The Energy Giants Face Off
In the early 1910s, Winston Churchill ordered the conversion of Britain’s giant fleet of dreadnought battleships to oil fuel from coal. In so doing, the story goes, he ushered in the age of oil power. He also effectively anointed the United States — at the time the world’s largest producer of oil — as the 20th century’s natural hegemon.
If global competition is inextricably interwoven with technology and energy, how states power themselves could predict how the next world order takes shape.
Today, China is a classic example of a power state. It pursues energy in every direction, harnessing an army of scientists and industrial R&D. The United States, at least through the end of the Biden administration, seemed to be in the same game. Thanks to shale, the United States surged ahead of Saudi Arabia in the oil and gas stakes. There was a retro, Tinkertoy aspect to President Joe Biden’s emphasis on U.S. steel, but the United States was at least competing in green energy.
Then came the second Trump administration, itself the product of a generation of radicalization in the American conservative movement. There are elements of its politics that are relatively conventional: the talk of energy dominance, the use of blunt force to secure a sphere of influence. But then there is the climate denial, the attacks on science, the phobia of wind turbines. In its darkest incarnation, the administration embraces a vision of conservatism somewhere between steampunk and reactionary 19th-century Catholicism.
The problem is, of course, that steampunk isn’t real and solar panels are, that artificial intelligence needs gigawatts of power and that drones are a menace to battleships — even of the Trump class. Cutting loose from 21st-century physics, electrical engineering, the markets and international community may help the administration stick it to the libs, but pandemics are real, Venezuelan oil really is sticky and the modern U.S. Army really does run on batteries, not push-ups.
The anti-systemic, postfactual quality of U.S. power and its obsession with oil did not originate with Donald Trump. Remember Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and 2003? The Chinese do. The determination with which Beijing has pursued alternative energy for the last generation reflects its desire not to be subjected to the whims of Washington and its violent and capricious politics. China today is first and foremost a giant fossil energy power — by far the largest the world has ever seen. But its principal energy source is one the United States does not control: coal. And, true to the Soviet example, the backbone of China’s energy system is industrial electricity — but now it’s electro-tech. To eventually replace its coal-fired power stations, China has encouraged private entrepreneurs to build innovative factories for batteries and solar panels that now command world markets.
On the horizon is the promise of a global power system based not on foraging for oil but on farming the sun. That system won’t come without its own complications. By contrast with the grotesque caricature presented by America today, it is tempting to paint China as a haven of light: clear waters and green mountains, as President Xi Jinping likes to say. But its system, too, has a dark side. Solar farms in Tibet and power lines in Xinjiang have imperial stakes. The region’s economics are a mess.
But China’s is the real dialectic of modernity, not Mr. Trump’s W.W.E. version. Does a world order come out of this unequal competition between energy giants? Do new blocs of power and influence form between the petrostates and countries that buy into a greener future made in China? No one can see that far ahead. The outlook, for now, is for multipolar disorder lavishly powered with cheap energy: a polycrisis with drones and heavy crude.