Adam Tooze: Electrostates, Petrostates and the New Cold War

ELI5/TLDR

Adam Tooze stands on a Chengdu street and notices that a hundred cars have just glided past him in total silence. They are all electric. He realises he is watching the future the West has been talking about for forty years actually arrive, except it is arriving in China, not in Europe or the US. The rest of the lecture is him trying to figure out how the green dream that European technocrats spent two generations building got eaten alive by Chinese manufacturing on one side and American oil-and-AI capitalism on the other, and what is left to do when the world’s biggest decarboniser is also the West’s new cold war enemy.

The Full Story

A street in Chengdu

The lecture opens with a small visual shock. Tooze is standing at a crosswalk in Chengdu, looking at his phone, and when he looks up he realises that for the last thirty seconds about a hundred vehicles have moved past him without making a sound. Every one of them was electric. Tire noise only. He calls it a moment of “mid-transition” — a piece of jargon from energy studies that means the strange in-between period when one stable system is becoming another.

He notes, dryly, that car companies are now adding fake engine noise to electric vehicles. Yamaha — the people who used to make tuning forks — has patented a fake combustion engine whose only job is to vibrate between your thighs while you ride a motorbike that does not actually need to vibrate. Mid-transition in one image.

The electrostate vs the petrostate

Then back through the firewall to the West, where the same reality is being told as a clash. On one side: the electrostate, a country that has shifted most of its energy use into electrical form, regardless of whether that electricity is clean. On the other: the petrostate, still hooked on oil and gas. China is the first; the United States, with its fracking boom and its political dependence on the oil lobby, is the second.

The think tank Ember has a chart with two axes — how green a country’s electricity is, and how much of its total energy is electric. Europe sits in the top-left: clean electricity, but it never bothered to electrify deeply. China sits in the top-right: rapidly cleaning up its grid and shifting everything onto it. The US is a middling laggard.

But Tooze does not let the dichotomy stand. The Biden-era polite framing has cracked, and a new American policy literature — Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, Dan Wang’s Breakneck — is now asking whether America even has a state in any meaningful sense. China, Wang says, is a country run by engineers; America is a country run by lawyers, and the lawyers spend their time tying each other’s shoelaces together.

The European heartbreak

The most wounded party in this story is Europe, and especially Germany. From the 1980s onwards, European theorists laid out a vision of a “second modernity”: a politics of green modernization, feed-in tariffs, carbon trading, a Cambrian explosion of new governance forms. Europe actually built it. Through the early 2010s European renewable investment dwarfed everyone else’s. The 2019 EU Green Deal was, in proportion to the European economy, much larger than Biden’s later Inflation Reduction Act.

When Xi Jinping announced China’s net-zero target at the UN in 2020, the PowerPoint slides his Tsinghua University team prepared cited the European Green Deal directly. Imitation, the highest form of technocratic flattery.

And then look at Europe now. Tooze’s list of failures is brutal in its plainness:

Decarbonised the power grid but never electrified the rest of the economy.
Shut down nuclear in Germany and Italy while propping up coal.
Built the market for solar panels with subsidies, then handed that market to China, then put up tariffs.
Took fifteen years to make carbon pricing work, and was not ready when it did.
Put all its bets on diesel cars, milked the auto industry for dividends, and now begs for protection from Chinese EVs.
Was caught between the US and Russia and built no autonomy from either.

The Eurozone crisis is the inflection. Look at the chart of European renewable investment and you see it climb to $131 billion in 2011, then collapse under austerity. That is the moment China overtakes.

The 1980s theorists, Tooze says, were not directly to blame, but they shared a flaw: they underestimated power. They had no theory of how to bulldoze opposing interest groups, and no geopolitics at all.

Why America never joined the green coalition

The standard story is that fossil interests — Exxon, the Koch brothers, the coal lobby — bought their way into blocking US climate policy. Tooze finds this too small. He points out that for ten billion dollars, less than a tenth of Exxon’s market cap, the entire US coal industry could have been bought out and shut down at any point in the 2010s. The rear-guard accounts do not explain the size of the resistance.

His alternative: the American backlash is not rear-guard, it is front-footed. It is part of the same hegemonic project as the Iraq wars and the Bush-Cheney “we make our own reality” doctrine. The first defection from the global climate consensus came in 1997, before Kyoto was even signed, when the Senate voted 95-0 against any deal that exempted China. That unanimity was not climate denial — it was a panic about globalization. America had just signed NAFTA and the WTO. The political class was scared of what it had unleashed at home, and Kyoto’s exemption for China felt like one bridge too far.

“We’re an empire now. And when we act, we create our own reality.”

That was Karl Rove (paraphrased through Ron Suskind), and Tooze takes it seriously. This is what front-footed reality-making looks like, and the Iraq war was its disaster.

There was a window in the mid-2000s when a national security argument for green energy might have worked — a blue-green Apollo project. It was killed not by the coal lobby but by a technological surprise from inside the fossil sector: fracking. By the late 2000s, public-private investment had taught American oilmen how to drill where they had never drilled before. Then 2008 hit, and quantitative easing and zero interest rates poured cheap capital into shale. The fossil block was the largest beneficiary of QE.

And here is Tooze’s twist: fracking did not just make the US a petrostate. Fracked gas, because gas can mostly only flow through pipelines, stayed at home and rebuilt the American electricity system. In Texas, gas displaced coal at the bottom of the stack and wind piled on top. America in the 2010s is also an electrostate. It is just that nobody calls it one.

The Chinese shock, properly understood

Then the third shock — China — and Tooze wants you to understand it properly.

The obvious version is the manufacturing one: China went from a small player in solar in 2006 to 60% global share by 2013, and is now around four to five times the entire rest of the world combined. China can produce 1,200 GW of solar panels in a year. America’s total installed solar capacity is 250 GW. China can build five Americas of solar in twelve months.

But the real story, Tooze insists, is not the export of green tech. China’s exports as a share of its industrial output have been around 15% for a decade. The story is internal. 850 million people moved into 19 mega-urban regions in a single generation. 90% of all housing in China was built since 1990. Imagine erasing every American city and rebuilding it from scratch, twice, in thirty years.

That urbanization was powered by coal at a scale humanity had never seen. Tooze splits the human history of fossil fuels into three phases: prehistory, the Western 19th and 20th centuries, and what China did in one generation. China innovated here too — the world’s only fleet of driverless coal trucks, a fleet of ultra-supercritical power stations burning coal above 700°C. The US has one ultra-supercritical plant. China has hundreds.

The cost was 1.4 million deaths per year from air pollution in China in the early 2010s. For comparison, US air pollution deaths over thirty years totalled half a million. Tooze argues the CCP went into this with eyes open, and pivoted hard against it from the mid-2010s onwards — not as a concession to Western liberalism but as regime survival and as a power project. By the mid-2010s Chinese air quality standards on coal plants were stricter than US or European standards. The ultra-high-voltage transmission line that runs from the eastern industrial coast back into Xinjiang is, Tooze notes, also a tool of political incorporation, stamped onto the face of Tibet.

“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.”

The two faces of Western environmentalism

To understand why Europe cannot just team up with China on climate, Tooze rewinds to the 1970s. Western environmentalism was always two things. One face was anti-Cold-War — a damning of both nuclear superpowers, woven into the disarmament movement. The other face, especially in Germany, was universalist and human-rights-oriented, and it allied with neoconservatives against state socialism. The German Greens were the European party that championed the Dalai Lama through the 1980s and 1990s. They denounced Xinjiang and Hong Kong alongside MAGA Republicans in the late 2010s.

So when the EU formulated its 2019 stance on China — partner, competitor, systemic rival — that triple framing was not new confusion. It was the inheritance of green politics’ double DNA. It worked as long as Europe felt secure in its bubble and as long as Trump was the obvious other. Then Biden won, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the Chinese green energy build-out went vertical. Europe ran into the arms of America just as American climate policy was about to collapse again.

AI eats the pipeline

The final twist. The first year of Trump’s second term coincides with the most spectacular capital expenditure surge in American corporate history: AI data centres. Suddenly platform companies that were capital-light are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure measured in gigawatts.

And what does the American power construction pipeline look like? Almost entirely solar, wind, and batteries, with a sliver of gas. The Trump administration is trying to shut this down, leaving AI executives to fantasize about reviving nuclear or moving operations to the Gulf, where Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE have abundant fossil energy and the political appetite to buy America’s high-end Nvidia chips.

But — and this is the punchline — the Gulf states have no intention of powering their data centres with their own oil and gas. They plan to power them with solar, sourced from China. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE are now among the largest buyers of Chinese solar panels. Meanwhile the US Department of Energy and Qatar are jointly lecturing Europe about its climate regulations, because Qatari and US LNG are now Europe’s main non-Russian gas sources.

“The ultra high-end Nvidia chips will meet ultra cheap Chinese solar panels in the deserts of the Gulf.”

How to end the lecture

Tooze admits he could not figure out how to end. He uses Hayden White’s four narrative modes — comedy, romance, tragedy, satire — as a frame. Comedy assumes a happy resolution; tragedy assumes a doomed one; satire is too easy. Romance — joining the Chinese-led global struggle — is not actually available, because, he says drily, you cannot just sign up for a popular front with the CCP “except in the fantasies of bedroom tankies.”

His landing: maybe a comic narrative is still possible, but on one condition. The West has to stop casting itself as the protagonist. “Ours is a bit part. We’re not the love interest. This song is not about us.” His heroes are the Western analysts at Ember and the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab who are documenting Chinese energy investment around the world in granular detail — not to celebrate it but to give recipient countries the tools to bargain hard with Beijing. Useful work for the West that does not require Western centrality.

Q&A bits worth keeping

On the IRA: “If you ever have to rely on a Swiss Army knife, you’re basically in a pickle.” It was an emergency policy, brilliantly hyped, that did not transform American politics the way the Affordable Care Act did. Whether you can do the hype trick again post-Trump, Tooze doubts.

On India: the gulf with China is enormous and underestimated. India just overtook the EU as an emitter, but its real story is not climate, it is energy. Per capita energy consumption is too low to ask India to retire any existing capacity. The only useful question is how fast it can build new capacity. Pakistan has shown what cheap Chinese solar can do overnight; India is taking a more expensive route.

On rare earths: he sides with Michael Pettis. The shortage panic is overblown. The West can mine and refine these materials domestically, but only by either lowering environmental standards or paying for clean processes, and prefers to outsource the dirt to “available sacrifice zones” abroad.

On the US military: it is the world’s largest single fossil fuel consumer, exempted from Kyoto via a last-minute clause the Americans bullied through. Tooze treats US militarism as a fourth main of American power alongside finance, tech, and fracking — not properly leashed by the lawyers.

Key Takeaways

“Mid-transition” is the energy-studies term for the messy in-between period when one stable system is becoming another. Most of what looks like chaos in energy politics is mid-transition behaviour.
An “electrostate” is not just a country with green power; it is a country that has shifted a high share of its total energy consumption into electrical form. China is the leading example; the US is one too, but rarely framed that way because its electrification was driven by fracked gas.
90% of all housing in China was built after 1990. The Chinese urbanization wave is best understood as a third phase of human fossil fuel history, distinct from both pre-industrial life and Western industrialism.
The 1997 Byrd-Hagel resolution against Kyoto passed the US Senate 95-0. The unanimity came from anxiety about globalization (NAFTA, WTO) and China, not from climate denial.
Fracking was not enabled mainly by deregulation. It was enabled by zero interest rates and QE after 2008. The fossil sector was the single biggest beneficiary of post-crisis monetary policy.
The European Green Deal was, in proportion to GDP, larger than the US Inflation Reduction Act. Xi Jinping’s 2020 net-zero plan cited it directly in its slide deck.
The Eurozone crisis is the inflection point where Chinese green energy investment overtakes European green energy investment. Austerity killed the European decarbonization lead.
China can manufacture 1,200 GW of solar panels per year. The US has 250 GW of installed solar capacity total. China could replicate America’s entire solar fleet five times in one year.
China’s air pollution deaths peaked at around 1.4 million per year in the early 2010s. Comparable US pollution deaths over thirty years totalled around 500,000.
Chinese coal-fired power plants run at higher efficiency standards than American or European ones. Most of China’s fleet is “ultra-supercritical” (>700°C). The US has one such plant.
German green politics has carried two strands since the 1970s: an anti-Cold-War peace-movement strand, and a universalist human-rights strand that has historically allied with neoconservatives against authoritarian states. Both strands now pull European policy on China in opposite directions.
New US data centre power demand is being met almost entirely by solar, wind, and batteries — not gas, and definitely not new nuclear. The structural shift in US electricity generation is happening regardless of federal policy.
The Gulf petrostates are buying Chinese solar panels to power the AI data centres they will run on American chips. The world’s three biggest energy and tech systems are mid-collision in the desert.
Tooze’s frame for thinking about the present: Hayden White’s four narrative modes (comedy, romance, tragedy, satire). Useful diagnostic for asking what kind of story you are unconsciously telling about the future.
Best Western contribution now, in his view: not leadership, but documentation. Map Chinese investment flows in granular detail so recipient countries can negotiate from strength.

Claude’s Take

This is Tooze at his most useful and most exposed. Useful because he has done what he is uniquely good at — pulling together energy data, industrial history, social theory, and geopolitics into a single moving picture without reducing any of them. The framing of “front-footed” American resistance to climate action is genuinely fresh. Most accounts treat the fossil lobby as a defensive blocker; Tooze treats it as part of the same imperial project that produced the Iraq war and the post-2008 fracking boom. That reframing is worth the price of admission. So is the rebalancing of the China story away from “they’re winning the export race” toward “they did the largest urbanization in human history and you’re seeing the consequences.”

Exposed because he admits the lecture has no landing. The honest move at the end — confessing that he could not figure out how to conclude, and then reaching for Hayden White’s narrative modes as a way to organise the question — is the kind of intellectual honesty academics rarely show in public. It is also a small evasion. “Don’t be the protagonist, document Chinese investment flows, help recipient countries negotiate” is sensible advice for European think tanks. It is not really a politics. The lecture diagnoses the collapse of a forty-year project and offers, as a successor, the role of helpful note-taker. Whether that is humility or surrender is a fair question.

The data is solid and the comparisons land. The 1.4 million Chinese pollution deaths against 500,000 American deaths over thirty years is the kind of statistic that reorganises how you think. The point about US ultra-supercritical coal plants (one) versus China’s (most of the fleet) is the kind of small fact that punctures a lot of casual assumptions. The 90% of Chinese housing built since 1990 is a number worth remembering. The Tooze move of widening the lens — fracking as a US electrostate story, AI data centres as a renewables story, Gulf petrostates as Chinese solar customers — keeps catching things that single-issue accounts miss.

A nine. Loses a point because the ending is genuinely unresolved and because the satirical mode he says he is resisting keeps leaking through. But it is the best ninety minutes you can spend right now on what is actually happening to the energy transition.