Thank you for the link, Felix.
but I beg to disagree with your interpretation of the article. It's
lacking the dimensions of history and finance which the writers of
phenomalworld always keep in mind. Instead, you narrowly focus on a
symptom (post-carbon) and blur out the rest of the picture.
Just for the facts: the US is by no means the largest exporter of fossil
fuels (oil, gas, coal).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_exporters
Only for gas it is now leading, and we all know how it managed to get
into that position by coercing the Europeans and disrupting Russians
exports.
Adding the dimensions of finance and history the picture would lead to a
different diagnosis - approximately:
After having turned the West's democracies and former
colonial/neoliberal powers into oligarchies, their financial regime did
no longer rest on R&D and progress but on rent extraction. Progress came
to a standstill.
China took the decision to go for its own version cadre-communist
techno-accelerationism. The result of these decisions is what you
perceive as the centre of the competition (fossil vs electro). Seen from
a larger historical perspective, this is only one the fields where
rent-extracting oligarchies of the West clash with the BRICS souvereign
states that refuse to bow to the declining hegemon. Which leaves western
oligarchy (if they want to preserve their wealth resting on a financial
Ponzi scheme) with no other option than war and "imperial gangsterism" -
as McKenzie and Sahay have pointed out in an earlier text:
https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/polycrisis-2025/
Best
Stefan
Am 01.09.25 um 09:54 schrieb Felix Stalder via nettime-l:
This is one of the best articles on geopolitics that I've read in a long
time, not the least because it puts BRICS at the center, rather than the
US.
https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/brics-in-2025/
The basic argument is that the competition between China and the US is
now also a competition between two techno-political paradigms, one based
on (green) electricity and one based on fossil fuels, with China being
the largest producer of green energy (by far), while the US as become
the largest exporter of fossil fuels.
And these are really two paradigms from which very different industrial
policies, geopolitics, eco-politics, and even cultures (think
petromasculinity) flow.
There is now a fierce geopolitical competition between these two
paradigms, and the US has relatively little to offer, so it has to
revert to brute force to keep other countries in line. This works best
with allies (think Europe promising to buy LNG and scrapping tariffs on
US monster cars). Also domestically, the US uses brute-force to keep
fossil fuels competitive, cancelling almost finished green energy
installations and gutting the EPA to offload more of the costs to public.
On the other hand, the China model (and cheap Chinese exports), allow
countries like Pakistan to leap-frog in terms of energy production,
installing 17GW of solar capacity in 2024 in a largely bottom-up process
(as a comparison, Germany installed about 20GW).
As they write:
"China’s package of automation, digitalization, and electrification
offers firms and nations not just carbon-reduction but also—more
persuasively—productivity, efficiency, and energy sovereignty. The
material basis of the global production, consumption and information
systems are being remade. One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to think that
will imply a radical transformation in global politics."
They summarize this shift as "Diversify, dedollarize, decarbonize".
And, interestingly, AI plays an important, but somewhat subordinate
role, as part of a new industrial infrastructure, which underpins the
electrification and digitization in all its aspects. No AGI necessary.
The article even contains an update of Carlotta Perez famous chart on
techno-economic paradigms, with the IT/software paradigm in decline.
I came across this article via Paris Marx's Tech Won't Save US podcasts,
where the two authors. Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay, were interviewed.
https://techwontsave.us/
episode/291_how_chinas_renewable_push_upends_geopolitics_w_kate_mackenzie__tim_sahay
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