’t buy a BYD?

Joe Weisenthal: Yes, that there’s a car that exists that’s better than anything on the market and I’m not allowed to like purchase it is like really strange.

So, let me suggest that there are political limits to banning Chinese EVs. How do they know about Chinese EVs being cheap and great? Well, information wants to be free. Here’s American streamer iShowSpeed visiting China and driving luxury cars.

Reddit posts like “This Chinese car looks cool” are also out there. For goodness sake, the Wall Street Journal wrote about Ford’s CEO Jim Farley bringing back Chinese EVs to drive around the US and feeling shook by the experience.

This topic is deserving of its own post or to connect it back to issues of industrial policy and process innovation, but I just needed to get this off my chest.

This is a good thing for a world fighting climate change. My last post explicitly argued that cheap renewables (and batteries) changed the core political economy dynamic of decarbonization. It used to be that we thought of climate change as an impossibly wicked problem characterized by collective action dynamics. I won’t agree to sacrifice because I don’t trust that you’ll agree to sacrifice and so on. But cheap renewables have remade the dynamics into one much more about distribution (and existential politics, as Jessica Green argues in her soon to be published book) than collective action.

The industries of the future are increasingly clear and economical, but there are still lots of politics to figure out — where will the transmission lines be built, is the community going to build a seawall or relocate, can solar panels be built on cropland, who will build EVs and where, etc. While these politics are hard, they’re still preferable to the old alternative, which was all of the same questions but the panels, batteries, EVs, and transmission lines all just cost more. We were locked into a future of less that still has a grip on everyone’s psyche but isn’t the real dynamic materially.

The clarity of this vision of the energy transition feels obvious and overwhelming to me, but there are so many complications and dramas to behold in how the future plays out.

Two short examples. I fell into birding while living in Ithaca, NY. As one does. It’s the home of Merlin and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and there always seems to be an osprey scanning for fish while flying over Cayuga Lake.

Just north of the idyllic location where I captured what is one of my favorite photos ever was an eyesore. The Milliken / Cayuga Operating Plant was a 327 MW coal-fired power station that first began operating in 1955. It was still burning coal when I moved to the area a little over a decade ago. Its ownership history is not simple. Here’s how a Tompkins Weekly story from 2019 summarized it:

In 1999, New York state sought to deregulate utilities and ordered NYSEG to sell off its generation assets. NYSEG sold off its fleet of power plants, and the plant was sold to AES and renamed AES Cayuga. In 2011, AES Cayuga declared bankruptcy. In June of 2012, the shareholders took ownership under the name, Upstate New York Power Producers, and operated as the Cayuga Operating Company. Upstate sold the assets to Beowulf Energy in May of 2016, and the company is the current owner [2019] of the power plant. Even though it is now operating under a new company, the plant is still referred to as the Cayuga Operating Company.

Everyone knew the plant would shut down because its economics were terrible. However, that reality also meant that the town of Lansing where the plant resided needed to figure out how it would fund itself since its largest taxpayer would no longer be making contributions to the public coffers.

In 2018, the owners filed paperwork to convert one of the plant’s two generating units to burn natural gas instead of coal. Opposition was strong, and the plans didn’t go forward. The plant ran out of coal in August 2019 and formally retired that October.

What do you do with an old coal plant? The plant was next to land acquired by the Finger Lakes Land Trust, which, somehow, was a site of a proposed nuclear plant that never was constructed. The grid connections are valuable, and a data center project was proposed, as was a solar farm. The plant shut down in 2019, and only now are we seeing real action on getting the solar farm going. This story from last fall suggests that in 2028 the panels will start generating. Obviously things should move faster, but it was nice to see this “local” story show up in a dataset that Milo McBride put together at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on coal conversions.

Even when everything seems to be pointing in the same direction, it takes effort to move from alignment to progress.

Upstate New York has been quite slow to get on the solar bandwagon, but so has the US midwest and northeast more generally. Compared with California and Texas, these regions are incredible laggards (as are the southern states that aren’t part of larger regional transmission organizations (RTOs)). But my favorite American electricity grid data website, gridstatus.io, had a nice post about how solar is finally booming in MISO (the Midwest) and PJM (a behemoth that stretches from Chicago to New Jersey). You should go read it: The Sun Also Rises in the Eastern Interconnection.

Here’s a happy graph for you.

Beyond the basics of massive solar generation growth finally showing up in these regions, the post had a very surprising twist that I wasn’t expecting.

After years of continued decline, both PJM and MISO saw a sharp increase in coal generation. The increase in generation was not the result of a “dead coal bounce” from a retiring plant, nor was it driven by shifts in spot pricing, with only small changes year-over-year, as pricing was largely stable year-over-year. According to the EIA, April’s spot Central Appalachian sat at $3.25/MMBtu, 4% higher than 2024’s average of $3.12/MMBtu.

Instead, coal appears to be increasingly dispatched to fill in the gap left by gas generation pushed out by a combination of higher fuel prices and increased midday solar generation.

Catch that?! Natural gas generations is being squeezed in two directions.

The first is the simple one that is the heart of the story — solar is displacing gas. This is good! Burning gas produces emissions, and clean generation absorbing those parts of the energy system helps. These regions are just starting the journey that other parts of the world have taken that have seen large chunks of generation become carbon free.

The other direction of the squeeze is a national level story about natural gas. Global oil price declines have led to more and more rigs (in say Texas) to stop drilling, since their profits are a function of the global oil price. Yet those rigs whose main economic driver is oil also produce gas that they then sell off as a bit of a bonus. But when they shut down their oil fracking, the gas production also drops. This downward pressure in domestic gas production is accompanied by an increase in the export of natural gas as LNG to other parts of the world. A secret fact of life that Americans are mostly blissfully unaware of is that the rest of the world pays much more for gas than Americans do. Gas is troublesome to transport, and while there were Germans or Koreans who might pay more for gas than was on offer from Americans, gas producers in the USA had limited ability to get the gas to them. Unlike oil’s global market, gas was much more segmented. However, with the rise of LNG, we’re seeing a unification of prices, which for Americans means an increase from our cheap baseline.

So, back to MISO and PJM. Natural gas generators can’t compete with nature’s gift of solar at zero marginal cost, and the higher prices that they are facing in general is making a very different alternative rise from the grave: coal.

Despite massive boost in solar, emissions went up in both MISO and PJM because of coal’s return. This is something to keep an eye on, though I imagine that the growth of batteries in both markets should reverse this trend before it becomes something truly worrying.

In the end, while the energy transition is beginning to move, we have to remember that we’re in the middle of things, the “mid-transition.” Energy systems power civilization. They are Rube Goldberg machines that are always operating everywhere. Changing parts of their operation can both take awhile and not always follow our expectations.

But (I mean, if that wasn’t telegraphed…) I wanted to quibble with his post from Sunday as it relates to climate change.

How Things Work

Technology Does Not Solve Political Problems

If you are fortunate or unfortunate enough to spend time around people who work for big tech firms, you will find that their views on every issue tend to be rooted in the assumption that the tech industry itself will determine the future of said issue. So discussions about the economy become, “What will AI mean for the economy?” D…

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a year ago · 112 likes · 21 comments · Hamilton Nolan

His thesis is spot on, especially when directed at the broligarchy with its software and attention-plundering focus:

That’s because the tech industry is uncommonly consequential to all of us—and the techno-utopian vision prevalent within the industry, which assumes that the world’s problems are a series of technological problems to be solved, and that technological progress is the key driver of increased human well-being, can therefore lead to uncommonly bad outcomes for society, when it turns out to be a critically incomplete understanding of how things work.

And, the post is really a call for workers in those industries to unionize. Which would be a transformative win and change the way that these firms operated in a more serious fashion than it seems government (at least the US government) will be able to manage through regulation or other legal maneuvers.

But the title went big and it pushed me to think of the need for a few more caveats here. Agriculture, despite the recently departed Jim Scott’s Against the Grain perspective, helped humanity thrive. As did fire, and the wheel, and language, and writing. And medical science and vaccines. The post gestures at early technologies as being deformed for the purposes of the powerful, most obviously the possibility of weaponizing new inventions. Developments in metallurgy that take us from stone to iron to bronze to steel make far better plowshares but also allow for deadlier swords. Even chemical medical advances have been turned into chemical warfare and the possibility of bioweapons should not be ignored. On the whole, however, these advances have improved the human condition. Even if they lay bare some of the weaknesses of our civilization, which is the key point of Everything Is Tuberculosis by Jon Green. We’ve known how to cure this scourge for decades. And we’ve actually cured it in most of the developed world, yet we allow it to ravage populations of the poor to this day.

Changing Climate Politics

I’m on the record that the massive cost declines and efficiency improvements of solar, wind, and batteries have radically altered the politics of climate change. Essentially, by making clean energy more affordable, the cost of reducing most greenhouse gas emissions is much much lower than prior estimates. Some models even have the cost of an energy transition away from fossil fuels to cleaner sources saves money as an energy system, not even including all of the local and global benefits from reduced pollution. As such the political situation has shifted from a collective action game where we all agree to accept less in order to survive the climate crisis to a game of racing to transition and claim some slice of the industries of the future. Obviously the Trump administration doesn’t care at all about this shift even if it costs more for everyone and burns the planet, just like it doesn’t care about basic science and health.

To be clear though, and again returning to Hamilton’s post, these technologies do not solve the political problem of fighting climate change. They’ve simply changed the nature of the game away from the wicked problem conundrum that felt impossible to grapple with to something much more manageable. The politics and economics of transitioning all of our energy system isn’t easy, but it’s certainly easier to do so if you also don’t have to convince everyone to do so with a lot less of everything.

And I will agree with Hamilton that even in the climate world, there are some technologically-minded folks who think that innovation wipes away the need for politics, that the market will simply solve all of these problems without difficulty. I find these views naive. Perhaps in the rich world, market and state operations will smoothly reduce electricity emissions to near zero while electrifying more and more of society in ways that barely feel political to most citizens [I’m dubious, but it’s possible!]. But that would just get us into a situation like we have with TB, where other parts of the world are still suffering. Energy poverty is a real problem, as are emissions. We need to solve them all and doing so is going to take real political action and solidarity.

So, while it is true that technology doesn’t solve political problems, in the world of climate change, technological developments have made the problems that we have to solve much easier. And for that, I’m grateful.

As dedicated ChinaLab readers will know, I’m working on a book related to China’s climate journey. As part of my journey to create that book, I’m writing here and elsewhere to highlight pieces of information that the discourse is overlooking or dismissing. Today, two different essays that I’ve written this spring came out within hours of each other, both at publications I’ve long enjoyed.

The Wire China published my essay on China’s energy megabases: “The Looming Power of China’s Energy Megabases.” And Heatmap News published my critique of the Council on Foreign Relations climate realism initiative : “The Real Problem With ‘Climate Realism’.”

These are both, ultimately, good news stories in a world that so often is lacking in them. China’s megabases are huge projects that, while economically complicated and far from perfect (why is there coal?!!), are enabling China’s transformation into an electrostate (great FT report today). For the book, they represent one of the examples of China building big in ways that synergize. The climate realism essay is mostly critique, but I do turn to talk about what real opportunities are out there for climate realism and appropriate roles for the US. For the book, this previews the conclusion — addressing the so what question of how do we (the implicit non-China audience) participate in a transition that is going to be be led by China.

I’ll talk about both essays below, but you should click the links and read them.

Megabases

In sports commentary, there’s a premium on fine-grained analysis of the strategies of different teams, what kinds of schemes were used and why, what the thinking was behind them, the gamesmanship of it all. In the NBA, discussions can get so baroque that you have fans fighting over managerial decisions governed by details of the luxury tax rules and collective bargain agreement And then there’s another style of discourse (often used by players talking trash in the game) that just says “Scoreboard.” Analysts and coaches will sometimes have little left to utter other than “they just kept hitting shots.” But enough about my Indiana Pacers.

In the clean energy transition, there’s obviously a lot to be learned by detailed analyses of the pricing of renewables and intricacies of the policies that govern interconnection queues, but there’s also a sense in which the game is about clean electricity and deploying and generating more of it is the score. And China’s energy megabases are racking up the points. The visuals are great with solar. When built at a scale and against a contrasting background (like desert sand), the before and after images pop. They also allow for the possibility of branding because it’s 2025 and still inside of capitalism. Three Gorges Group (yes, the solar company is Three Gorges and yes that’s the world’s biggest dam and the world of Chinese conglomerates is a mess) took the trade that the name recognition from etching its name out of a blue ocean of panels would more than compensate for the small percentage loss in solar generation from doing so.

Wind, on the other hand, is harder to see in satellite imagery. A fact that energy people will know but is perhaps unfamiliar to others and helps explain why it makes sense to pair solar and wind together is that they have some contrasting generation profiles. That is, the sun — stop me if you’ve heard this — goes down at night and so solar generation flatlines. Wind, on the other hand and perhaps less obviously, tends to produce more generation at night, though this varies by location and season. So if you are building transmission infrastructure to take power from the desert to load centers on the Chinese coast, those lines will get more use with fewer batteries (more in a bit) if there’s a wind component. Of course, neither sun nor wind is truly “firm” power, and so the dirty secret of the megabases is that they are not truly “clean” but include new large coal plants. The Kubuqi Desert Ordos Central-North Renewable Energy Base (鄂尔多斯中北部新能源基地) that is the base I profile has planned 8 GW of solar, 4 GW of wind, and 4 GW of coal. Given that China’s coal fleet only operates about half the time, this is a weird, wasteful investment. Sadly, the information about the project seems to point to their already being offtakes (though I suppose it could be hopecasting by the firms):

The supporting coal-fired power project is planned to build 4 1 million kilowatt indirect air-cooled high-efficiency ultra-supercritical coal-fired power generation units, with an annual utilization of about 4,300 hours and an annual grid-connected electricity of about 16.5 billion kilowatt-hours. It is planned that all units will be connected to the grid for power generation in 2028.

This is not what coal should be transitioning to in the Chinese power mix. Coal should increasingly shift to the kind of “peaker plant” model to add power when high demand can’t be met by clean sources or when clean variable power is low.

The only storage discussed in the plans, sadly and again weirdly, is molten salts: “A 2X300 megawatt high-temperature molten salt energy storage system will be built on site simultaneously.” There’s also discussion of 200 MW solar thermal facility. But no batteries. It’ll get there, but apparently not yet. There are all manner of experiments with V2G — vehicle to grid — in China, so the idea of figuring out the pricing of stationary batteries in the land of the battery kings just makes too much sense to ignore.

But in the end, this is a good thing. Chinese firms have built massive capacity to turn sand into clean electricity. They should run those factories, and everyone that can should deploy as much solar as possible as soon as possible to mitigate climate change. China’s energy megabases are a huge part of that reality.

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They also matter symbolically as a testament to China’s ability to build and innovate. In this sense, they are a picture of Abundance, for better and worse. But that book merely whiffs on China, just spending a few pages at the end noting that China is a real place that has lots of operating factories and ample housing. It isn’t wrong, just thin. The real mischaracterization of China happens in the Climate Realism Initiative.

Real Climate Realism

As I said on bluesky, the dual reality of Trump and climate crisis breaks people’s brains. And this can be seen in the CFR Climate Realism Initiative. Launched just about a month ago, this is clearly an attempt by CFR and its funders to find some way to frame climate action for a MAGA crowd. The idea is messy and wrong, and in so is hard to write about. Jillian Goodman did a great job editing the piece for Heatmap and so please do read it. Catherine Fraser also had a critique of the initiative here.

The essay relies on a DC blob notion of China as an enemy to do the heavy lifting. It argues China’s emissions are like missiles exploding in the US, and we need to get them to stop. The supposed lever to move China in this direction is tariffs, but Trump’s powder on that score is not dry.1 The initiative flounders because it wants to (1) lead the world and (2) not do anything at all about American emissions. It’s an absolute impossibility that America the petrostate is going to lead the world on climate if we … don’t do anything to mitigate climate change ourselves.

There’s a lot going on in the essay, but these might be the best lines:

The initiatives proposed in the Climate Realism launch are the initiatives of giving up. Investing in resilience and adaptation is needed in any scenario, but tying this spending on adaptation to Trumpian notions of protecting our borders reeks of discredited lifeboat ethics, which only cares to save ourselves and leaves others to suffer for our sins. And while supporting next-generation technologies is an appropriate piece of the policy puzzle, they should be like the broccoli at a steakhouse: off to the side and mostly superfluous compared with the meat and potatoes of deployment and mitigation to decarbonize today.

Again, I hope that solid state batteries are great and work. The NYT just profiled Factorial Energy, and I certainly hope that those plucky Cornell grads (from China) can make it work with their partner, a small German auto start-up, Mercedes-Benz. But even that gauzy profile suggested 2028 at the earliest to see it in any kind of commerical lineup. QuantumScape, another US solid state battery company, does not even name its “prospective launch partner” and expects to lose over $250 million in 2025. Whereas BYD and CATL are making batteries for cars that people want to buy today and have done so for years already.

The US should try to bring in world leaders in EV and battery manufacturing to America, even if those firms happen to be Chinese. Joint venture agreements and others that lead to tech transfer will happen and the kind of innovation that happens by building at scale amidst competition will take place.

Jonas Nahm and I wrote about how the US should try to figure out its part to play in a world where China’s clean tech is winning the future last month in Foreign Policy. I expanded on that idea in my original draft for Heatmap.

An alternative vision is possible. The American economy is services based. We grow as many crops as ever and make lots of stuff in factories, but what overwhelmingly employs Americans is providing services to our fellow humans (including those beyond our borders: entertaining Brazilians and South Koreans and Nigerians with A Minecraft Movie, etc). For all of the fantasies of a white guy with a hard hat and a return to the 1950s, being rich enough to have a service based economy is a good thing. Americans and American firms will inevitably make some of the hardware components of the energy transition, but the opportunities that play to our strengths are mostly on the software side.

What does the software and financing future lead to? More to come on that in future posts.

Also, I want to add a caveat to the dismissive note that I gave on the rare earth ban. While the actual amount of stuff and money is very very small, if firms (and perhaps governments) don’t stockpile and aren’t careful, then they could get caught flatfooted if China completely bans exports. The major concern is if supplies fall to zero then major processes that require tiny amounts of rare earths (like Yttria and turbine construction) could be completely halted with serious fallout. Thanks to Alex Turnbull for opening my eyes to this possibility.

In the end, figuring out where China is headed matters because it’s the centerpiece of the climate crisis. It is the emitter and the principal source of solutions. But that doesn’t mean that we’re all spectators to some drama that’s happening elsewhere. Everyone needs to do our part and fulfill our roles to mitigate and adapt as best we can.

Writing can be lonely, but it’s great to know that there are people out there interested in where we go from here, and how we do it together.

In the first post of what is promised to be two parts at his Chartbook, the eminent historian and political commentator, goes after an essay written by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor on “End Time Fascism.” I’ll leave to others to defend Klein and Taylor, though I’ll say that I shared the essay with others and think it is a well-argued piece that pulls out an important strain of thinking from the muck of the right-wing fever swamp. I’m not particularly interested in the question of whether this version of fascism is “even bleaker than the original,” which seemed to gall Tooze (a scholar of the 20th century’s fascism).

It’s the characterization of Trump and Democrats and the future that I find so strange. Tooze:

Not only is the historical comparison far-fetched. But for progressives to focus their attention on that maniacal strain of the current far-right is to my mind an evasion of the rather more unsettling fact that Trumpism as a whole may have the attraction that it does not because it promises the “end times”, but because compared to the actually existing alternative in the USA today, the Democrats, it is actually more willing to talk about the future and to do so in bold and bright terms.

The argument that Tooze puts forward is that the tariffs and trade policy is “clearly intended to deliver on all three dimensions of a politics of the future,” whereas Democrats aren’t. This is shocking to Democrats who, apparently, are unwilling to talk about the future. Which feels weird since, I don’t know, it feels like we’ve had a cornucopia of such discourse recently, just lots and lots of it.

And yes, as my colleague Henry Farrell has pointed out, these discussions shouldn’t be over because we need usable futures.

Programmable Mutter

We need usable futures

Last Thursday, Combinations (a publication of the RadicalxChange foundation), published a review essay that I wrote on Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. I’m not going to repeat here what I say there; it’s available for free, so if you want to read it…

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a year ago · 26 likes · 12 comments · Henry Farrell

But the idea that Democrats aren’t interested in talking about the future is a bit odd. Indeed, Klein and Taylor themselves are helpful thinkers about utopias and how to achieve them.

What seems to be exciting for Tooze in Trump’s rhetoric is that in the midst of all kinds of noise about trade policy, he sees a signal call to sacrifice.

what is truly original about the Trump-Vance project is that it not only rejects the neoliberal past and summons the spirit of blue collar America, it does so with a rhetoric of sacrifice. For the first time we have an American politics that actually talks about getting by with less. Of course it is not by accident that this new rhetoric of self-sufficiency is overtly gendered. It is dolls, and washing-machines, Chinese-made household goods that are the target. The gendered domestic order is affirmed at the same time as the proper masculinity of industrial work is affirmed.

The future that is being depicted is one of a nonexistent past where men were men, workers wore hard hats, women were women (and everyone was white, or quiet). To be clear, there’s no evidence that Tooze is defecting to Trumpism. This isn’t a future that he wants or thinks is good. But it is a future that he sees being articulated.

I’m much more dubious. The messaging around the tariffs has been anything but coherent. I don’t see how one can read this story about how Bessent and Lutnick took advantage of Navarro being out of the room to get Trump to pause the tariffs as anything other than the workings of an uncertainty engine.

Which makes this sentence from Tooze stand out: “But when push comes to shove, Trump and his spokespeople do not flinch.” A generous reader may say this refers solely and simply to the idea that Trump and Trumpians acknowledge that their trade agenda might cause some pain before things get better.

And, indeed, Trump does not always flinch. Trump does not flinch when he grabs a woman by the pussy, when he sends hundreds to gulags abroad without due process, and when he unleashes Russ Vought to rip the copper wiring out of the American administrative state.

But Trump has flinched on trade policy in a dozen different ways since April 2, and even before when monthly pauses to Mexico and Canada tariffs became a joke before the administration had even been in office for two months.

More than this, regardless from an individual line of Trumpian rhetoric, everything about his presentation oozes a very different message: that his child will still get dolls, pencils, and memecoin billions. He’ll still get a gilt Oval Office, and — and this is the seductive part for oh so many a grifter — if you’re close to him or the Right kind of American, you’ll get everything you want too.

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Tooze continues:

The embarrassment for advocates of the Green New Deal and Bidenomics is that in pursuit of their visions of the future, Trump’s national economic strategists are far bolder in what they demand of the American public than their opponents in the Democratic party ever were. Trump’s trade policy is, in fact, what Green New Deal advocates never dared to be: A direct challenge to prevailing norms of American consumerism in the name of a better future.

This is too much. What Trump demands of the public is obedience. There is no discussion nor debate. There is no transparency. There is only graft (for himself, relations, and insiders) and obedience (for everyone else).

Robinson Meyer at Heatmap has a series of shitposts about Degrowth Donald, that is, that Trump’s actions are actually the kinds of policies that a degrowther might put forward in order to slow down the economy and mitigate climate change despite Trump’s denialism and downplaying of the climate crisis. But a couple of random ramblings about dolls and pencils does not make Trump an avatar for challenging American consumerism.

Perhaps this is too harsh. Perhaps the point of Tooze’s piece is somehow not its literal text but instead an implied subtext that complains about Democrats falling into a popularism that is afraid of telling the public anything that doesn’t poll well and that on many issues, perhaps especially on climate change, this is not enough. I suppose such a reading is possible and perhaps even plausible. It might even be close to an argument that I could imagine supporting: not popularism nor deliverism but leadership.

But right now, what we have in front of us in the White House and OMB and DOGE and the Penatgon is a whirlwind flinging shit everywhere, stealing the seed corn of American prosperity to take just a bit bigger bite at the tax cut apple before everything falls apart. The real work, the real sacrifice, is to fight him.