The Daily Planet #34: The Electrostate, Part 1 - Infrastructure Stacks

It's been five weeks since I started these Daily Planets and I'm now reasonably confident that I can keep them going for a while. So far I have been quite scattered in how I cover topics of planetary interest; one day artificial intelligence, next day energy geopolitics, and then animal vocalizations on day five. I'll still perform that kind of scatterbrained coverage but I also want to cover certain key concepts in depth.

The Galvanic Apparatus by John Pass

So starting today I'm going to make each week about one concept - maybe multiple weeks but definitely one week at a minimum. This week's concept is that of the electrostate. From today's Daily Planet:

That divide is not ideological but infrastructural. There is a growing split between electro-states (those building industrial capacity for clean energy technologies) and carbon states (those whose economic and political institutions remain deeply tied to fossil fuels). Energy systems both reflect and mobilise the political coalitions that govern national economies, and these coalitions shape national capacity to resist external economic coercion amid deepening global fragmentation.

The deepest idea here is about the transition from ideology (communism versus capitalism) to infrastructure as the organizing principle of geopolitical competition, with China as the archetypal electrostate and the US the archetypal carbonstate. Not surprising, because infrastructural stacks are how metabolism manifests in society.

I want to understand this better. Note that there's difference in category between fossil fuels and electricity - the latter is fundamentally more abstract than coal or gasoline. If modernization tracks the progress of abstraction, one might argue that China has become the epicenter of modernization.

Infrastructure choices mark the difference between carbonstates and electrostates; not only is this distinction about the production of power, but also its distribution and consumption. You can produce electricity using coal and then use that to create an electric car based transportation system. That's still an electrostate, for the role of fossil fuel ends once it's converted into volts, and it's relatively easy to switch out the coal for solar. But in a carbon state, the carbon economy's tentacles penetrate all of society - from home heating to gasoline powered cars - therefore, you have a much deeper link between the political economy and fossil fuels.

By contrast, carbon states such as Russia remain tightly bound to hydrocarbon rents and fossil-fuel exports. Their economic power relies on carbon-intensive trade flows, which limits flexibility and locks in established elite coalitions.

If infrastructure is the organizing principle, we should (will?) see increasing rapproachment between the US and Russia despite the current bonhomie between China and Russia.

The growing Brics divide between carbon nations and electrostates

Energy systems can shape political institutions and make some nations more vulnerable to trade wars than others