Climate

To ensure that global demand for fossil fuels remains buoyant, the United States is leveraging the advantages of incumbency. Unlike the Green Entente, which must build an entirely new energy production, distribution, and consumption infrastructure from scratch, the Axis of Petrostates is playing infrastructural defense—a strategically easier position.

Crazy to read this as the US shuts down the Straight of Hormuz and decimates the O&G infrastructure of the Gulf States in a matter of weeks.

According to the International Energy Agency, China controls more than 90 percent of global processing of rare earths and 94 percent of the production of permanent magnets (essential for electric vehicle motors and wind turbines); its share in manufacturing solar panels exceeds 80 percent; and it produces more than 70 percent of all EV batteries and also accounts for over 70 percent of global EV production.

I do have to wonder how much of this is the result of geological good fortune and how much is merely the fruits of geological discovery. Is there an unusual load of easily extraditable minerals in Chinese sovereign territory, or is China the only country doing exploration and mining at scale?

The trouble, of course, is that joining this bloc isn’t a simple trade agreement; it effectively means entering a hierarchical system led by Beijing. Because China has secured a massive (perhaps even insurmountable) lead in both green power generation and transport systems, any country seeking to go green is essentially forced to adopt Chinese hardware and standards. From this perspective, the Green Entente could represent the emergence of what Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann have labeled the “Climate Leviathan”: a global system where the climate emergency is used as a pretext for a new form of command-and-control dominance, in which tribute is paid in technological dependency and the risk of political blackmail at the hands of what is also a deeply illiberal and nationalistic regime in Beijing.

Again, so much of this seems to be predicated on the notion that China has some kind of intrinsic advantage, when it seems as though they're out ahead merely because they're the only country with a public policy focused on a green domestic industrial output.

Where European countries do embrace alternative energy strategies (France's nuclear program, UK wind farms, Spanish HSR) they seem more than capable of matching Chinese productivity. But as these efforts are confined to specific regions and decoupled from a continent-wide long-term economic strategy, the real "Climate Leviathan" does not appear to be China specifically but any continent-spanning economic policy generally speaking.

That would appear to be the real threat posed by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. The fossil fuel industry nations are fundamentally aligned on their economic goals in a way that rivals the Chinese superstate. What the article describes as "command-and-control domination" is merely coordination and cooperation between public policymakers and private stakeholders.

Control over solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, EV supply chains, and rare-earth processing gives Beijing an infrastructural chokehold over any nation seeking to modernize its energy metabolism

That's simply not true. Not in the way the Saudis can maintain a chokehold on cheap light sweet crude, anyway. "Rare" earths aren't that rare. Technology is highly fungible. The geography isn't what's at play with green energy. And the marginal yield on cutting edge imported green technology doesn't justify refusing to manufacture lower-end domestic infrastructure.

Nothing China produces is beyond the reach of the European (or African or South American) economies, should they be willing to invest capital and labor in their development.

But Europe has positioned itself as a consumer finance economy first and foremost. Until they change course on that front, they're necessarily going to be locked into a choice of Chinese Coke or US/Saudi/Russian Pepsi.