The Weekly Planet #3: Metabolism Wars

Nothing in society makes sense except in the light of the planet.

This week’s Daily Planets have mostly been about the metabolic competition reshaping our world—by “metabolic,” I mean the energy, information and materials systems that power computation, industry, and life. I've been tracking interconnected stories about chip sanctions, viral ecologies, urban sustainability, and the emerging ecological Cold War, all of which is pointing to a fundamental reorganization of planetary politics around the question of what powers civilization.

I began this week with the tools that might enable AGI--the advanced chips that the US controls and China wants. As the SemiAnalysis report argues, Chinese companies like Huawei are playing an extraordinary game of "fab whack-a-mole," setting up shell companies faster than regulators can list them, building fabs connected by wafer bridges that are legally separate but physically continuous, importing "mature process" equipment that mysteriously ends up producing 7nm chips next door.

But information runs on matter: the ability to build AI supercomputers isn’t just about having the right chips; it’s about having the electrical, cooling, and physical infrastructure to run them at scale. China has no issues converting multi-gigawatt aluminum smelters into datacenters in six months. They can re-route industrial power to compute clusters rapidly, potentially building installations that dwarf anything in the US if policy aligns. China might have a balanced metabolism .

This brings us to the deeper transformation Nils Gilman identifies - the ecological Cold War that's dividing the world not by ideology but by energy metabolism. On one side stands China, which is pivoting from coal villain to green hegemon. They now control roughly 80% of the global solar supply chain, around 70–80% of lithium‑ion battery manufacturing, and the vast majority of critical mineral processing—part of a state-led transformation that treats ecological modernization as both environmental necessity and geopolitical strategy.

On the other side, we have what Gilman calls the "axis of petrostates": the US under Trump, Putin's Russia, and MBS's Saudi Arabia. What unites them isn't governance models but their mutual dependence on fossil wealth and determination to resist decarbonization. They're building a petro-populism that treats hydrocarbons as both material base and cultural bulwark, where fossil fuels become emblems of sovereignty and the green transition gets denounced as neocolonialism.

Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie, in their Polycrisis analyses, show how China's renewable push offers something genuinely new: a development model based on electricity rather than oil. China is strategically electrifying its economy not primarily for climate reasons but to reduce dependence on imported hydrocarbons--resources it lacks domestically. This is import substitution on a civilizational scale. China hosts 70-80% of the world's clean energy factories, a complete reversal from two decades ago when the US, Europe, and Japan dominated. China's renewable energy leadership offers Global South countries a pathway to reduce dependence on both the US and fossil fuels. If the Chinese get their way, electrification will be built into the infrastructure of development. No wonder successive US administrations have treated Chinese solar panels and EVs as security threats rather than climate solutions.

Meanwhile, in New York, Michael Sorkin talks about Terreform's radical experiment in urban metabolism at human scale. But he also reveals how far we are from true sustainability. Yes, technically NYC could produce enough food for all its residents--but it would require on the order of dozens of large power plants’ worth of electricity for vertical farms alone (Sorkin estimates ~25 nuclear plants’ output). The city could become autonomous in food, waste, water, and energy, but the cost would be prodigious. Still there's something romantic about urban neighborhoods as cores of sustainable organization, freight moving through subways, street space recaptured for growing food.

But perhaps the most profound story comes from COVID-19 and what it reveals about our place in the microbial world. The virus moved from bats to possibly pangolins to humans, treating us as just another multicellular habitat for reproduction. This is the great "un-differentiation" event that undermines the entire modern concept of politics--that clean separation Hobbes drew between human civilization and the state of nature. On the order of 8% of our genome is viral in origin. Every organ system depends on bacterial metabolites. Viruses regulate our internal ecosystems just as they regulate biodiversity in actual ponds. The modernist conception of the human as separate from nature is a dangerous illusion that makes us misunderstand both pandemics and politics.

We live in a world where microbes invented the feedback systems supporting all life on Earth, where all organisms including us are inseparably interwoven with bacteria and viruses. These metabolic stories converge on a single point: the modern system that separated human artifice from natural necessity, that treated technology as freedom from nature rather than participation in it, is breaking down. The chip wars reveal that technological sovereignty depends on industrial metabolism. The ecological Cold War shows that energy systems are destiny. Urban experiments demonstrate that self-sufficiency requires accepting natural limits. And COVID proves we're multi-species assemblages, not sovereign individuals.

What's emerging is a new kind of politics organized around metabolic capacity. China's model is attractive to many because it's industrial metabolism at unprecedented scale. The petrostates resist while they can, though the US might well oscillate to the other extreme if its politics shift, but independent of its status as a petrostate or as a green superpower, the US is doubling down on its chips.

What needs fleshing out—soon—is the empirical backbone of this intuition: we’re not facing separate crises in chips, climate, cities, and biology, We're facing a single metabolic transformation that's reorganizing every aspect of planetary civilization.

The empires of the future will exert control through chips and cables.

The planet is telling us—through chips and viruses, through solar panels and pangolins—that the age of separation is over. We’re all in the same metabolic soup now. The only question is whether we’ll learn to swim together or insist on drowning separately.