The Weekly Planet #1

The Sunday Synthesis of all the daily updates

The biggest shift in my thinking over the last year has been from treating “climate” as a standalone policy problem to treating Earth’s coupled bio-geo-tech systems as the primary unit of analysis and that means analyzing carbon alongside nitrogen, biodiversity, water, materials, supply chains, finance, and compute as one interdependent system.

We are in the condition of planetarity

Ummm....wtf does that mean? How does one do planetary analysis?

Why Planet > Climate

For decades, climate change has dominated environmental discourse, and for good reason—it represents an existential challenge to human civilization. But a climate-only frame has three limits.

First, climate change is one pathway by which human activity is perturbing planetary systems (nitrogen and phosphorus loading, mass extinction, factory farming, plastics, land-use change, freshwater depletion, air pollution are others). The Anthropocene isn't just about carbon—it's about the simultaneous multi-system transformation of earthly conditions.

Second, the geopolitical landscape has shifted . The early climate regime presumed Western-led coordination (read Climate Leviathan for example - it came out in 2018, but might as well have been written a century ago); that world has ended. Today, renewables, grids, and critical minerals are as much about industrial strategy as cooperation. China's scale advantages in solar manufacturing, Europe's energy security shocks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and U.S. protectionist industrial policy paired with expanded fossil production point to a multipolar reality where decarbonization is being driven by strategic competition at least as much as collective action.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, climate is an issue domain; “planet” names a coupled system that requires institutions capable of setting cross-domain constraints (e.g., carbon budgets linked to land, water, and materials budgets) and enforcing them across borders. Without such institutions, sectoral wins are offset elsewhere in the system. The air quality in Delhi affects respiratory health today. The collapse of fisheries impacts food security immediately. The technosphere we've built shapes every aspect of daily life.

The Technosphere as Planetary Reality

Peter Haff's concept of the technosphere is a useful shorthand to say that we're not just living in nature—we're living in a hybrid system where the technological and the biological have become inseparable. The technosphere is an assemblage of machines and infrastructure, the entire globally coupled system of human activity and technology that now processes immense flows of energy and materials.

People worry about AI controlling their lives, but if you think of the Technosphere as an already existing artificial intelligence, it already controls our lives: we can’t survive when the grid breaks down.

As Paul Edwards and Gabrielle Hecht argue, infrastructures enroll us: we maintain the grid because we depend on the grid, creating powerful lock-in effects. Failure triggers restoration protocols (human and automated), which is why “return to normal” often outruns “rethink normal.” The question isn't whether the technosphere exists, but whether we can develop the governance structures to manage something this vast and path-dependent. The technosphere has evolved faster than our ability to understand it, let alone control it.

Animal Dreams

Climate → Planet also frees us to think about beings who are being tortured whether we fix the climate or not. Mostly non-human animals. For a while it looked like plant-based meat alternatives were going to transform our food habits. Not so much any more.

I am partial to veggie burgers. In fact, I had a couple yesterday night for dinner. These days my go to brand is Boca, which has been around for a while, but the two big kids on the block are Beyond and Impossible. And as you might know, they are both struggling to maintain their valuations and the massive amounts of investment.

I don't have any special fondness for these brands, but anything that reduces factory farming, which is an unmitigated evil, is a good thing. And frankly I don't get why people gobble sausages and (meat) burgers which are highly processed, but don't extend the same courtesy to a plant based alternative. And I really don't get why eating meat is such a thing for men.

China as Planetary Actor

China’s state-led buildout of solar, batteries, and EVs crystallizes the planetary turn. Adam Tooze's recent lecture in Beijing lays out the implications. China isn't just participating in the energy transition—it's redefining its industrial and geopolitical terms. The scale is unprecedented by historical standards (annual solar deployment measured in hundreds of gigawatts; EV and battery output dominating global supply chains). But this isn't just about scale—it's about the model. Where the West imagined a gradual, market-based transition guided by carbon pricing and international agreements, China has unleashed state-directed industrial policy at a scale that overturns prior orthodoxy.

This creates a paradox. China's renewable surge offers evidence that we might address climate change at necessary speed and scale. Pakistani villages are getting solar panels. African nations are leapfrogging fossil fuel infrastructure. The green energy revolution is finally here. But it's arriving stamped "Made in China," creating dependencies that make Western politicians deeply uncomfortable.

Wang Huning, the most powerful intellectual alive, has long argued that "software" (culture, values, attitudes) shapes political destiny as much as "hardware" (economics, systems, institutions). Whatever one makes of that synthesis, China is acting as a planetary-scale supplier of decarbonization hardware, with the political leverage that implies.

The Politics of Planetary Transformation

The planetary isn't politically neutral - we're moving from a world organized around fossil fuel autonomy to one organized around electrical networks. That shift centralizes control points (grids, standards, mineral supply chains) and redistributes bargaining power.

Tariffs on Chinese EVs in the U.S. and EU are not only protectionist; they are bids to control chokepoints in the emergent electrical order. When Germany auto workers see BYD vehicles that are better and cheaper than anything they can produce, they're not just seeing competition; they're seeing the end of a world where advanced manufacturing was a Western monopoly. The "second China shock" that economists are now discussing targets capital-intensive, high-tech sectors rather than only low-wage manufacturing.

Yet this shift might also be an opportunity. The planetary perspective suggests that we need to move beyond zero-sum thinking. Pakistan getting reliable electricity from Chinese solar panels isn't a Chinese victory over the West—it's a human victory over energy poverty. African nations developing with renewable energy rather than coal isn't about geopolitical competition—it's about preventing the climate catastrophe that would affect everyone.

Beyond Catastrophism

Catastrophism tends to paralyze publics or harden denial; it rarely builds durable coalitions. When everything is framed as existential crisis, people either panic or tune out. Neither response produces effective action.

The planetary perspective offers something different: a recognition that we're in the middle of a transformation as significant as the agricultural or industrial revolutions. Thinking planetarily means specifying new institutions and rules or at least the possibility of fresh imagination.

We need new ways of thinking adequate to our planetary moment. The old categories—nature vs. culture, East vs. West, human vs. technology—are breaking down. In their place, we need concepts that can grasp the hybrid realities we're creating: socio-technical systems, planetary boundaries, ecological civilizations, more-than-human assemblages. In short:

The planet is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited.