Electrification is good for climate even when it's based on fossil fuels - the efficiency of electricity when consumed is higher than that of burning fossil fuels by the end consumer. But forget climate for a moment. Electrification is also good for other anthropogenic harms such as air pollution.

In today’s Daily Planet: if you can’t be a producer Electrostate, at least be a consumer Electrostate.

On the Electrostate - the first of 6 Daily Planets on this topic. The deepest idea here is about the transition from ideology to infrastructure as the organizing principle of geopolitical competition, with China as the archetypal Electrostate and the US the archetypal Carbonstate.

All human activity is grounded in energetic and informational sources. These two plug us into the larger (much larger!) non-human world. Future cooperation as well as competition will be predicated on access and control over the two. That's the basic insight behind Metabolics.

You can create almost anything if you can build stacks powered by compute and electricity. Today’s Daily Planet is about the electricity side of this transformation.

If I had to boil our planetary condition to two enabling transformations, they would be: compute and energy, or what I call bits and volts. China's "AI Plus" policy aims to deeply integrate artificial intelligence across all sectors of the economy and society.

Planetary Risk implies Planetary Insurance, but how are we going to price that insurance? "Insurance in the Polycrisis" by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay explores the profound challenges climate change poses to the insurance industry and, by extension, the broader economy.

On how the green energy transition is reshaping global geopolitics by driving economic opportunity, energy security, and technological innovation.

Energy is at the heart of civilization, and every shift in energy production leads to shifts in power. The shift to renewables will also be a shift in power relations.

The Daily Planet # 28: Wounded Lions Existential risk is an evergreen topic here at the Daily Planet - and one that's haunted the post-war era. Which leads me to the question animating today's Daily Planet: should we have a class of planetary risk takers? dailyplanet.leaflet.pub/3lyrwr53ycc2q

We live in a moment where every attempt at planetary thinking reveals both possibility and paralysis. This week’s Daily Planets have been circling around a central tension: the collision between our belief-driven politics and the material realities of a planet that doesn’t care about our stories.

Even committed ecologists don't experience other species as belonging to a world - not a niche, but a world which has its own sensory landscape. But rhythm and sound are endemic to the natural world, which suggests we should engage with other species as artists in residence.

Insightful conversation between Nils Gilman, Jerry Brown and Stewart Brand - nice to see how planetary thinking precedes awareness of climate change and with any luck, will continue after we solve climate change

It's both incredible and utterly predictable that our views about wolves and coyotes come bundled as Democrat or Republican. One might hope that planetarity will help us shed our partisan identities, but perhaps it will be the exact opposite: there will be a Red Planet and a Blue Planet.

Hirschman's experience of economic development after the devastation of WWII is a useful guide to the world we might want to create when we come to our planetary senses. More in today’s Daily Planet.

Polycrisis has been the term-du-jour for a few years now, ever since Adam Tooze reintroduced it into the global lexicon. In today's Daily Planet, Yuen Yuen Ang has a different take, focusing on the possibilities inherent within crisis, and saying we are in the condition of Polyunity.

If metabolism is the big picture of planetary politics, chips and cables are the two core commodities. China is doubling down on cables and the US on chips. Ben Thompson's defence of the US taking a 10% stake in Intel should be read against that background.

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 material flows that power the pursuit of life and liberty.

Tim Sahay - better known as Albert Pinto/70’s Bachchan to his fans - and Kate Mackenzie write an amazing newsletter on the Polycrisis. In today's Daily Planet, they are on a podcast with Paris Marx where they talk about the energetic basis of the geopolitical competition between the US and China.

Gilman writes frequently about planetary politics, including a book about which I will talk about sometime. Today's Daily Planet is from his Substack.

1/3: I keep saying whenever I get a chance: "Nothing in society makes sense except in the light of the planet." One aspect of that planetary sense-making is modeling society in metabolic terms. Today's Daily Planet is about urban metabolism. Tomorrow's and Saturday's are on geopolitical metabolism.

If there's one thing that irks me, it's: is academic philosophy a total waste of time in the screaming into the void of other philosophers kind of way? Counterpoint: who cares, they're smart and good people doing their thing, leave them alone will you? I want to leave them alone, but I can't.

Shout out to @ranganaut.bsky.social — impressed with "The Daily Planet" publication they've been writing on @leaflet.pub, daily links to planet-themed essays (etc) + commentary, now up to 18 daily posts & two weekly ones! Threading a few favorite quotes here below…

The Microbiocene reveals that we are multispecies ecosystems, intricately woven with bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms that have shaped our evolution and continue to regulate our health and environment.

What's the commercial exploration (really exploitation) of space going to do to politics on earth? International politics are already of the “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” (attributed to Thucydides BTW) type, and space politics are even more likely to be so.

Giving Amar, Akbar aur Anthony for me

Methinks Trump should get a #NobelPrize if India and China sign a border agreement

The AGI arms race is as keenly felt a race as any, but I have to admit, I don't know if I should treat it as real or surreal.

Weekly Planet #2 traces a dark arc through our planetary condition, from the cruelty of factory farming to the looming space race, from the technosphere to the twilight of Western hegemony, behind which is an uncomfortable truth: we have constructed a planetary machine that treats all life as fuel.

Back in the day, people used to think earthquakes and floods are acts of God. Scientific advances have disabused of those notions, but it's also obscured a truth hidden in that religious sentiment: there's a vastly more than human planet whose stability we have taken for grante

The most famous critique of growth in the 20th century was "Limits to Growth," written by Meadows et. al., with Rockstrom et. al.'s work on Planetary Boundaries as a more recent version. Today's Daily Planet is a link to an essay about Meadows' book and its aftermath.

Some wise words from Amitav Ghosh - his Erasmus Prize acceptance speech

Travis Taylor makes for an excellent country singer

The technosphere is the result of human technological progress coming to fruition, for better or worse. Today's Daily Planet is a link to a (relatively new) book by Robert Skidelsky on our machinic civilization, which is another way to label the technosphere.

@leaflet.pub the last couple of days I have noticed that images and links aren't rendered in posts when they are first published. I have to press "update" a couple of times before they do.

Today's Daily Planet has two links, not one. They are to articles in Ars Technica by Eric Berger about the Space Race between the US and China.

We have all heard about petrostates, but have you heard of electrostates? And that China might be the first electrostate?

The biggest shift in my thinking over the last year has been from treating “climate” as a standalone problem to analyzing carbon alongside nitrogen, biodiversity, water, materials, supply chains, finance, and compute as one interdependent system.

I find it appalling that some environmentalists think we should be subjecting chickens to even more torture in the name of climate action.

Paul Edwards has written about the development of Computing Systems and the Earth Systems Sciences and his book on climate modeling is really good. Today's link is a discussion between Gabrielle Hecht and Paul Edwards of Peter Haff's ideas of the Technosphere.

The Anthropocene is a Technocene. Or put another way, the Technosphere is a layer on the Earth's biogeochemical systems. A very extractive layer as of now, but maybe one day it will contribute to the flourishing of all beings. #dailyplanet

The planetary is not just about trees and coral reefs, but also about chips and rare earth minerals. Social scientists and physicists keep reminding us that all information is material: a data center is a physical entity after all. We can expand that claim to say: all information is planetary.

China's 'energy stack' has many elements but electrification is a big part of it. This transcript of a talk that Adam Tooze gave in Beijing is an introduction to some of these developments. #dailyplanet

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 they are both struggling.

This third edition of the Daily Planet might feel very unplanetary, but to the extent that China will be a/the Climate Leviathan of the future, Wang Huning's thinking about political ecology will determine our planetary condition.

Ted Nordhaus on why he is no longer a climate catastrophist. Agree with him or not, this article has good arguments that need to be taken seriously on their merits.

My second @leaflet.pub publication...! The Daily Planet consists of (daily?) links to planet themed essays, images or videos along with light commentary. The first #dailyplanet is a link to an article in one of my favorite sources of planetary information: @noemamag.com dailyplanet.leaflet.pub

The first issue of the Daily Planet is out, with a link to a planet themed reading. The first issue points to one of my favorite sites on the web: Noema. #dailyplanet

What do thought experiments, architectural blueprints and enneagram types have in common: they are all models. In this post, I explore how modeling can become a core 'language' that connects many disciplines.

My first contribution to the summer of blogs hosted by @leaflet.pub . Brings together an old favorite, Douglas Adams, and a new obsession - creating an internet of dreams - and combines them into a new ladder of speculation. rajesh.stream/3lvofbyhjak23