The Stack

Only a few years ago climate was equal parts apocalypse and salvation. Doom sold books — David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth turned planetary fever into a cultural event, while Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future promised pop-sci-fi deliverance. Streets in Western capitals filled with Fridays for Future strikes, Extinction Rebellion “die-ins,” and Sunrise sit-ins. Greta Thunberg lectured the UN that they had stolen her childhood with ‘empty words.’ In Paris then Glasgow, diplomats toasted a turning point. 

Central bankers discovered a moral vocabulary — “stranded assets,” “climate risk,” “orderly transition.” ESG funds swelled. BlackRock’s Larry Fink told CEOs that decarbonization wasn’t just virtue; it was fiduciary duty. Mark Carney pioneered the “tragedy of the horizon” framework, warning that climate change posed an existential risk to the global financial system. The mood music was unmistakable: this would be the century we bent emissions down and politics up, a cooperative project for a livable planet. Carbon was the problem; ESG, SDGs (sustainable development goals), and maybe even carbon taxes were the solution. It was activism in the streets as much as in the (Excel) sheets.

And then the world refused to sort itself so neatly. Oil demand hit record highs. A shale boom turned the U.S. into the largest producer of oil and gas. From 2008 to 2019, U.S. oil production more than doubled from 5 million to 12.3 million barrels per day – the fastest sustained increase in a single country’s history. Russia invaded Ukraine, and Europe — rich in rhetoric but poor in winter fuel — swapped Russian pipelines for American and Gulf LNG tankers. Carbon prices wobbled; supply chains snapped. The international climate change conferences, The Council of the Parties (COPs) kept their pageantry, but attendance and ambition thinned. “Stranded assets,” once finance’s scariest phrase, quietly left the slides. The public moved on to other emergencies.

What followed wasn’t the end of climate action but the start of something more consequential and less tidy. The emerging shorthand is “petrostate vs. electrostate.” The petrostate, in its classic form, was never merely an oil producer. It was a political economy organized around rents: centralized revenue, weak taxation, strong patronage, and a foreign policy priced in barrels rather than productivity. Its legitimacy flowed from geology, not institutions. Electrification disrupts this logic at its root. Electrons do not concentrate power the way oil does; they diffuse it – across grids, factories, and balance sheets. The danger for petrostates is not decarbonization per se, but irrelevance: a world where energy security no longer requires their blessing.

The shorthand of “petrostate vs electrostate” is not wrong – but it is only a slice of larger transformation that can be called combined and uneven electrification. This isn’t just about which countries sell oil, and which countries sell solar panels. Nor does it mean simply replacing all the machines of daily life – cars, home furnaces, and factories with electrical versions that run on clean sources of electricity like wind, solar, and nuclear power. It is an argument about compounding: about how consumer devices, industrial supply chains, manufacturing and state capacity, and military systems now share a common technological substrate.

It's a whole-of-economy reordering where electrons, semiconductors, magnets, batteries, grids, and software on top — the electro-stack — become the decisive inputs in everything from cars, home stoves, and heat pumps to data centers, drones, and AI. It’s combined because consumer adoption, manufacturing scale, materials refining, power electronics, software, and grid build-out all compound on each other. It’s uneven because those flywheels are spinning at dramatically different speeds across geographies and within countries. Some societies are becoming “electric” in daily life while staying dependent in production; others are becoming producers without becoming rich.

As Andreessen Horowitz partner Ryan McEntush has argued, the decisive arena of this transition is not abstract energy systems but consumer products. Everything is a computer. When Steve Jobs first mass-marketed the iPhone, it was something foundational: “the first mass-market machine that bundled compute, power, sensing, connectivity, and software into a single, tightly-engineered package.” Once that template existed, everything else began to converge on it – laptops, appliances, drones, robots, and beneath the bodywork electric vehicles – all variations of electro-industrial architecture of batteries, power electronics, sensors, and code. In this sense, electrification spreads not as ideology, but as convenience. Consumers adopt products that are cheaper, faster, quieter, and more capable, pulling entire supply chains behind them. Convenience is a stronger force than virtue – and it scales faster. 

This is why alumni of Tesla have gone on to found or scale some of the most innovative firms of the energy transition—not only in the United States, but across Europe and beyond. In the U.S. and Europe, Tesla’s diaspora has seeded industrial platforms such as Redwood Materials, Electric Hydrogen, Northvolt, Huron Power, and Sila Nanotechnologies, along with a new generation of consumer hardware companies like Pila, Lightship, and Impulse Labs. But Tesla’s most consequential impact may have been in China—and not because of alumni. When Tesla opened its Shanghai Gigafactory in 2019, Chinese commentators described it as a “catfish effect” (鲶鱼效应): drop a fast, relentless competitor into the pond and everyone swims harder. Tesla forced domestic champions such as BYD, Nio, and Xpeng to accelerate iteration cycles, tighten manufacturing tolerances, and compress cost curves. The result wasn’t Tesla dominance; it was the rapid upgrading of China’s entire EV ecosystem—from batteries and motors to power electronics and supply-chain orchestration. Tesla didn’t hollow out China’s EV sector; it intensified it—accelerating the compounding dynamics that now define combined and uneven electrification.

These companies all illustrate that mastering consumer-scale integration is how electro-industrial capability is built. The factory that perfects battery packs for cars also perfects them for grid storage; the supply chain that feeds EV motors feeds drones; the software that optimizes fleets optimizes logistics and defense. When consumer products become the training ground for industrial systems, the boundary between market competition and state capacity blurs. Electrification stops being just an economic upgrade and becomes a geopolitical accelerator — the means by which a nation compounds manufacturing skill, supply-chain control, and ultimately hard power. In the electro-age, “industrial policy” is no longer a cabinet memo; it is the operating system of national competitiveness.

This can already be seen across the geopolitical map: China integrated the electrification value chain end-to-end — mining, refining, polysilicon, cathodes, gigafactories, grid gear — while the U.S. and Europe fragmented their capabilities and congratulated themselves for financing other people’s factories. Developing countries can quickly add cheap renewables, but true mastery lies in owning “The Stack.” Internally, the map is domestic: metros gliding toward post-carbon lifestyles while fossil regions remain grounded, economically and culturally, to rigs, refineries, and rails. France’s gilets jaunes showed what happens when climate ambition collides with commutes. In America, the fracture runs between Trump’s hydrocarbon bloc and the professional decarbonization coalition — both responding rationally to their incentives but pulling further apart. Uneven electrification is not only a global gap; it is an internal political fault line.

How did this happen? The background story is fire. For two centuries, modern life was organized around combustion: coal, oil, gas. Heat water, push pistons, spin turbines. Thermodynamics sat on the throne; electricity played valet. Edison’s filaments glowed, but the industrial core ran on explosions. There were brief experiments in both factory electrification and electric cars in the early 20^th century, but ultimately the greater power density of internal combustion vehicles doomed EVs for a century.   

That order is ending. Five revolutions tipped the balance. All were technical breakthroughs; both became geopolitical facts the moment they scaled.

First, photovoltaics. They shattered fire’s monopoly by capturing energy directly, without heat. Photovoltaics turned photons into electrons. For decades, solar was dismissed as too costly, a boutique power source fit for satellites and eco-minded homeowners. That changed when Beijing decided panels were an industry of state importance. Chinese firms bet on overcapacity, building gigafactories in Jiangsu and Guangdong that churned out modules faster than the world could install them. Prices collapsed: between 2010 and 2020, the cost of photovoltaic modules fell nearly 90 percent. Every doubling of production cut costs by another 20 percent. By the mid-2020s, solar wasn’t just competitive — it was the cheapest electricity humanity had ever known, undercutting coal and gas almost everywhere.  In the combustion era, energy scarcity was geopolitics; in the electro era, manufacturing scale is geopolitics.

Second, semiconductors. As Chris Miller argues in Chip War, chips have become a hidden input into almost everything that matters – embedded in “pretty much every device,” with even automobiles now carrying roughly “a thousand dollars worth of chips.” The US invented the semiconductor industry, but in the age of globalization outsourced much of the industry to Taiwan, South Korea, and the Netherlands. And unlike oil, computing power is constrained by a handful of chokepoints: Taiwan fabricates a huge share of the world’s new computing power each year, while a single Dutch firm, ASML, supplies the extreme-ultraviolet lithography tools without which cutting-edge chips are impossible—concentrations that make OPEC look diffuse by comparison. In the electro era, that silicon nervous system doesn’t just run phones and AI; it runs inverters, motor drives, factory automation, drones, and grid control—so whoever controls the chip supply chain increasingly controls the speed, cost, and security of electrification itself.

Third, transistors and MEMS. Transistors and MEMS also orchestrated currents with nanosecond precision. Inverters and brushless motors gave machines a finesse combustion could never match. A hovering drone is less a triumph of aerodynamics than a semiconductor’s victory over fire. Crucially, this offered China another way to leapfrog technologically. Metallurgy and turbine geometry locked up a century of tacit knowledge in Western combustion engines. But electric drivetrains are simpler: fewer parts, more electronics. China already had the fabs, foundries, and Foxconn lines from the IT boom & consumer electronics. Apple’s iPhone supply chains became BYD’s EV advantage. And while Washington fought to block China from 5-nanometer CPUs, the chips that mattered for power electronics, drones, and batteries were trailing-edge controllers — exactly the parts China could scale. The decisive chips are often not the smartest ones, but the ones you can make by the billion.

Fourth, batteries. Lithium-ion chemistry, perfected in the 1990s and industrialized in the 2000s, made electrons portable. Energy density doubled; cycle life stretched into thousands. EV drivetrains convert 80 percent of input to motion, compared to barely 30 for gasoline. Heat pumps deliver two to three units of warmth per unit of electricity, while furnaces struggle to break even. Tanks gave way to cells: modular, reversible, efficient. 

China again seized the lead. Between 2010 and 2020, battery costs fell nearly 90 percent, overwhelmingly from Chinese scale. CATL, BYD, and dozens of rivals helped drive battery-learning curves: in many studies, battery cell costs fall by ~19–25 percent for every doubling of output. According to economist Noah Smith, “batteries were the first big technological revolution that the U.S. missed.” By 2022, China controlled roughly three-quarters of global cell manufacturing; even by 2030, most forecasts give China something like two-thirds of the global market — still dominant.

Fifth, rare-earth magnets. 90 percent of rare earth magnets are processed in China — and the electro-stack was complete. If semiconductors are the brains of the electro-age, magnets are their muscles. Permanent magnets made from neodymium and other rare earth elements sit inside electric motors, wind turbines, drones, EV drivetrains, robotics arms, MRI machines, speakers, induction stoves — the devices that convert electricity into motion, heat, light, and sound, and back again through regenerative braking. China mines roughly 70 percent of the world’s rare earths, processes 85 to 90 percent of them, and produces over 90 percent of finished permanent magnets. Mountain Pass in California accounts for roughly 10 percent of global supply, but most of its concentrate has historically been processed in China. In practical terms, Western motor manufacturers admit they are waiting to see whether they can secure what they need. Export licensing regimes and paperwork can slow shipments; a form can become a chokepoint.

Unlike oil, rare earths are not especially rare geologically. What is rare is the refining capacity, the environmental tolerance, and the industrial ecosystem required to turn ore into high-performance magnets at scale. In the combustion age, control of oilfields shaped geopolitics. In the electro age, control of magnet processing and motor manufacturing shapes it. Magnets, power electronics, and embedded compute together form the physical architecture of electrification — muscle, nerves, and brain. 

Five quiet innovations — better magnets, better transistors, better batteries, better semiconductors, purpose-built chips — allowed electricity to overtake fire. The industrial map flipped. At that point, “clean energy” stopped being a sector and became a general-purpose industrial base.

This wasn’t just an accident of the market; this was deliberate state policy. When Xi Jinping took over the Chinese Communist Party in late 2012, he identified energy as a core national-security vulnerability. Dependent on oil and gas imports that transited maritime chokepoints—the South China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, the Indian Ocean—China faced what its own strategists call the “Malacca Dilemma” (马六甲困局). In 2014, Xi formally called for an “energy revolution” (能源革命), embedding clean power, electrification, and domestic manufacturing capacity into the broader framework of national rejuvenation and supply-chain security. From that point forward, Beijing treated clean hardware not as climate virtue but as statecraft. The point was not simply to decarbonize, but to de-risk dependence.

The state poured capital into what became the cleantech capital value chain: China now controls 70–80 percent of global solar manufacturing, dominant shares of lithium refining, most rare-earth processing, and a battery industry exporting tens of billions annually. Chinese automakers now sell EVs at prices Western incumbents struggle to approach. The result: industrial compounding. Each doubling of output drives pushes costs down, widens markets, justifies more capacity, and drives costs lower again. 

By the mid-2020s, the outputs are staggering. More than 105 gigawatts of solar added in four months — more than Australia’s entire grid. Over 11 million EVs sold in one single year, combustion now the laggard. High-speed rail at 45,000 kilometers — five times Europe’s — on track to hit 60,000 kilometers by 2030, and with further plans for expanding. A grid overhaul nearing $800 billion by decade’s end, with electrolyzer gigafactories turning surplus electrons powering not only AI-thirsty data centers but low-carbon molecules of hydrogen, ammonia, and methanol – industrializing the next layer of The Stack.” This is what “overcapacity” looks like when it is treated as an asset: you develop new technologies and build ahead of demand so demand can arrive.

China developed The Stack through industrial strategy while the United States and Europe encountered and continue to encounter it as disruption and deindustrialization. They did not respond from the same starting point, nor with the same incentives. The result was asymmetry—not just in manufacturing capacity, and climate policy, but in how each interpreted the meaning of energy security. One side built the supply chain; the other debated the narrative.

In the early 2000s, that divergence seemed not only tolerable but rational. Globalization was treated as an economic law of nature. China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization accelerated what economists would later call the first “China Shock”: a tidal wave of low-cost manufacturing that hollowed out industrial regions in the United States and Europe even as it lowered consumer prices and boosted corporate margins. Manufacturing could move offshore; design, finance, and software would stay home. The United States doubled down on the knowledge economy—Silicon Valley platforms, Wall Street capital, asset-light business models—while supply chains stretched across the Pacific. Europe leaned even harder into regulation and welfare stability, trading industrial depth for environmental standards and fiscal caution. Deindustrialization was framed as progress: smokestacks gave way to apps; steel towns to services. Cheap Chinese manufacturing kept inflation low; American tech kept market caps high. The bargain worked—until it didn’t. When The Stack began to matter not just as a consumer convenience but as strategic infrastructure, the West discovered it had optimized for margin, not manufacturing.

The United States did not simply watch industry leave; it replaced it with two different engines of growth. On the coasts, Big Tech generated extraordinary value with relatively little physical footprint, “software ate the world”—platform monopolies, cloud infrastructure, software rents, and soaring equity valuations that concentrated wealth but employed fewer people than the manufacturing giants they replaced. In the interior, shale offered something more tangible: rigs, trucks, welders, royalties. Silicon Valley restored American market capitalization; shale restored a measure of American labor demand. Together they softened the blow of deindustrialization and obscured the deeper erosion of manufacturing depth and supply-chain skill.

Between 2005 and 2012, the U.S. shale boom added roughly 750,000 jobs, with estimates of ~555,000 of those in non-urban counties alone In shale regions.  In pivotal swing states like Pennsylvania, some estimates suggest that the Marcellus Shale directly supports 123,000 jobs. No wonder Obama was sometimes called the “shale president,” while Biden championed domestic oil production. Fracked gas emits less carbon than coal and, for a decade, helped stabilize global oil prices.

That political embrace was not accidental. The mid-2000s oil price spikes — when crude surged above $100 a barrel — left a deep imprint on policymakers who feared renewed dependence on OPEC and geopolitical chokepoints. Shale appeared to solve multiple problems at once: it cut imports, improved the trade balance, lowered domestic energy prices, and revived employment in regions battered by manufacturing loss. By the mid-2010s, U.S. net petroleum imports had fallen sharply, and the country could plausibly claim “energy independence.” Cheap gas also underwrote a quiet industrial renaissance in petrochemicals and fertilizer, reinforcing the perception that hydrocarbons remained the most reliable path to growth. It is this memory — of vulnerability followed by abundance — that animates Trump 2.0’s aggressive pro–oil and gas posture. In a fractured world, doubling down on hydrocarbons feels like doubling down on sovereignty.

But the Trump 2.0 mantra of “unleashing American energy” hides a more awkward reality. Shale bought time; it also deepened dependence on a commodity whose wells decline quickly, whose profits vanish when prices fall, and whose geopolitical leverage is eroding as electrification spreads and fossil trade plateaus. We are nowhere near “peak oil” in the ground but according to Carlyle’s Jeff Currie we are rapidly approaching peak oil trade. Energy investors increasingly talk about a “New Joule Order”: an age where the organizing principle of the global system is no longer the cheapest barrel but the most secure joule – where countries pay not a “green premium” for climate, but a security premium for local, dispatchable, low-risk energy. In other words: the political economy of energy is shifting from fuel price to system reliability.

Energy investors increasingly talk about a “New Joule Order”: an age where the organizing principle of the global system is no longer the cheapest barrel but the most secure joule.

Europe, by contrast, had no shale miracle to lean on. On the eve of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the European Union sourced roughly 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia, with countries like Germany far more dependent. When these flows collapsed, it discovered just how exposed it was not only to energy shocks, but to its own industrial base. Mario Draghi warned that the EU lacked the kind of high-tech and industrial anchors that America had in Google, Meta, or Tesla, let alone the integrated electro-industrial scale China was deliberately constructing. Not one of the world’s top ten technology companies by market capitalization is European — a stark indicator of how far the continent has drifted from the commanding heights of the digital and electro-industrial economy.

Beijing pursued what renowned Chinese political scholar Lu Feng calls industrial maximalism – consciously overbuilding capacity in batteries, solar, and EVs to drive down costs through learning curves and capturing global market shares. Europe, by comparison, responded with industrial minimalism — ambitious targets, subsidy frameworks, and regulatory design, but insufficient manufacturing & next-generation industrial competitiveness. Even traditional European chemical champions; legacy firms like BASF in Germany’s Rhine valley heartland are increasingly battered by what executives describe as the “unrelenting scale of China’s production machine.” In an age of combined and uneven electrification, scale is sovereignty—and Europe discovered it had outsourced too much of it. The result: even its flagship battery maker, Northvolt, was left to flounder, a casualty of underpowered follow-through. Europe can regulate a market into existence; it struggles to manufacture one into dominance.

While Europe now faces a thicket of regulatory approvals, cautious capital markets, and fragmented fiscal authority, the United States currently faces a different constraint. American politics increasingly reflects two polarized different energy futures. Democrats increasingly draw support from professionals whose livelihoods are already essentially post-carbon, who run on electrons and who view climate action as a chance to expand prosperity. Republicans lean on communities where hydrocarbons remain central to jobs and identity, making electrification feel less like growth and more like loss. Hydrocarbons are OpEx: spend daily, hire daily. Renewables are CapEx: build once, then clip bond-like returns. One produces dense political coalitions, the other produces cheap power but thin constituencies. Both rational; only one durable. The West is not short on innovation; it is short on aligned constituencies that can carry execution through the messy middle.

Across the Western world, the bottleneck isn’t invention—it’s execution: regulatory sclerosis in Europe, coalition politics in America, and capital markets still calibrated to either fast-scaling low CapEx software businesses and hydrocarbons rather than electrons and The Stack. The climate zeitgeist that peaked around 2020 now looks to narrow. Fossil realists preached energy security; climate advocates moralized about emissions. Both missed the deeper shift. In China’s factories—built at a scale the West often dismissed as overcapacity—a new order was taking shape driven by “The Stack.” A single system to bind mining, refining, manufacturing, and deployment — a single compounding system that turned scale into power. When you can outbuild your rivals, you don’t need to outargue them.

And this new order won’t be easily reversed. Electro-tech isn’t just cheap solar and batteries; it’s what those cost-curves unlock next. Chinese firms are pushing electrolyzer costs toward $100/kW by 2030, controlling roughly 60% of global electrolyzer capacity, positioning themselves to industrialize green hydrogen and green methanol for steel, shipping, and aviation, sectors of the global economy once considered “hard-to-abate” as they were “hard-to-electrify.” 

Batteries, too, are diversifying. Sodium-ion packs are already entering commercial markets; solid-state cells promise step-changes in energy density. EVs are no longer just cleaner cars but mobile computing platforms—rolling batteries that train autonomy systems and anchor robotic supply chains. (This is the trillion-dollar bet behind Tesla’s robotaxis). To unlock deeper automation, you need deeper electrification. As climatetech investor Andy Lubershane of Energy Impact Partners (EIP) puts it, “autonomy favors the electron.” The next productivity wave will be electro-mechanical; i.e. “embodied AI” or software made real.

China leads here as well. More than 60 percent of top-cited battery research and roughly half of clean-tech patents originate from Chinese institutions. And in robotics—the connective tissue between software and the physical world—China is scaling at industrial velocity. According to a new report published by The International Federation of Robotics, China accounted for 54 percent of all new robot installations worldwide in 2024 representing more than double the number installed by Japan, the United States, South Korea, and Germany combined. Companies like AGIBot, Flexiv, Unitree, Fourier, and LimX are not only building impressive humanoid and adaptive robotics but also creating industrial platforms. The deeper story isn’t just installations. It is ecosystem density: local servo-motor suppliers, power electronics firms, precision gear manufacturers, machine-vision startups, and state-supported automation programs feeding directly into EV factories, battery plants, and logistics hubs. The same electro-industrial stack that builds cars builds robots; the same factories that refine cathodes refine actuators. Robots are the physical expression of The Stack: electrons turned into force, precision, and repetition.

Meanwhile, America risks self-inflicted drift. Political assaults on universities, immigration, and research budgets undermine the very R&D ecosystem that electro-industrial leadership requires. The future is built in factories, but it is forged in labs—and right now China is compounding both. This is not the China Shock of cheap labor hollowing out Western industry. This is China Shock 2.0. 

The hierarchy runs from China at the commanding heights, through fast-electrifying importers, through Europe’s partial successes, through the Gulf’s hybrids, to an America stuck between carbon rents and decayed state capacity.

Seen this way, the emerging global map clarifies. China is the paradigmatic electrostate — both producer and consumer — dominating The Stack, with clean-tech manufacturing topping 10 percent of GDP and electricity’s share of final consumption hitting 30 percent. Europe sits uneasily in the middle: willing to electrify, with wind and grid exports, but reliant on Chinese panels and American LNG. According to global energy think tank Ember, developing countries can move faster on consumption: Bangladesh leapfrogged the U.S. and EU in electrification share. Pakistan doubled its capacity in six years with cheap Chinese PV and batteries, insulating itself from LNG shocks. Saudi Arabia and the UAE hedge both ways: exporting the cheapest oil while building the cheapest solar, straddling petro-and electro-strategies. The hierarchy runs from China at the commanding heights, through fast-electrifying importers, through Europe’s partial successes, through the Gulf’s hybrids, to an America stuck between carbon rents and decayed state and industrial capacity. The point is not that everyone will become China; it’s that everyone will be priced against China’s cost curves.

If energy transitions redraw military power, this one is no exception. Coal gave Britain dreadnoughts; oil gave America carriers & fighter-jets. Electrons and The Stack will decide the arsenal of the 21st century. For most of the 20^th century, U.S. power rested on the biggest, fastest, most expensive platforms: $13 billion carriers, $350 million jets, $4 million tanks. Thermochemical monuments of hegemony. That order is ending. In Ukraine, a sea-drone worth $300,000 powered by lithium-ion batteries shredded billion-dollar assets. Russia’s bombers were torched by plastic drones launched from trucks. A toy felled a bomber. The most expensive machines ever built are suddenly vulnerable to the cheapest electronics ever mass-produced. The offense has been consumerized. 

Already, even elite American units are constrained less by marksmanship than by watt-hours. U.S. Special Operations Forces now carry radios, night-vision goggles, thermal optics, GPS, laser designators, small drones, and secure computing gear — each dependent on lithium-ion packs. Pentagon studies over the past decade have repeatedly noted that battery weight can account for 10–20 percent of a soldier’s load on multi-day missions, limiting range and endurance. In austere theaters, energy resupply is as critical as ammunition. The binding constraint is no longer fuel for tanks but power density for distributed systems. Venture capital and growth equity have noticed. Billions have flowed into defense-tech firms that sit squarely inside The Stack: Anduril building autonomous systems and sensor networks; Shield AI training AI pilots; Palantir optimizing battlefield data; Saronic and Saildrone deploying unmanned maritime platforms. In 2025 alone, U.S. defense-tech startups attracted more than $30 billion in venture funding, much of it aimed at autonomy, robotics, and energy-enabled systems. The frontier of hard power now runs through batteries, semiconductors, power electronics, and AI — the same layers that define civilian electrification. In modern warfare, electrons are logistics.

Ukraine has become the first full-scale laboratory of electro-industrial warfare. Several million drones are now produced and destroyed each year in the conflict, and by some estimates, they account for 60 to 70 percent of battlefield losses across categories — far exceeding the roughly 45 percent attributed to drones in the Nagorno-Karabakh war only a few years earlier. Drones are no longer adjunct tools; they are the primary sensors, relays, and strike systems of both armies — a robotic nervous system linking infantry, artillery, and long-range fires. They function simultaneously as binoculars, grenades, and mortars, conducting reconnaissance, counter-battery fire, and deep interdiction at cost orders of magnitude below traditional aviation. Cheap quadcopters now saturate front lines like permanent grapeshot, hunting logistics, striking armor, and harassing rear echelons. In effect, the battlefield has been rewired: mass-produced electronics, lithium-ion batteries, power electronics, and embedded compute — the civilian electro-stack — now shape operational coherence under extreme attrition. Warfare has become a throughput problem.

The current & future prize: mastery of the electro-stack — semiconductors, batteries, magnets, photovoltaics, electrolyzers, AI, drones, and the grid that ties them together. 

Here, however China dominates again. The Chinese consumer drone manufacturer, DJI holds three-quarters of the global consumer drone market, a position built not only on design but on deep integration across the electro-industrial stack. Its factories produce the motors, magnets, flight controllers, cameras, batteries, and frames — often sourcing from an ecosystem of nearby suppliers clustered in Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta. Civilian scale bleeds into military capacity: the same assembly line that makes crop-sprayers, survey drones, and wedding videography kits can be redirected toward reconnaissance or loitering-munition platforms. The learning curves are civilian; the optionality is strategic.

AI multiplies the effect. Drones harass; AI swarms overwhelm. Training and running those swarms take rivers of cheap, reliable electrons. China overbuilt its grid for decades, creating reserve margins up to 100 percent, enough to treat AI as a sponge for surplus. America’s AI boom collides with a decrepit grid. America’s AI boom is sprinting into an electricity gauntlet: Goldman Sachs projects $6.7 trillion in data centers by 2030, yet Virginia and Ohio already fire gas turbines to keep servers running. The asymmetry is stark: America thinks in platforms; China in supply chains. America builds symbols of dominance; China builds the components that make them obsolete. This is combined and uneven electrification at war. 

Seen in this light, combined and uneven electrification isn’t just an industrial story – it is a hinge in world history. As Brown economist Mark Blyth warns, U.S. tariff policy and China’s turn to clean hardware threaten to erode the dollar’s dominance and unsettle an order built on dollar clearing, U.S. sea power, and cheap traded oil. Further still, by dominating The Stack, the Columbia historian Adam Tooze recently suggests, China’s rise may become the axis through which modernity is written.

For decades, global integration – of trade, politics, immigration, and technology – was treated as a law of nature. Today, integration has given way to fragmentation. Post Cold-War institutions are creaking, industrial policy is back in vogue, and the U.S. – China rivalry now shapes everything from chip fabs to shipping routes. The energy transition is no longer happening “inside” globalization; it is happening as globalization frays.

Combined and uneven electrification doesn’t make climate irrelevant. It makes climate part of a larger logic: power, in all senses. Climate policy has always been industrial policy. Looking back, the 1997 Senate vote on the Byrd–Hagel Resolution prohibiting the U.S. ratification of the Kyoto Protocol reads less like a skirmish over climate science than an early warning about industrial asymmetry. By a 95–0 margin, senators signaled that the United States would not accept binding emissions cuts unless major developing economies like China and India faced comparable constraints. The concern was not atmospheric modeling; it was competitiveness — who would bear the costs of decarbonization, and who would gain the factories.

Climate policy is not just whose emissions but who owns the mines, refineries, fabs, gigafactories, and grid gear? Who delivers clean electrons fast enough to power AI without brownouts? Who scales drones and power electronics fast enough to alter the military balance of power? Those questions aren’t answered by divestment campaigns or more drilling. They are answered by factories, finance, and facilities.

Combined and uneven electrification doesn’t make climate irrelevant. It makes climate part of a larger logic: power, in all senses. Climate policy has always been industrial policy.

And in a fractured world, those choices don’t unfold on a single timeline. As Shell’s energy-security scenarios make clear, governments keep getting pulled between short-term imperatives—price shocks, gas shortages, political backlash—and long-term goals, producing a transition that is patchy, contested, and uneven across regions and sectors. Geopolitics, not spreadsheets, now decides the pace of electrification. In practice, states oscillate between “Sky” and “Archipelagos”: between ambitious decarbonization and security-first retrenchment.

The U.S., fortunately, is waking up to its inability to build. The country that once threw up Hoover Dam in five years now struggles to string a transmission line across state borders. From Thompson and Klein’s Abundance Agenda to Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works to Wang’s Breakneck, a wide swath of literature diagnoses hollowed institutions, deindustrialization, regulatory capture, and lawyerly sclerosis. All describe decayed state capacity and lack of industrial policy. Even in today’s polarized climate, politicians from across the spectrum have grasped the same dilemma. On the left, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushes for a Green New Deal while Joe Manchin emphasizes permitting reform; on the right, Josh Hawley rails against deindustrialization while Marco Rubio calls for a “common-good capitalism.” Ro Khanna and JD Vance may spar on ideology, but both insist the U.S. must rebuild its capacity to make things. The Inflation Reduction Act was the first serious attempt to treat climate as industrial policy, but it quickly splintered under culture-war backlash; in practice, even its most ambitious provisions rest on political scaffolding built from Trump-era tariffs, and any genuine bid to compete with “Green China” will require not only large-scale protectionism, but also state-led industrial strategy — an uncomfortable truth for both parties. The hard part was never passing a bill; it was building the constituencies and institutions to deliver.

What many of today’s debates still miss is the nature of the prize. The question is not simply decarbonization, state capacity, nor American dynamism, and European reform. 

Call it what it is: The Stack

Not a metaphor, not a climate slogan, not a tech trend – but the layered system of mining, refining, semiconductors, batteries, magnets, photovoltaics, electrolyzers, AI, drones, and the grid that binds them together. The Stack is where energy becomes industry, industry becomes capability, and capability becomes power.  If the twentieth century’s strategic infrastructure was oilfields, pipelines, and sea lanes, the twenty-first’s is fabs, gigafactories, transmission, data centers, and the software that orchestrates them.

This isn’t growth in the abstract. It is about where companies are formed, where capital compounds, where supply chains thicken, and where learning curves are captured. The electro-stack is the new industrial commons — the training ground where consumer markets become manufacturing depth, where software becomes physical capability, and where energy systems become strategic leverage. The winners will be those who can turn deployment into learning, learning into cost decline, and cost decline into global market power.

Much of today’s political noise circles around symptoms. The American seizure of Venezuelan oil tankers — even the extraordinary spectacle of Maduro’s capture — reflects a fossil logic asserting itself at the very moment its structural leverage is narrowing. Mark Carney’s warning at Davos about the “end of the rules-based international order” echoes the same tension: a global system built on commodity flows and financial plumbing confronting a world reorganizing around manufacturing depth and technological integration. These episodes look chaotic in isolation; together, they suggest a system searching for a new anchor.

In the age of combined and uneven electrification, coercion over barrels cannot substitute for compounding capability. Force can disrupt supply; it cannot manufacture batteries, fabricate chips, or scale robotics ecosystems. The future is not secured by controlling yesterday’s choke points but by owning tomorrow’s production platforms. Power is migrating from extraction to integration

Winston Churchill once said that “mastery itself was the prize” in the shift from coal to oil. The same holds now. Mastery of The Stack is the prize. Not because it is green. Not because it is fashionable. But because it is foundational.

The 20th century was organized around the barrel. The 21st will be organized around the electron — and around those who can turn electrons into systems, systems into industries, and industries into durable power.

That is The Stack.