Some reading and other content from the week of 2025-09-15
- Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change — a paper from 2020 by Jessica F. Green and others, about how the portfolio of fixed assets held by an entity affect its position on climate. Climate vulnerable, climate forcing, or (now) climate benefiting (e.g. Chinese PV manufacturing assets). A prelude to her upcoming book Existential Politics.
- Falling battery costs can unleash Mexico’s full solar potential and boost energy security — from Ember Climate, looking at near-term electrification / energy-transition options for Mexico. Disponible en español también.
- Market Failure: The Climate Crisis and the Limits of Capitalism — a discussion between Brett Christophers (author of The Price is Wrong) and economic historian Adam Tooze, moderated by Kate Aronoff.
- Beyond the Marshall Plan: China’s solar boom as world-changing industrial policy — a post by Adam Tooze synthesizing a bunch of other holyfuckingshit It’s Happening data that’s been circulating lately.
- The Power of a Russia-China Energy Deal — Columbia Energy Exchange podcast episode talking about the dynamics of the global natural gas market in light of a possible 50 bcm Power of Siberia II pipeline doubling Russia’s capacity for delivering pipeline gas to China. Sounds like it is likely to be negotiated on *extremely* favorable terms to China. Like Russia has to build it, and China gets an option on buying the gas, and at a very low price. So low that maybe they just decide to pass it through to the international LNG market. It seems like Russia is going to end up totally subservient to China. It’s a weird relationship. China elsewhere is doing everything it can to make itself (and the world) indifferent to the fuels that Russia has to offer. Why are they not in conflict? Maybe because they both have (different) interests in decentering the west.
- The Electrotech Revolution — a weirdly climate-agnostic reframing of the energy transition from Ember Climate. I did a thread on BlueSky while reading it. Not that it’s wrong to think about the tech diffusion independent of the climate lens, but I’m not sure where we end up if that lens gets fogged up. I doubt it’s to zero emissions.
- It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics — David Wallace Wells in NYT Magazine. To which I can’t help but respond… “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” — Phillip K. Dick
- Electricity is the new price of eggs — a spicy episode of the reconstituted Energy Gang (Open Circuit) in which Jigar Shah goes after Charles Hua (Powerlines) on some of his assumptions about the political economy of utility regulation.
- Marissa Gillett to resign, ending turbulent era at PURA — sadly in the same vein… even when you DO have a “permission structure” to do things like performance based regulation, it may well turn out that the utilities have more power than your state does. See also David Roberts’ interview with Gillett on Volts.wtf. This stings especially since we were hoping to work with PURA on some open regulatory data stuff, but now who knows what the situation there will be like.
- China’s Green Leap Outward: The rapid scale-up of overseas Chinese clean-tech manufacturing investments — a new database (not yet publicly available) of Chinese foreign direct investment in clean energy manufacturing overseas. About $220B total since 2022, including batteries, EVs, solar, wind, materials refining. Others are ca
