Adam Tooze Electrostates Petrostates And The New Cold War

TITLE: Adam Tooze: Electrostates, Petrostates and the New Cold War CHANNEL: London Review of Books (LRB) DATE: 2026-01-16 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Uh what a privilege it is to be here and I’m so glad I I have to say being the inaugural speaker of the LRB series my greatest fear was that you know we’d have 20 lovely friends and and I am really utterly delighted to see that this journal which is so important to so many of us all over the world as a site for I actually set myself this summer to going back I’m sure everyone in the room has this problem of like back issues you haven’t read last year and it is a completely dizzying experience uh to go back over the journal. So um in fact so much so that until I have finished this book which is not called any of those things um I’ve actually declared a moratorium on any further LLB reading until I’m done um because it is such an engrossing fascinating privilege to be uh a reader uh let alone a contributor and I’m utterly delighted that we’ve had such a good launch for this evening. So, thank you so much for for showing up for for for the LB uh tonight. I I have a I have a I have a terribly bombastic title uh to fill out this evening and um that isn’t really the mood of of what I have to say at all to be honest. I mean, it’s wide ranging in all of those things, but um like anyone else who I think is seriously engaged in trying to make sense of the present right now, I’m at why my wit’s end and um clinging on uh by the skin of my teeth. It feels like uh most days and and that I think is going to be the theme of tonight’s tonight’s uh talk. Um, I I I’m struggling to make sense of the panorama that’s unfolding around us, and I want to let you in on some thinking and be delighted to hear um your reactions. Um, and I want to start with a with a moment of bewilderment. Um this summer on an extremely hot day in uh Chungdu, the the capital of Sichuan province in China, megalopouloolis of 20 million people standing by a street corner. I was going to see the uh people’s park which has the monument to the railway protection uprising that was the beginning of the Republican revolution in China in 1911. And I was standing by the side of this multi-lane highway. Um, and it was a, you know, the pedestrian light was on red. And I got lost in my phone for a while and was looking at the map. And then I looked up and I realized that for about 30 seconds, maybe a hundred vehicles had gone past me and I had not noticed the movement of a single vehicle. It was like one of those silent discos. There were all these cars moving and I hadn’t heard a single thing because every single one of them was electric and the only sound any of them was making was tire noise. And you know I spend my life thinking about electricity, the energy transition right now. But that was a kind of visceral moment of realizing ah this is maybe what the future looks like when a street of cars this densely packed. This isn’t actually the street. And if you know your cars, you’ll know they weren’t these ones because these are all internal combustion. Um, but an entire wedge of cars and motorbikes had moved in front of me and had left me kind of lost. I hadn’t noticed it had happened. It was quite it was a very disconcerting experience. And I want to start with that sense of disconcertedness because because I I swear to God that I actually thought to myself, are you experiencing a moment of midtransition? I don’t know why this thought came into my head, but that’s literally what came into my head. This was a fashionable idea in energy studies circles back from 2021. And it describes the condition of being in the complex period of change between two more stable states more commonly used in discussions about energy systems, gender transitions and career changes. And I kind of felt as though I was slightly in the middle of this of this process. uh you can can lay it out and and it is having that effect on people. Um as you may know I’m a little bit of a petrol head and for those of us who are the advent of this world in which hundreds of vehicles will move entirely silently is in fact profoundly disconcerting. It removes something from our lives that we’re deeply attached to. So much so that the producers of electric vehicles worldwide are adding fake engine noises produced electronically to the vehicles. And my favorite motor vehicle YouTuber recently did a report on the fact that Yamaha who were in the tuning forks business. So these people have history in musical instruments have created a mock internal combustion engine on which the valves do not actually close. So the only function of this electrically driven engine is to generate sounds and vibrations. Why would you want the vibrations? Because it is specifically designed for straddled vehicles. In other words, you want the feeling of engine vibrating between your thighs. This is the single purpose of this Yamaha patent, which is a real thing. I’m not kidding. This is, I think, what we mean by the mid-transition phenomenon. And then I re-entered left the world, the blessed world of the of the great firewall behind me and re-entered uh the the reality of the west and found this same story being told not in terms of the language of the mid-transition but in a more dichotomized way in terms in the terms that frame my lecture this evening. not a story about a common journey that we’re on from one place to another by way of this confusing period of the mid-transition but one of dichotoies of electrostates on the one hand and their others. The electrostate to just sort of cut a long story short is a story not just about electrification per se but about the degree to which a society consumes its energy in electrical form. However that electricity is generated as we know for the climate for climate stabilization our only hope is to move as much as possible to electricity and that then is something that we can make clean. In fact, the brilliant British think tank Ember, one of the organizations I’ll come back to at the end, has mapped this helpfully onto two dimensions, which explains for us on the one hand, as it were, the degree of electrification that’s changed since 2010 along the bottom, which is what I was experiencing in Chundu, and then the greening of the electricity sources along the vertical axis, which is where you’ll find the United States as a kind of middling lagard and the the European uh champions of the green transition at the top but not crucially making this move along the horizontal axis towards deeper electrification the thing that I had uh been so takenback by in Changdu and this is hardening now as an account and it’s being hardened by the fact that the electro state is being juxtaposed quite systematically in a literature which has emerged after and this is significant I think the Biden administration left office, people feel much freer, I think, to speak their minds because we’re less encumbered by our desire to be polite about our friends in Washington trying to make the world a better place. Um, and so we now speak quite openly about a contrast between the United States as a pro state and China as the epitome of an emerging new order. All of this, of course, framed even more dizzyingly by the prospect of an emerging new uh cold war. And this is from the point of view of anyone who was committed, as I’m going to say much more about this in a minute, to the project of a democratic progressive green energy politics, a profoundly perplexing, disturbing, dismaying reversal of the front. And it becomes even worse if you believe the latest crop of liberal big think policy books. If you dig into not just the question of electro versus pro, but the issue of the state. Because contrasting the United States as a putitive pro state with its commitment to fracking and the power of the fossil fuel lobby with China, an emergent electro state, presumes that at least they have in common that they have a state. And the central question of American policy discourse in the current moment is to I think ask the question of what that is whether that is true and if so in what form at least if you took um the policy bestsellers of this year abundance by Ezra Klene and Derek Thompson and Dan Wang’s breakneck at face value the question that both of them are posing is what kind of a state apparatus what mode of government is in fact at America’s disposal at all. And you can ramify out from that a kind of mind map of a series of questions which are going to loosely frame what I have to say for the rest of this evening. Because if we start from the question of electrostate versus prostate, there is of course then the question of green versus dirty. Are we in the middle of an unevened and combined transition? Or are we at the point of a great new cold war divide? So the question of whether or not we’re on a trajectory as opposed to whether or not we’re in fact at a point of bifocation. There is the question of what kind of state. But then behind that there is the question of what kind of society is it that informs the sorts of governance that are on display in the United States and China right now. And as you may know from Dan Wang’s account, um the contrast is between a world uh of governance organized around engineering and a world of governance organized uh by by by lawyers. uh a world of good abundance um uh at least uh to be delivered by a kind of technocratic elite and the world of self-obstruction uh as Klene and Thompson describe Ameris condition um in the present but there are I think also a variety of even deeper associations that are being organized in this juosition of the electrostate and the pro state the engineering society and the loyalist society. There is a question about the future and the future past. There is a question about uh American decline. And there is ultimately a question of how we situate the current moment within broader narratives of historical development. Can we any longer see the future a future or is the defining fact of our situation its rupturing of familiar narratives into incoherence or what I’ve called poly crisis and the phenomenon of hyper agency of exaggerated and massive uh moves towards land grabs on the future. Now, whenever I start running this line, which is one that you will be familiar with from me if you know any of my recent work, people always push back. And the question they ask is, well, Adam, is this really is this Adam, is this really new? Is this diagnosis that you’re making of a kind of peculiar type of incoherence really a novel state at all? I mean, if you remember uh social theory uh going back to the 1980s, you might ask, why are we surprised about the situation that we’ve ended up with? Didn’t we, if not predict, then at least map out uh the coordinates of this confusing world um which you are now underlining um uh as uh as strongly as you are. Didn’t we have after all from the 1980s onwards a theory of a first modernity turning into something more complex, something more self-questing, a zone a a second modernity that would give rise to a subpolitics of expert disputation and struggles precisely of the type which uh Klene and Thompson are now calling out as the origin of America’s paralysis. Didn’t we systematically decompose the old building blocks of a largecale social science into models of actors and networks? Didn’t we treat from the 2000 onwards even the sacred ground of the market as an ultimately malleable a malleable space subject to an extraordinary proliferation of different modes of of organization? Didn’t we, buring down into the forces of production, the layers of materiality, uh, pose those same questions about historical alternatives? Uh, and didn’t we insist forcibly on the need to tear open simple industrial determinisms that would have in the current moment allowed us to confidently say, “Here is the future. The one best way is green.” And it looks like the sort of scene that I was so bedazzled by and confused by in Chungdu. Didn’t we already in the early 90s understand that this was going to turn our simple stories of progress from the past into the future by way of a cutting edge of modernity? Didn’t we understand that those narratives were going to be at least uh questioned if not fundamentally thrown onto the scrap heap? And were we not already at that point uh confronting the possibility that even if we could agree on the mere facts, then the imploment to which history might be subjected was in fact open contingent framed perhaps by a set of structural necessities that linguists and literary theorists could detect. But then within the margins of this grid of possibilities, the options for a romantic narrative, of the struggle of good versus evil, for a positive outcome, the tragic logic of necessity, the comedic logic, this is one that’s going to play quite a role in uh what I have to say this evening. The comedy of errors that ultimately ends in a good place. And finally, of course, the acid of satire. Didn’t we already understand um that those were opening up a play of options that rendered any self-confident commitment to a story of progress um uh vain. And it wasn’t for nothing after all that in the 1980s in a way that was so inspiring to so many others uh that Stuart Hall mobilized his crucial concept of the conjuncture to describe precisely the kind of complex totality that I’m trying to put a pin in this evening. And didn’t we in a kind of low-key way expect this mess that was already charted in so many ways to in the manner of a liberal comedy to work its way through um by way perhaps of something you might refer to as the mid-transition to some kind of resolution? Well, my answer I think would be well yes we did. Um this is certainly what we anticipated and in fact if you want to look for a place which in the current moment is truly brokenhearted. um it is the location, it is the zone, it is the region, it is the continent where a politics essentially derived in fundamental elements from the building blocks that I’ve just sketched out was in fact put into action in a way and that is the laboratory of governance and politics that has been Europe since the 1980s and perhaps nowhere more so than the Federal Republic of Germany. Sable and Zitellin not uh writing about the endless possibilities of uh uh industrial production but writing about governance in Europe spoke in 2008 about what they called a Cambrian explosion of new types of governance that were unfolding on the continent of Europe in Europe. I think one could really see the outlines of a kind of green modernization politics uh ranging from devices like feedin tariffs to the promotion of new green energy uh resources to the neoliberal devices of carbon trading uh played out and it had real effects. These are the Ireina numbers on the installation of renewable energy. And it’s really worth looking at the European column here to see the way in which Europe through the early 2010s utterly dominated uh the story the story of the formation of a new politics of green energy. This was a place where this politics of the of the that was laid out in theoretical terms that was sketched the possibility of an alternative better in its own terms uh greener uh political economy was actually made real and it culminated in 2019 in the EU’s green deal far larger in its extent in relation to the European economy than say the inflation reduction act of the Biden administration a few years later and not for nothing um in the fall of 2020 when Xi Jinping made his surprise announcement to the United Nations General Assembly of the truly decisive turn of Chinese policy towards decarbonization there. Not by accident when you look deep into the PowerPoint slides that accompanied Xi Jinping’s announcement that were prepared by a ramified team of Chinese climate experts centered at Shing Hua University. the citation of the green deal by the Chinese uh was direct. So this is literally I don’t know maybe it’s PowerPoint that generates this particular image. Um but this is the highest compliment that you can be paid I think in modern technocracy that is the imitation of the Chinese uh at Shinua in October 2020. an explicit acknowledgement of the indebtedness of China’s vision of a comprehensive uh uh decarbonization as a social economic project to the European lead. And after all of that, after that buildup, look at Europe now. And it’s really that shocking contrast that for me is the starting point of my confusion. It’s precisely because something like a coherent vision of new uh modernizing reform governments was so clearly mobilized in Europe by this point that the current situation is as drastic and as devastating as uh uh it is. Europe drove decarbonization of power supply but did not drive electrification. They’re on the top left hand side above the Americans, but not on the top right hand side where the Chinese are to be found. The Germans and Italians shut down nuclear as an essential part of their politics of green modernization, but they agonizingly extended the protection for the coal sectors. They created a market for power supply through feed and tariffs, then surrendered that market to the Chinese, and then slapped on protectionism. Anyway, they introduced the carbon pricing mechanism, but took almost 15 years to make it work. It now does work. Carbon prices in Europe are at very significant levels, sometimes above a hundred euros per ton. But they were unprepared for the shock of delivering that particular price signal. Rather than focusing on new energy models, European politics and interest groups converged on the diesel and the European car industry was milked as a source of dividends for its oligarchic investors and they now complain about Chinese comp competition and demand protectionism. The Europeans were clearly at odds with both Russia and the US and yet did nothing to develop strategic autonomy with regard to either of them. Now I’m of course I’m not saying that the theorists of the 1980s and 1990s were responsible for this. They did not play the role of the European economists of the period who do share a measure of blame for the Eurozone crisis and the truly catastrophic and widely underestimated impact that that had on renewable investment in Europe. So on the left hand side the ramp up you see the formation period of this what I’m calling this new synthesis of green governance in Europe through to the maximum level of investment in 2011 at $131 billion. And then you see in the wake of the Eurozone crisis which of course dramatically affected southern Europe where unsurprisingly the investment in solar was particularly dramatic. um as that crisis hits under the sign of austerity the European the European push collapses and this is the moment of China’s this is the moment of China’s overtaking but what I think can be fairly said of that group of social theorists who in some sense provided a roadmap for this shall we say partially successful partly abortive project of green modernization what can be fairly said about them I I think is that they underestimated the question of power. They did that at home in the sense that they often failed to develop coherent theories of how the opposed interest groups might be bulldozed out of the way and they also failed to elaborate a global geopolitics of green modernization. Now I’m for one don’t think that that necessarily follows from the kind of theoretical constructions that were offered by the range of people that I alluded to a minute ago. or respect for one for instance tried after a 911 to pivot to an understanding of a global risk society but anyone who has waded through those books knows what thin rule they are if you read David Edertton with his military history hat on he is of course the great analyst of the warfare state um but how do we connect that to a wider theorization of technology I think this remains a question that is left begging. Broadly speaking, it seems to me that that group of European theorists of green modernity were in a sense unaware of the geopolitical frame that sat so comfortably around them and allowed them to relatively easily ignore the questions which are now so painfully inescapable. And it would of course all have been far better if the United States had in fact been a reliable ally in the project of green modernization. And there was no on the face of it any reason to doubt that America might be. After all, it was in the United States from the late 1960s onwards culminating with the extraordinary demonstration in the spring of 1970 that was Earth Day. It was in the United States that the model of modern environmentalism was first forged. It was the United States that first delivered the idea of feedin tariffs which the Germans then became famous for that allowed small-cale producers of renewable energy to join the grid. It was the United States that pushed the model of emissions trading. It was the United States that um created the market for the Prius. Uh this is the global sale of Priuses and I well remember visiting the United States at the height of the Iraq war and discovering the way in which this um appetizing small Japanese car had become a symbol of resistance in Bush’s America to the oil wars of uh the era. It is that Californian and American market that sustains the first new energy vehicle. And of course it is the United States also that is the home we have to say it of Tesla and the first proof of concept of a fully uh battery driven vehicle. But as we all know that those moves those moves towards a American green uh future have been repeatedly countered by backlash after backlash after backlash. too heartbreaking to enumerate at this point as we are living through perhaps the most brutal uh to date and there’s an entire generation of historians and political scientists. I was just teaching the Scotchpollo’s extraordinary postmortem on the failure of captain trade in 200910. I was teaching that this afternoon. There’s an entire generation of literature devoted to anatomizing how reactionary interest groups mobilized a culture of doubt to obstruct change in the United States. We have Quinn Lebodian’s latest contribution highex bastards on the way in which in the 1990s green was designated as the new red. we have the strangulation um of energetic municipal politics by self-interested liberal lawyers highlighted by the likes of Klein and Thompson in the current moment. But to be honest, I find these sociologies, these sociological accounts of America’s impass too restricted and self-serving. Uh abandons after all is literally a manifesto for a better life in Brooklyn in the Bay Area. And not that there’s anything wrong with that, but deriving an account of the entire United States from there seems a little like a kind of inverted pyramid. And it’s a diagnosis of how we get to the it diagnosis of how we get to abundance seems to have been sponsored by interest groups who already have plenty of everything uh that they could possibly need. And the same is true I think when we reduce the political economy of American capitalism to or fossil capitalism either to the rear guard action of the coal industry and the Koch brothers in that from the 2010s onwards it would not have taken more than a couple of 10 billion dollars to buy out the entire American coal industry and shut it down. That’s onetenth of the valuation of Exxon. They don’t belong in the same category. I think the problem of American fossil backlash is bigger than these sectional and uh uh accounts. And what I want to do in what follows is to offer an account in which that backlash is better understood as emerging from the mainline of power which centers on hegemonic efforts um uh to maintain a grip both on American domestic society and the world economy and disastrous exercises in hyper agency. So, if you like a front-footed account of the resistance to the green energy project as opposed to the rear guard action of reaction and darkness and enemies of the enlightenment, the first defection after all from the global green consensus happens already before the Kyoto agreement is signed with a Bird Hegel resolution by the Senate in the summer of 1997. And the extraordinary thing about this is it’s unanimous and you aren’t going to get a Senate resolution on unanimity um as a result of the actions of climate denials or the fringe nationalist extremists. the key element that held together the unonyimity of the first wave of uh uh of American backlash against global climate politics was the question of globalization. Essentially after NAFTA and after WTO, Kyoto was a bridge too far for a very wide range of American interest groups including the AFL CIO which squarely declared itself against Kyoto. Because what was in the background of Kyoto was China. Because Kyoto in a kind of hat tip to climate justice exempted the great emerging powers of the era from any efforts of decarbonization. And this was understood across an incredibly wide segment of American society as a disastrously dangerous concession. self-interested, of course, in the self-serving interests of American business interests, which would relocate their most damaging processes of production to China. Once you get into it, it’s downright weird how little this obvious connection to the struggles over globalization, how little emphasis it receives in the literature on the American climate backlash. America saw the China threat and feared it. Or rather, the American political class from the late 1990s onwards were profoundly concerned about the pressures they had unleashed in American society through the extraordinary, and this is the point I want to underline, the extraordinary boldness, radicalism of the globalization project they were pursuing in the 1990s. And Bush, though of course he rejected Keyoto, fully subscribed to that globalization agenda set in motion by the Clinton team in the 1990s. The question was, however, how to manage those forces. And into that space come what I would describe as other projects of front-footed aggressive global management, which are not simply to be best understood as rear guard actions, but as forward moving edges of efforts to seek control over the world. And the campaign in the Gulf, the two campaigns in the Gulf, after all, fully qualify for this badge of novelty. America’s military deployments in the Gulf were not, after all, of long vintage. America certainly has projects of imperialism, but not in the Gulf. This was British territory. It’s really only from the late ‘7s with the Carter Doctrine that the American footprint begins to build up. And I think we shouldn’t estimate quite how quickly from the early 1990s onwards this p this project culminated. The sort of spirit that I want to invoke is the kind of deathless uh quote given to suskend in uh 2004 um the in which uh uh uh the the logic the history making logic of this project of power uh was laid out. Right? This is this claim famous rejection of the so-called realitybased community which defined people who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now. And when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality judiciously, as you will, we’ll act again, creating other new realities which you can study, too. And that’s how things will sort out. And there’s a liberal knee-jerk in us which is just repelled by this language, by this refusal of the fact-based reality. But if you’re serious about making history, this is exactly how you act. This is exactly how you act. This is the template of how you would understand uh the process of making change. Of course, it ends in disaster. And when you put that disaster together with the rumbles of discontent from the late 1990s onwards against the American globalization project, there is, I think, a window in the mid 2000s in which a national security coalition, a blue green alliance, an Apollo project could perhaps have been mounted around green energy and the promise of national security in the United States. It was not to be. And it was not to be fundamentally again because of innovation, not because of a rear guard action by coal, but because of an absolutely transformative set of innovations within the fossil fuel sector um that changed the game. And that of course is the story, the story of fracking, shale and tight oil production exploding upwards from the early 2010s answered the question answered the question of um of uh energy security um through technological innovation. When we talked about alternatives to the existing fossil fuel regime, this was not what we were thinking of. But that is a set of cumulated public private investments in technological innovation which by the late 2000s enabled American oilmen to drill for oil in ways they had never been able to drill before. The point I’m trying to emphasize is that the logic of innovation, the multiplication of auctions, the diversification of the mode of production that once we confidently claimed as a progressive alternative to mass production came back to haunt us in a kind of unexpected uh in an unexpected uh a dramatic and unexpected way. And as oil prices ramp up and then the financial crisis of 2008 hits, the second the second great the second great shock is also kind of uncomfortably close to home because what really escalated uh uh fracking production was not simply the innovations of the era but QE and zero interest rates. No one benefited more in American business from that epic extraordinary period of public intervention in uh in capital markets and money markets uh than uh the fossil block. Um and uh if that slogan which we all loved so much uh anything we can do we can afford applied to green Keynesianism it turned out to apply with even greater force uh to the fossil fossil fuel lobby. What I’m warning against here is the temptation on the part of a critique uh to uh to insist uh that fracking was a bubble, that it never made any profit, that it was uh a kind of capitalist delusion. But at that moment, of course, we invoke precisely the standards of constraint which in other contexts, our own contexts, uh we are only so only too keen uh to overthrow. Again, another word for a bubble is a a situation with multiple equilibria. And if we are in the business of anything in progressive energy politics, it’s a world of multiple equilibria. In fact, we need to keep checking our biases here because you may have noticed that a minute ago I blanked out part of the graph showing the impact of fracking on the US energy economy. Because why do we call this? because this is the foundation of the story of the pro state. Why do we label this the pro state when in fact the most dramatic impact of uh uh fracking uh alongside oil was felt in gas and in the political economy of the energy system in the 2010s. The fundamental difference between the two systems is that oil flows out into the global big pool of oil marginally affecting oil prices in the United States. Gas, on the other hand, because it basically can’t easily be moved except through pipelines, flows into the US economy and fundamentally changes the logic and the price and the cost structure of electricity generation. Fracking, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of the American electro state in the 2010s. Because yes, America too is an electrostate. There is no modern state that is not to some degree an electrostate. And in the American case, what this does, and this is true to a degree also for Europe, but it’s particularly dramatic in the in the US case, is to fundamentally rebalance uh the structure of power generation, even in a venue like Texas. Along the bottom, you have the green line um of uh LNG driven power generation. You have the squeeze being put on coal and then the growth over the top even in the Texan case of wind. The fact that this is not more generally celebrated as a story of the American electrostate is not to do with the fact that there isn’t drama and a really rather fundamental recomposition of the sources of electric power. It’s to do with the fact that the overall aggregate is barely is barely growing. So what we’re talking about in this case is a recomposition within a system and it’s a doublebarreled recomposition. It’s a recomposition that on the one hand has this fossil element coming from shale and on the other hand uh that very substantial wind element uh piling on top. What is driving wind in Texas is not of course any commitment to a project of green modernization there uh but simply cost. What is driving what is driving the story of the of the of the energy transition in Texas is the dramatic decline um in in in the cost of wind of wind generation. Now part of that is coming from the United States. Part of that is coming um from Europe. But fundamentally the bottom of the market is defined is defined by China. And that is the the orange line that you see there sucking down from the first half of ‘08 to the first half of 2022 the global cost of uh of Wimpar around around the world. And this is the third shock that uh the second shock really that destabilizes uh that European narrative of dream modernization with which I started and brings me back to where I started this lecture this evening namely namely China because it’s really I think the fundamental and wrenching shift in the Chinese position and the Chinese energy system which is uh the most basic challenge uh to the western centric vision of the energy transition uh that was mapped out so thoroughly by an entire cohort of theorists in the 80s and ‘9s. And the element of this which in some senses is most obvious is the bit that is captured in this graph here or in this graph here which shows the share of uh solar solar photovoltaic panels um in the critical phase between 2006 where as you can see China was a relatively small player uh to 2013 by which point it has an absolutely dominant 60% share of the of the market at some level. This story, the story of a manufactured energy system, because that’s what makes renewables so distinct from fossil fuels is that they are generated by turbines, by photovoltaic panels, things we have to make. And China, that’s really a uh an association that that is at some level I think obvious. Those elements have to be made. And China dominates global manufacturing in a way that no power has dominated global manufacturing since the since the American era of absolute hegemony in the aftermath of World War II. So China piggy banks on European subsidies. Yes, of course it does. And China systematically builds out its photoval mass mass manufacturing capacity with the aid of small German firms which eagerly supply them with the kit. In wind, China doubles down on its strengths in heavy engineering because giant windmill blades turning in the wind require that kind of skill. China builds heavily um um uh attempts again and again to break into the motor vehicle market. fails repeatedly and backtracks and moves into electric vehicles instead. Um the story is one that really you can read off and is not in a sense particular to the green energy story. It’s simply a story of Chinese manufacturing dominance across the board. This is a huge shock to the Europeans above all who from the 2000s onwards had imagined that their vision of a green modernity would in fact go handinhand with a green industrialism. It’s a huge shock. But to focus on China’s green energy manufacturing and its exports as the key to writing the history of China, the key to writing its economic history is to imagine that economic history fundamentally as other directed as directed to satisfying global markets to meeting export demands catering to world markets. It’s to make China’s economic story like that for instance of South Korea or to a degree of in of Japan. But as impressive as those exports have been, the fundamental thing to realize is what you see on the right hand side, which is that China’s exports are really the tip of the iceberg. And really from the mid 2000s onwards after the first four or five years of the new WTO regime had worn off the share of exports in Chinese industrial production falls dramatically from as high as 20% which means that 80% was being done to domestic markets down to an average of 15% which it maintained throughout the 2010s. The fundamental driver of both Chinese growth and specifically the Chinese electro state is not to be found here in this otherdirected bolting of China into the global manufacturing system. The core of the Chinese industrial uh growth uh logic is to be found in this utterly awesome uh graph which shows the relocation of a uh uh of uh um a huge 800 million people over the period from 1949 to 2019 uh to the cities of China. the formation of a giant new urban society organized in 19 uh connobations, industrial connibations, urban conibations of which I was witnessing one in the mega complex of Chungdu and Chongqing with a combined population in excess of 50 million people. These 19 urban regions are thought to contain 850 million um inhabitants. This is a urban world stamped out of in many cases uh uh brownfield uh sites built fresh. My favorite statistic is that 90% of the habitations of the population of China were built since 1990. 90%. Imagine erasing all of urban America and replacing it in the space of a single generation. When we talked about alternatives to mass production in the 1980s and 1990s, I don’t think we had in mind this. I don’t think we had in mind that we meant by alternative an entire new version of industrialism piled on top of everything that we had experienced so far. whenish Beck theorized about a second maternity modernity to come after the industrialization and urbanization which had dominated European and American history. I don’t think we reckoned with the possibility of a far larger urban and industrial civilization to be built after that first modernity transition to a second in the west and on a far larger scale. There are uh 19 urban spaces in the United in China with a population greater than 10 million people. In the United States, we barely count two. And that system was sustained by a massive electric infrastructure, which itself was the dirtiest thing that humanity has ever done. The burning of coal on a scale literally never before witnessed. This is the fossil fuel history of our species summarized by way of our dirtiest fossil fuel consumption. And it is no exaggeration to say that our history falls a century into three phases. The prehistory, the 19th century and 20th century history of western industrialism and then what has happened in China literally in the last generation. three phases of our species existence in terms of our relationship to fossil fuels. This too is not replication. It’s not the same thing over again. It’s itself also like fracking driven by revolutionary new technologies. This is the first fleet of driverless Chinese coal trucks. No people. This is the fleet of Chinese um uh it’s it’s awesome fleet of furnaces. Um so these you know when you combust coal to make power you can do it at different temperatures. Uh to do it efficiently and cleanly you need to burn them at either supercritical or ultra supercritical temperatures. That’s in excess of 700° centigrade. Um the color lines you can read there. Ultra supercritical is the state-of-the-art and you can see that the United States has a grand total of one ultra supercritical power plant. Um China’s the vast majority of China’s fleet is ultra super critical. So they didn’t just replicate western industrialism or coal consumption. They innovated an entirely massively new model of fossil fuel consumption that was also unprecedentedly destructive. And they knew it. And this is I think perhaps in some senses the most radical element that the Chinese story adds to our thinking about the current moment. It is the scale. It is the drama. It is the overturning of any simple western conception of a sequence of modernities. And it is the absolutely stark clarity with which they steered towards the apocalypse of uh pollution that you see in 2013. In terms of impotments, if the western story is a story of a comedy in which for ages we did fossil fuel before we woke up to the reality in the 1970s that maybe the great acceleration was bad for humankind. and we then slowly by some efforts try to sort ourselves out. The story in China I think is better told in formal terms as something you might describe as romance. A struggle of good development against the evil of poverty but comes at a huge price which is essentially squarely understood and then dramatically pivoted against as the damage builds up. When we say this is a extraordinarily uh uh a radical process, it’s estimated that number of deaths due to air pollution in China in the early 2010s was running at 1.4 million people a year. Um in the US calculations between 1990 and the 2020s, we think half a million people died as a result of air pollution in the United States over a period of almost 30 years. So we’re talking here of a truly violent process of transformation which the Chinese regime uh I think uh uh it can be fairly said deliberately opted into as a choice and then pivoted hard against and that pivot begins in the 2010s. It is a matter uh widely understood of regime survival because there’s only so many times people can see their babies choking to death before uh you need to pivot. By the early 20 by the mid2010s the air pollution standards um imposed on Chinese um uh uh coal fired power stations were actually more strenuous than those in either the United States in Europe. As unpalatable and as uncomfortable it is, we need to reckon with the fact that the cleaning up of China’s first phase of dramatic hyperrowth uh was accompanied under the leadership of Xi Jinping by a extremely explicit commitment to environmental protection at first on a limited scale and then secondly on a global scale culminating in that Chinese appropriation of Europe’s vision of green modernization in 2020. 20. The point I want to make is that this is inescapably tied up with the power project of the CCP. This is not some sort of con concession to western norms or global liberalism. This is understood as organic and essential to the project of the CCP as a historical actor and as essential to its survival as a political force and to the completion of the unification of China um under the under the rule of the CCP. the great green power projects of the hydro world are stamped onto the face for instance of Tibet as a program of uh incorporation. Um and these maps recently um reproduced in an remarkably uncritical way by the New York Times which has gone full abundance on the Chinese growth story. um maps the longest uh ultra- high voltage transmission line, a truly spectacular engineering trans uh line which goes from the eastern zones of industrial production back to the west and to Shing Jang into the heart of the project of um uh of power assertion by the CCP regime. There are no two ways about the logic of this in political terms. environmentalism becomes a key element of a revived CCP uh project. There is no shilly shadowing. There’s no kind of evasiveness that says that really this is an accommodation of some kind of western project. No, in its scale, in its force, in the drama of the Chinese green energy buildout, we have to see again the front-footed power orientated project of the CCP at work. And that brings me to my final section which is this issue of the cold war which I have somewhat uh slighted to date in my effort to make sense I hope intelligibly of the logics the explosive logics of development which have torn apart the herbiferous um uh vision of green modernization so beloved of my generation of Europeans. One crucial thing to do, I think, is to locate Western environmentalism’s politics in relation to the Cold War. And that requires going back to the 1970s, to that um Earth Day moment in 1970. And I think from the very beginning, it’s been clear that environmentalism in the West has two faces. I’m not going to say they’re Janus’s face. I think they’re just two separate tracks. And one is a kind of daunt environmentalism which is directed a great against the great acceleration the voracious demands of industrialism and military industrialism that was a damnation of both the houses both the camps of the cold war. There was a third way a kind of troskish flavor. This has above all of course closely tied with the peace movement of the 1980s and the disarmament politics and that remains a thread that runs through environmentalism all the way down to the present day. But there was also another wing of uh environmentalism notably in Germany where it’s most strong in political terms that was universalist that was insisted on the relationship between environmentalism and that other great mission as Sam Moy helped us understand in the 1970s of universal human rights that was directed against state power in general you could say but more specifically against the tyrannical state power of state socialism in Eastern Europe and that allied itself again and again with neoconservative forces. So the German Greens were the political force in Europe that lionized the Dalai Lama and that upheld the cause of Tibet throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In the 2010s, as Donald Trump is um exiting the Paris Climate Accords, German Greens in Europe make common cause um make common cause with uh conservatives, MAGA Republicans in their denunciation of the unfolding drama in Shing Jang and then the repression in Hong Kong in 2019. This is not a surprise. this affiliation between notably German green politics and the neoconservative uh cause is is is is baked in. It goes all the way back it goes all the way back to the beginning. And for European politics as it clustered increasingly around the green issue in 2018 and 2019 after the shock of Trump, the rise of populism, the Xihon as Vanderlean began to assemble her coalition for her ultimately successful run to the presidency of the European Commission. This became an increasingly nagging and difficult issue and the way in which the EU resolved it is interesting. Um because what they laid out was a story about what they laid out was a story about a three-fold a kind of metaost politic uh not a comprehensive package but an effort to segment different zones of potential cooperation and collaboration but also rivalry and competition with China. The partnership wing we saw expressed and was clearly recognized by the Chinese experts themselves in that back and forth between the Chinese net zero planning and the green deal in Europe. The economic competition was the old WTO agenda of a level playing field. Uh but what was new and was a concession to the increasingly tense and complex relations between the west and China by 2019 um was uh the insistence on systemic rivalry and Europe balanced these positions and it was possible because on the one hand this was a way of marking a difference to Donald Trump’s regime in the 2010s that was progressively ramping up the pressure of the new cold war and on the other hand Europe was in a relatively secure bubble and confident of itself. And this was however fundamentally shaken out of place um by two developments. And the first is the defeat of Trump at the hands of Biden. Um, which caused the Europeans uh to re-imagine to return as quickly as they possibly could to a vision of a Atlanticist America that would uphold the good cause of green democracy and a block of democracies against authoritarianism. The second maybe I should say there are three shocks. The second great shock was of course uh the Russian invasion of Ukraine which drove Europe well exposed its dependence on Russian gas and drove Europe into the arm of the Americans. And then on top of that the third shock is the sudden surge in uh the Chinese green energy story. uh this is the track of uh renewable energy uh investment around the world over the period of the most dramatic acceleration of both American and European efforts of the most recent years. So the IRA has at least one year in here. The European Green Deal has one year in here. And the reality dawning on the west in 2022,23 and 24 was that even at maximum effort, their efforts to build out and respond to the climate crisis were dwarfed by what was going on in China. China increasingly has come in the 2020s to be the climate challenge. In emissions, it’s number one. In renewable energy investment, it’s number one. and in the production of green energy equipment. And to complete the story with which I began a little while ago. Um this is the uh uh the shifting balance in the global uh uh uh ind global photovoltaics industry in in recent years. Remember China going from a relatively modest position to 60% of global output um in the in by the early 2010s. At this point, uh, China’s capacity for both photovoltaic production is something like four or five times the entire rest of the world put together. China currently has the capacity to churn out 1,200 gawatt of photovoltaic panels. Um, in a single year, uh, America’s total installed solar capacity is in the order of 250 250 gawatt. So, China can um increase America’s install capacity by a five-fold in a single in a single year. the this is the moment where I think that the the hinge any possibility of a straightforward uh melding together of a green politics a green distinctively western European western democratic green politics the promise of an industrial future uh for for the west in this zone um and an autonomy from China in the face of this giant global problem definitively collapses. And in the exit interviews by uh the key figures of the Biden administration like Jake Sullivan talking to Jason Baldoffer is himself a veteran of the Obama administration. Um you see this perplexity echoing through. It’s a long quote. He he he speaks at some length. Um uh but uh the the key line here the first is I think it’s very difficult to tell Americans or Europeans or frankly people anywhere else in the world that they don’t have a role to play in the clean energy transition other than being the consumer. I think that’s just a very hard argument from the point of view of democracies selling a policy over the midterm. And then third for what we need globally the kind of resilience capacity production deployment just saying well China will take care of it is no answer. There need to be other people at the cutting edge and it should be Americans who are there with the highest and highest end most effective technologies and it’s armwaving. It’s it’s it’s as as you can see from the data itself. This is the mapping of a problem. We can entirely see what Sullivan is laying out. the political logic is evident and the inability to deliver was spectacular and as we saw from the spending figures um barely moved the global balance with China driving the entire story. It’s hard really against the backdrop of that not to see a certain consistency in the Trumpian position which simply says, “Well, in that case, let’s not bother. Let’s just back out of this. What are we doing here?” Um, but you don’t really fully taste the irony of the consequences of that kind of decision unless you move to the final, and I promise the final stage of this of this increasingly twisting and turning and slightly delirious this slightly delirious story because one of the great sort of historical coincidences of the current moment is that the first uh year of the Trump second term coincides um with Another spectacular shock, another instance of a kind of hyper agency, another instance of a scale shift, a dramatic shift of a type that no one really previously anticipated. And I’m talking, of course, about the story which entirely dominates the American business scene, entirely dominates the American markets in the modern period, and that and that is AI. the sudden shift, as Joe Visentar commented in a post uh today on Twitter, the sudden shift in the scale of spending by by previously capital light American platform businesses is just simply like nothing we have seen um in decades. And if it has one common denominator, it is that this capacity is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars and the other thing it’s measured in is gigawatts. In other words, these data centers need power. And in the American pipeline of power construction, this is what it looks like. The simply isn’t anything other than a little bit of gas, the green bit. And otherwise, the entire pipeline is solar uh uh and uh wind and batteries. The shift in American capitalism is actually happening. It had begun well before the Biden administration. The basic structural shift is evident was already evident in those Texas data that I showed you. Um, but is now absolutely overwhelming. And how do you square this? Well, one of the things the Trump administration is doing is trying to shut this down, leaving America’s AI capitalists to fantasize about reviving atomic power stations and all of the other um slightly juvenile projects uh that they intend. And the other move is to move to the Gulf where of course there is abundant energy and a huge appetite to be placed in the position of being able to purchase America’s very high-end chips. But then you ask one further step. Do the Emiratis or the Saudis anticipate using their oil and gas to power the data centers which America’s shift in export policy will enable them to construct. And the answer is no more than anywhere else in the world do they intend to do so. They intend to power their data centers with renewable energy. And where are they going to resource these solar panels from? China. So Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirates have emerged as some of the largest buyers of Chinese solar panels with which and this will be the only place on earth possibly these two things will ever actually marry and bump as those phones do. The ultra high-end Nvidia chips will meet ultra cheap Chinese solar panels in the deserts of the the deserts of the Gulf. Meanwhile, the United States Energy Department and the Qataris are ganging up to lecture the Europeans on what they should and shouldn’t include in their climate regulations and why does this matter and why are the Europeans as vulnerable as they are because Qatar and the United States are their major non-Russian sources of gas. That European failure um comes home to roost. This to conclude is why I feel this situation is if not unprecedented in an abstract sense then at least the shattering of a half almost half century 40 years of a project of modernization to which many of us in Europe I think feel quite profoundly committed. It’s marked an entire generation um of thinking and practice and lifestyles and a kind of vision of the future which is coming undone before our eyes. And it leaves me this evening to be honest um unsure about how I should end. I’ve spent days trying to think about how to land this lecture and one of my wisest friends in the end concluded that really perhaps I shouldn’t try. But I’m gonna try anyway because I think we need some sort of we need some sort of account. I mean the basic dilemma is that our sense of the underlying material forces driving this story has become more and more attenuated. You can make bets on interest groups. But would they really lead you to any clear pitch in this situation? It’s not clear to me that they do. How do we end up in this world in which Chinese solar panels will meet American chips in the Gulf? Well, we can spell out each one of the steps now. We see it, but would we have anticipated ahead of time? I’m not sure we could. We would have. Well, you could simply place a bet in trying to think hard about the future on the sheer force of the cheap Chinese technology. Maybe this is going to be the driver. And that I think is for many of us at some level at some level our only hope in the current moment. I’ve been on calls with folks that are involved in this green energy business and that has been the more or less openly articulated point of view with all that implies because as much as we may want to cleave to that position and as much sense as it makes we shouldn’t imagine that this is the world of the 1930s or the 40s where you can join a popular front and commit yourself to the common turn and make common cause with the CCP because even if you wanted to do that you can’t actually do that. that’s not actually an option which is available. So how then does one position oneself in a world in which that kind of old vision of class treachery of commitment to a kind of internationalism is not actually available except in the fantasies of bedroom tankies. How do we position ourselves? Well, to pick up on Hayden White’s options, if we’re cautious about comedy and romance joining the global struggle, then two other options are tragedy and satire. And to my mind, tragedy suffers from the same problem as comedy. You have to know the ending. Even in this case, it’s sad and predetermined in a bad way. And of course, things do look bleak. But do we are we really confident about exactly how up we are or how doomed we are? That seems to me almost presumptuous. To call a book doom is kind of to miss the point because we we don’t really quite know how it’s coming at us. Satire is you can feel my impulse, my natural tendency. I it’s a good place. uh it helps to keep one’s spirits up. The material is endless, but also by virtue of that, it’s just simply too easy. So, is there a way of making the comedy position a decent one under the current circumstances? And I asked this question advisedly because obviously especially speaking to an American audience now myself an American in an American venue not yet with an American accent but nevertheless the risks of the comedic option the comedic narrative for Americans are obvious. Um it comes far too it breeds complacency. It reestablishes an exceptionalism. So for my money, the minimum move to respectability is to realize that we if we perhaps want to cleave to a comedic drama about the long run potential of Chinese technology to change the world in ways we do not yet understand to change the energy bargain in a Pakistan overnight practically or South Africa. The very least we need to do is to emphasize that in this comedy ours is a bit part and not the starring role. We’re not the love interest. This song is not about us. This is the thing that we have to underline. And so in addressing this situation constructively, my heroes, uh, I’m really sad that Tim Sah is not here this evening, but Jack Gross and people like that know this scene really well. My heroes are the western observers, the European ember, the outfits uh uh that are around the netzero industrial policy lab who are accompanying this process of dramatic transformation. Not from the position of panda hugging CCP groupies, but from the position of experts who make it their job to document around the world the flow of Chinese funds in ways that I know from conversations. this summer in Beijing. The Chinese themselves don’t understand to map out and describe the scale of Chinese agency in motion as it’s happening at the level of the individual investment project. This is being done down to that level with a view to resuming the project of openness and indeterminacy and breaking open the constraints. In other words, equipping their counterparts in recipient countries, those who, contrary to Jake Sullivan, are going to be the consumers of Chinese technology with the tools to haggle, to negotiate, to bargain, to force the Chinese to terms. This seems to me to be a position which is adequate to the moment that addresses the drama that’s going on that does not resume the fatal doomed to my mind dangerous project of a western exceptionalism that positions our expertise the freedom and resources that we enjoy in compiling data like this in a constructive way and I don’t say this in the spirit of a kind of third worldish self-abnigation um but or a kind of altruism or humility even but out of a sense that this at least is a place in which one might exercise um uh efficacy. This is a leverage a point of leverage and it is really to those people that this talk uh this long rambling talk is dedicated. Uh thank you very much for your for your attention. Thank you, Adam. That was epic. Um, I’m afraid this isn’t going to be discursive at all because we only have about 10 minutes tops. So, it’s going to be quickfire. Um, please only raise your hand if you have a really good, really short question. Uh, I can see one hand raised in the middle. Maybe we’ll come up with three hands at this point. One there.

I see the one in the middle. Yeah, one in the middle. One slightly three rows behind. And uh I see a hand right at the very back there. Oh no, keep keep going. Sorry, I saw him. I saw him. Okay, sure. He’s You’re next to him. Why not? Okay, go ahead. Is it me? Okay, great. Uh thanks so much for that. Um if you could quickly talk about major lesson of the IRA and perhaps its failures, challenges and how that should inform future energy climate policy in the United States, if there is such a thing. Why don’t we stack a couple? Yeah, good idea. Okay, so let’s this gentleman there and then we’ll go to the person in the middle. And when do you want to run? 9:15. Yeah, you 10 minutes. You focused on energy, but at no place you considered as a force m what I think major changes in demographics and land and its productivity. Do these uh not have a role in this balance of the future? One more. Okay, one more that the first person. So, yeah, right there. If you could pass that along. Thank you. Yes. One thing that was not mentioned is that the US military is the largest consumer of fossil fuels in the world. And I’m wondering if this factor uh plays a part in this story you tell. It’s absolutely extraordinary actually. The little known clause of the Kyoto treaty is it exempts the US military from whatever commitments the US make. The Americans twisted everyone’s arms into accepting it the very last moment. Um it was actually a matter of discussion in the United States. um which points I think to the way in which Kyoto was so deeply entangled with American discourse about globalization. Um certainly I see as I was trying to emphasize um there’s a sort of it’s it’s very important to stress the role of US militarism as agent. Right? If we if we think about the rather odd construction of American reality provided by the people who argue that it’s a society run by lawyers who like constantly tie their own shoestrings together like if you think of like four different mains finance tech fracking the fourth would obviously be American militarism and like not all together and deeply constrained by the lawyers at least not all the time right so so that would be be one aspect um I am acutely conscious um that that focusing on energy and climate is a is a shorthand for um you know a dazzling array of of of of other fundamental issues and and every ecologist that I know insists that biodiversity and pollution is in some senses, you know, where the rubber really hits the road. This is this is the this is the real this is the tragedy that in every sense is irreversible. This is where climate change is most brutally cashed out, if you like. I mean, it’s in the it’s in the these horrendous pictures that we saw in the last couple of days of the death of like at least two major coral types of off of off Florida. Um, and I’m very I’m very I’m very aminable to the idea that that um that that the focus on climate which my work currently reflects so much is itself very much an artifact of the you know speaking fucodian terms the governmentality of the 80s and 90s both a as project of governmental governmentality but also almost self-consciously as a project of governance. the the the the the centering of climate was not by accident. It’s because it’s the kind of ultimate nerd problem like it’s the thing that we think we can map and that’s a there so there’s a kind of vaavancha there’s an elective affinity between a certain sort of liberal governmentality or technocratic governmentality and the climate problem specifically um apart from anything else it’s the zone where the degrowth problem can most easily be shuffled off stage because you can focus on green climate whereas when you’re talking about biodiversity and and and loss of territory that that that move is much less compelling and on the IRA. I mean I I I think the central lesson is I mean if you really actually want to achieve any effect it needs to be much bigger. I mean the IRA is a triumph of Swiss Army knife politics used and you know this is a kind of it became a kind of standard laugh line but you know Swiss Army knife is generally meant as a compliment. It’s, you know, a an instrument which is doing 10 different things. But if you are ever in a situation in which you have to rely on a Swiss Army knife, you’re basically in a pickle. I mean, it’s also designed for use in emergencies. And the IRA is an emergency policy. It’s like a desperate effort by the Biden administration to craft something highly functional in an, you know, to dance in a telephone booth. Like, it’s it’s almost impossible. And the other thing we learned is that as a result, it’s also harder to to proof it, future proof it, right? The whole idea behind the IRA was you could change enough of American society so that it will become like the Affordable Care Act. And it it clearly it clearly hasn’t had that hasn’t had that effect. What you what you can’t what you can’t fault the IRA people for is the hype. Oh my god. I mean as a PR exercise head turning like like mindblowing demonstration of the credul and the willingness of the western world to given half a chance to sign up for first the kind of positive vision oh my god amazing America is going to save the planet and then secondly in the European case the kind of backdraft of that is oh god we’re so abject we don’t have a state like the Americans we need to do better both things were very very powerful and uh shouldn’t be underestimated though. Whether post Trump you can do that again. I I I think we may have burnt the uh may have burnt the boats. I think we’ve got time for literally two more. It’d be good if one of them was a non-male question. Uh if we can seek out a non-male question, that would be good. I see one right there. Go for it. Thank you. Can you say more about India’s role in all of this? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, we’ll take that. And and one more raised hand. I see someone right at the back. I feel like we should let someone right at the very back ask a question. Hello, my name is Connor Agorski. I’ve come across many predictions about a shortage of rare earth minerals surfacing in the near future. Do you see such a shortage of rare earth minerals surfacing and how would it affect the Chinese political economy and geopolitics more generally? I asked Michael Pettis this and he said that due to um demand dependency such concerns are overblown and I I tend to be with him. I mean I I I I can’t help myself. there’s too much of an economist in me and so I I I think supply concerns I mean I would I would again like ask the question what the hell happened that we suddenly found ourselves in this kind of boy’s own world of geoeconomics where we went around the world mapping deposits of this and deposits of that and and then sort of started building these stories about supply chain blockades and so it’s it’s um these are trade-offs it’s quite obvious that we In fact, both mine and refine almost all of the key rarest if we wanted to domestically to do it would require either a substantial watering down of environmental standards or a big effort to make the processes cleaner and it’s the our unwilling to do either and the fact that there are available sacrifice zones around the world that can be uh uh uh used instead. So I’m I’m with Michael on that point. India is indeed you know plays a kind of fascinating role in this story. because um uh you know in quantitative terms it’s there’s a huge gap between China and India right it’s hard to exaggerate just how large that gulf still is in terms of their physical impact the drama of the growth um India has just overtaken the EU as like as as an emitter so the transition is happening um but it’s it’s not on the same path and there’s a kind weird way in which within the politics of global p climate India’s position has become um both more salient in terms of actual change going forward in terms of green energy projects but much less secure I mean India it’s hard to exaggerate India’s importance as the anchor of the climate justice position at Rio at Kyoto but that depended to a high extent on their ability to hold the Chinese in line and their ability to prevent the small island states being coralled by the Europeans into a high ambition type strategy. And that Indian diplomacy really post Copenhagen breaks down then increasingly the Indians find themselves embarrassed, strong armed, squeezed towards following the Chinese first into making commitments in Paris or at least opening the possibility to an NDC and then at at Glasgow finally being actually willing to state a net zero path. So this isn’t a zone in which India has really built substantial agency. Um and the the Naval Stubash who’s is a close friend and and the great expert on ch on Indian energy policy and climate always just says forget it take climate out of the picture. This is a man who’s worked in this field for his entire life you know for for 30 years. That is not the story for India. The story for India is essentially a story of energy and and and sustainable energy. That is where the that is where the conversation is. And this is despite the fact that we all know that South Asia is in the crosshairs of the most some of the most extreme warming. So his view is that the politics of energy in India are such that the only plausible way of working this is essentially to focus not on the energy transition because the Indians aren’t and shouldn’t reasonably be expected to run down any of their existing capacity. their picataby energy consumption is far too modest. The focus should simply be on the question of how as rapidly as possible to build out new capacity and Pakistan has demonstrated what’s possible with cheap Chinese imports. India is going to have much more problem um going down that route or go down a more expensive road. It’s a in other words it’s a slightly it’s not a very conclusive answer to your to your to your question. It isn’t so far. It’s a it’s a it’s a tiger or lion, whatever, that hasn’t hasn’t quite roared in the way that many people were predicting. I’m sorry, we’re going to have to stop it there. But the great thing about the London Review of Books is that we have a letters page. This article will be published as an article and you will be invited to send your questions or indeed your comments in as letters. Please do so. But for the time being, thank you Adam. Thank you so much for coming and see you next year.