The Weekly Planet #9: Metabolic Sovereignty

Of late, many thinkers have commented that the new cold war - and its attendant geopolitics - is not going to be ideological as much as metabolic, with competing energy stacks driving competition and conflict. In this scheme, there’s a Petrostate nexus led by the US competing with an Electrostate nexus led by China.

I have a slightly different take.

Metabolism needs both energy and information and as I see it, the US is doubling down on AI, so it’s less of a Petrostate than it’s championing the Compute Stack while China is centering the Electric Stack. Both have the capacity to incorporate the other - a compute centric power can switch out gas for electricity (of which it will need a lot!) and having tons of electricity on hand will make it easier to sustain an AI stack, especially if AI is going to be integrated deeply into hardware.

I am going to stay agnostic - for now - on the better of the two.

In any case, the metabolic wars have a compute component as well as an energetic component. What’s missing in the commentary so far is the political unit that’s engaging in geopolitics. I believe that’s the Metabolic Sovereign, a nation (or some other unit?) that has monopoly control - or alternately, what Maturana-Varela-Luhmann would call Autopoiesis - over the energy and information that flows across its borders. Also, those borders don’t have to be national borders - we don’t know yet as to how the boundary of the metabolic sovereign will be drawn.

Over the next four weeks, I am going to dive deeply into the concept of Metabolic Sovereignty, with this first week devoted to abstract considerations, week 2 on Energy Sovereignty, week 3 on Compute Sovereignty and then back to Metabolic Sovereignty in week 4 where I would like to combine abstract and concrete considerations.

On Metabolic Sovereignty

When I was a teenager in Delhi, I used to wander into the Mir Publishers bookstore in Connaught Circus, a cramped Soviet-era outpost that sold hardbound books on mathematics and physics at prices a student could afford. Those books, translated from Russian, carried the scent of state printing presses and ideological confidence. I learned quantum fields and algebraic topology from them, but every now and then, buried between tensor equations, appeared a phrase that seemed to come from another planet: dialectical materialism. It startled me. I could follow the mathematics; this I couldn’t. What did it mean that reality itself was material, that social order could be explained by the logic of matter?

Years later, I understand why the phrase unsettled me. The world I inhabit is not built from static matter so much as from dynamic flows of energy and information. These are the currents that sustain both living organisms and human institutions. To understand society today, we need to think not in terms of substance but in terms of metabolism, the ceaseless conversion of energy and information into work and meaning. From that shift in thinking follows another: if power once depended on territorial control - on drawing borders and enforcing them - it now depends on the control of flows. Sovereignty, in the twenty-first century, is increasingly about who governs the metabolism of civilization.

I call this emerging condition metabolic sovereignty: the power to organize and regulate the flows of energy and information that make life possible. It fuses two forms of control that have usually been treated apart - energy sovereignty and compute sovereignty - into a single architecture of power. Energy sovereignty secures the physical metabolism: the electricity that lights cities, moves vehicles, and drives industry. Compute sovereignty secures the cognitive metabolism: the computational systems that perceive, decide, and coordinate. Each by itself is partial. Together, they define the infrastructure of survival and sense-making in a planetary civilization.

We are used to thinking of geopolitics as a contest of ideologies, or perhaps of nuclear bombs and economic prowess. It’s all of those and more, but beneath the treaties and blocs lies something more basic: metabolism. Every society is a living arrangement of energy and information—electrons and bits coursing through grids and fibers, the power plants and data centers that heat homes, move goods, feed cities, and coordinate decisions.

The central claim of metabolic sovereignty is simple: in a century defined by planetary disruption and computational acceleration, power and prosperity accrue to political communities that can self-organize and secure the flows of energy and computation that sustain life.

This is not a neat return to autarky - there will still be flows of energy and information in and out of the sovereign, but its a recognition that the 21st-century state (and its rivals: corporations, cities, networks) rises or falls on its capacity to maintain metabolic order - to keep lights on without cooking the climate, to provision food and water through shocks, to steer complex infrastructure with digital nervous systems robust against coercion. In that sense, sovereignty is being redefined: not just supreme authority within a territory, but competence over vital flows of energy and information.

The metabolic sovereign doesn’t have to a nation-state - it can also be a village.

From Thrones to Control Rooms

Classically, sovereignty meant: supreme rule over a bounded space, the right to decide and be obeyed. Of course, the modern nation state is far from a closed system - there’s international trade as well as international political arrangements such as the UN Charter, human rights regimes, free-trade agreements, and supranational entities like the EU.

Even so, a durable core survives: sovereignty is still the legal name we give to ultimate authority, and to the responsibility to provide order. But the kind of order that matters has shifted. Climate change, globalized supply chains, and the digitization of everything have made metabolic order - secure energy, resilient logistics, reliable communications - the new face of the social contract.

There’s a systems-theory way of saying the same thing. Niklas Luhmann took the biological notion of autopoiesis—a living system that continuously produces itself—and applied it to society. A social system, he argued, persists by regenerating its own communications, codes, and boundaries. It is operationally closed and structurally coupled to its environment: it maintains identity by transforming inputs from the world into meaningful signals and responses. In our context, a metabolically sovereign polity is one that can keep regenerating the conditions of its survival—energy, food, data, water—under uncertainty, without being at the mercy of a hostile environment or a chokepoint it doesn’t control.

That shift from thrones to parliaments to control rooms helps explain why the map is changing. Where the 20th century was ordered by oil, the 21st is reordered by electrons and compute, a move from petrostates to electrostates and computestates. Petrostates remain powerful, but their logic is backward-looking: defend rents, weaponize scarcity, treat decarbonization as a threat. Electrostates and computestates build out renewables, batteries, chips, fabs, cloud regions, and undersea cables, then run it all with software. They compete to be the keystone species of the global metabolism.

The US is both a computestate and a petrostate. For now the two are in an uneasy equilibrium.

The Planetary Turn

Astrobiologist Adam Frank has argued we are living through a “second Copernican revolution”—one that forces us to see planets and life as co-evolving systems. In that picture, a mature biosphere exhibits something like planetary intelligence: complex feedback loops that sustain habitability across deep time. Humanity’s technosphere is now entangled with that biosphere, but our technologically enhanced metabolism is extractive, leaky, prone to destabilize the very conditions that support civilization.

If the planet is the ultimate sovereign and the carbon cycle, hydrological cycle, biodiversity are political as much as physical, then any credible model of sovereignty must align the human technosphere with those constraints.

We need a planetary contract that can be enforced by a planetary sovereign.

Metabolic sovereignty, in this sense, points toward a planetary constitution and institutions that secure a livable metabolism for everyone.

That constitution, IMHO, will not be drawn up as laws but as code.

Electrons: Energy Sovereignty After Oil

On the energy side, the tectonic plates are already moving. China has spent a decade constructing the industrial base of an electrostate, now controlling more than 80% of solar PV manufacturing capacity (and an even higher share in some upstream stages) and over three-quarters of the world’s battery output. That isn’t just industrial policy; it’s a bid for metabolic leverage: whoever makes the panels, inverters, wafers, cells, and packs in vast quantities brokers the terms of the transition.

This matters because electricity is becoming the central energy source. The more sectors we electrify (transport, heating, industry), the more a society’s resilience depends on cheap, abundant, reliable electrons, and the more its politics tracks the grid. In 2025, reports noted renewables’ galloping growth and China’s outsized role in adding capacity, even as policy shifts tempered global forecasts; the macro trend still points to a decade where solar, wind, storage, and upgraded grids define national competence. Countries that build secure, diverse supply chains, invest in firm low-carbon generation (hydro, nuclear, geothermal), and design smarter, more resilient grids will accumulate the metabolic sovereignty oil once conferred. Those that don’t will be price-takers, import-dependent, and vulnerable to coercion.

Energy sovereignty is not isolation. It’s optionality: diversified sources, interoperable infrastructure, local buffers like microgrids and storage, and the ability to substitute (e.g., heat pumps for gas, EVs as mobile batteries). It’s also justice: a grid that is technically superb but socially brittle will fail when it’s most needed.

Bits: Compute Sovereignty and the New Oil

If electrons are the blood of modern life, computation is its nervous system. AI training runs on scarce hardware; data centers congregate near cheap power and fiber; nations face a hard choice between renting capability from hyperscalers or building sovereign stacks. A 2025 analysis noted that AI-grade data centers were located in just 33 countries, with capacity heavily concentrated in a few—raising the specter that “compute producers” could wield influence over “compute importers” much as oil producers once did. This is the geopolitics of FLOPs and fabs.

Compute sovereignty has at least three layers:

Location: hosting data centers, HPC clusters, cloud regions, and network chokepoints (IXPs, cables) on your soil.

Control: who owns and governs them—domestic firms, public consortia, or foreign hyperscalers.

Supply chains: access to advanced chips and lithography, packaging capacity, and software/IP rights.

The U.S. leads in chip design and frontier AI; Taiwan in advanced manufacturing; the Netherlands (ASML) in critical lithography; China in scaling compute and retrofitting constraints. None of this is settled; all of it hinges on energy abundance, because the next generation of models will be power-hungry by design. Watch where new data-center clusters emerge: they are the visible outposts of metabolic strategy.

Integrating the Stack: From Pieces to a Metabolism

The point of naming “metabolic sovereignty” is to integrate what we often treat as separate dossiers—energy, compute, food, water, materials—into one picture. A polity has metabolic sovereignty to the degree that it can:

Generate sufficient clean power and store it cost-effectively.

Process critical materials and manufacture key components (from transformers to wafers).

Host and govern the digital stack (chips, clouds, data) without hostage risks.

Provision food and water through diversified, shock-tolerant systems.

Recycle and remanufacture at scale, shrinking dependency on linear imports.

You don’t need 100% on every line to be secure; you need degrees of freedom in each, and substitutability across them. A city with robust microgrids and desalination can ride out supply shocks; an island with geothermal and controlled environment agriculture can insulate itself; a region with strong rail and electrified freight can keep commerce moving when oil spikes.

This is where Luhmann’s autopoiesis is more than metaphor. A metabolically sovereign system is one that keeps making itself under changing conditions: it shortens critical distances, diversifies suppliers, and co-designs technology and law so that failure in one component doesn’t cascade.

Emergencies, Exceptions, and the Risk of Leviathan

Carl Schmitt’s grim aphorism - “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” has haunted political theory for a century. For Schmitt, a true sovereign can suspend the law to save the state; Giorgio Agamben warned that this state of exception can become a permanent technique of rule. Climate change pushes us toward metabolic exceptions: meaning conditions in which normal politics fails to protect the flows of life (heatwaves, crop failures, water collapse, grid emergencies) and leaders reach for extra-legal powers to re-establish order. That prospect should worry us. But pretending we won’t face emergency management at planetary scale is wishful thinking.

How will power organize in that pressure cooker?

Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright sketch four archetypes for climate politics: Climate Leviathan (a capitalist, planetary-scale sovereign that imposes top-down coordination), Climate Mao (planetary coordination under anti-capitalist command), Climate Behemoth (reactionary nationalism that rejects coordination), and Climate X (decentralized, solidaristic, post-sovereign movements). In metabolic terms: Leviathan centralizes the grid-of-grids and the data-of-data; Mao seizes the means of (re)production and rationing; Behemoth hoards resources behind walls; X federates thousands of local sovereignties into a commons. None is pure; all are possible mixtures.

Our task is to steer toward versions that deliver metabolic order without sacrificing freedom and justice.

Science fiction has done some of our political thinking for us. In The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson imagines India, reeling from a mass-fatality heatwave, unilaterally deploying solar geoengineering - a metabolic exception - to cool the subcontinent. He also imagines a global institution able to coordinate finance, technology, and coercion to bend the curve. Whether you read that as benevolent Leviathan or necessary evil depends on your priors. Either way, it dramatizes the reality: someone will decide on exceptions as climate shocks mount. The question is whether we build legitimate, accountable forms of metabolic authority that act with foresight and justice, or slide into ad-hoc rule by panic and force.

Principles for Building Metabolic Sovereignty

If metabolic sovereignty names the goal, what does the practice look like? A pragmatic agenda would include:

Electrify almost everything, cleanly and fast. Build a portfolio: wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, nuclear where safe and economical. Invest in long-duration storage, demand response, and grid intelligence. Localize critical components where feasible; diversify the rest.

Treat data centers and networks as critical infrastructure. Site new compute where clean power is abundant; pair with firm generation and storage. Incentivize sovereign-capable cloud options (public, academic, or regulated private) to avoid total dependence on a few global providers. Align AI growth with energy system upgrades.

Shorten and circularize material flows. Scale domestic and regional capabilities in refining, cell/module manufacturing, transformers, power electronics, and recycling. Build strategic reserves not just of fuels but of critical components (switchgear, inverters, chips).

Plan for metabolic exceptions—constitutionally. Codify trigger-based authorities for extreme heat, drought, wildfire smoke, blackouts—with sunset clauses, oversight, and rights protections. Pre-negotiate fail-over agreements across borders for shared rivers, grids, and refugee reception.

Distribute sovereignty downward. Empower cities, regions, co-ops, and indigenous nations to run microgrids, manage forests and watersheds, produce food, and own data. A federated metabolism is harder to break and easier to legitimate - Climate X as design principle, not utopia.

Measure the right things. Track metabolic risk as seriously as macroeconomics: heat-mortality exposure, grid fragility, water stress, food import dependence, compute chokepoints, and supply concentration indices.

Link justice to resilience. The most reliable systems are those people are willing to defend and repair. Prioritize energy affordability, participatory planning, and the co-benefits (clean air, green jobs). Make the transition a rights-expansion, not a technocratic imposition.

A New Social Contract of Flows

In the end, metabolic sovereignty reframes the social contract: citizens owe obedience not to an abstract symbol of the state but to institutions that keep life possible, and do so within planetary boundaries. That demands new capabilities (scenario planning, systems engineering, computational governance) and old virtues (prudence, solidarity, accountability). It can feel administrative rather than romantic, but survival politics needs that alongside visions of Gaia.

One last provocation.

The goal isn’t to crown a new king. It’s mature as a species: to assemble a distributed, layered, accountable intelligence about our own metabolism before exceptions make the rules for us. That is what it would mean to achieve metabolic sovereignty worthy of the name: not domination over others, but stewardship over the flows that let us share the only home we have.