Re: <nettime> electro- vs petro-state

[Felix Stalder via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

On 9/1/25 21:21, Brian Holmes via nettime-l wrote:
> Today, the ugly spectacle of Trump breaking all the conventions of 
> liberal multilateralism, and thereby apparently destroying the 
> prospects of "inter-imperialist cooperation," might make you believe 
> that it's now a done deal. No one can hold back the tide of history. 
> The Western alliance has broken down and substantial decolonization 
> of the Global South has begun. Hegemony has already shifted to the 
> East.
>
> It sounds rosy under those lights, but it's far from the case. This 
> is a major crisis, and like all such crises, it unfolds in the dark, 
> between players of highly questionable motivations, and largely by 
> sheer accident, under the pressures of passion and necessity. We are 
> at the outset of a protracted struggle in which anything can happen.


The thing that clearly comes into view fro this article is that the
energy transition is driven by two factors. One is top down geopolitics;
the other is bottom-up demand for reliable, cheap energy that can be
installed locally.

The latter is the story of Pakistan, as far as I understand. There it's
not government policy, but the pressure of fluctuating prices, poor
infrastructure, and the availability of an actionable alternative. And
the scale of that is massive and massively parallel. Sierra Leone
imported as many solar panels from China in one year that, if all
installed, will increase the energy production by 61%. In one year.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-first-evidence-of-a-take-
off-in-solar-in-africa

If there is government policy at work, things can go really quickly.
Uruguay is the case in point here. It turned from an importer of fossil
fuels to an exporter of clean energy in less than two decades.

https://earth.org/the-uruguay-way-achieving-energy-sovereignty-in-the-
developing-world

But geopolitics is an ugly business, and environmental concerns play a
secondary role. China still is the largest emitter of green house cases
and will not go off coal anytime soon. So, from a climate change
perspective, it's woefully insufficient.

But the interesting thing is to see how diverse motivations and agendas
are beginning to coalesce and become mutually reinforcing. That's what
paradigms are all about.


On 9/1/25 12:04, Petter Ericson wrote:

> Briefly, while you can certainly build an electric generator and 
> basic semiconductors using elements and with processes that are 
> widely available, for high-power and high-efficiency electrical 
> components, there is a need for REE, and while REE are widely spread 
> in the earth's crust (despite the name) the actual _mining_ and 
> especially _processing_ of REE is highly concentrated in China.

Yes, there are new dependencies here, and I'm sure the Chinese will do
everything they can to preserve them. In terms of energy infrastructure,
once the solar panels are up and running, the technology exporter has
relatively little control anymore. Should they enact a boycott further
down the line, the lights would not go out. Whereas with fossil
fuels, just the threat of a boycott or some accidental interruption can
ruin an entire economy.

I think this is what real hegemony is on a geopolitical level. The
hegemon can offer tangible benefits to allied, if subordinate,
countries. This is how the US brought Western Europe and Japan into its
fold after WWII.

And the US increasingly cannot do that anymore, and revert, as Stefan
Heidenreich pointed out, to "imperial gangsterism".


On 9/4/25 11:04, André Rebentisch via nettime-l wrote:
> It is further important to look at the professional background of 
> policy developers in different countries, aka engineers vs. lawyers.

That's the topic of a a new book by Dan Wang. BREAKNECK: China’s Quest
to Engineer the Future.

The main idea is this:

> China is an engineering state, which treats construction projects 
> and technological primacy as the solution to all of its problems, 
> whereas the United States is a lawyerly society, obsessed with 
> protecting wealth by making rules rather than producing material 
> goods.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/china-america-tariffs-
trump-economy/683895/

The idea is that in China, things get done, even if a few people get
crushed, while in the US, nothing gets done because too many people can
block too many on procedural grounds. I'm not sure about this. Sounds
more like Europe than the US.


But there is another aspect of the book that is relevant to this discussion:

> The biggest lesson I took from Breakneck was not about China, or the 
> U.S., but the importance of “process knowledge.” That is not a 
> concept that features much in the existing debates about trans- 
> Pacific geopolitics, nor discussions about what America ought do to 
> revitalize its economy. Dan makes a very strong case that it should.


https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/process-knowledge-is-crucial-to-
economic

Process knowledge means an ecology of knowledge that is bigger than one
firm, but brings together the full range of expertise from research to
manufacturing, across the multiple components necessary to create a
complex product. But focusing on services alone, a crucial part of that
knowledge ecology disappeared.

That certainly set up an interesting contrast between Silicon Valley and
Shenzhen, and points to deeper problems with industrial policies, or,
perhaps more narrowly, to the strategic risks inherent in the neoliberal
bet of global outsourcing.

If you take the extended diagram of Perez's techno-economic paradigms
from the original article, them you see, the IT paradigm, bits over
atoms, with finance (bits) as the key sector of the economy, which
inspired this industrial policy, is waning.


































--
| |||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |
| |||||||||| https://tldr.nettime.org/@festal |
| for secure communication, please use signal |

--
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org