Racing to the Top: How Energy Fuels System Leadership in World Politics

In the international political economy of the last two millennia, there tends to be one state leading the world as the foremost producer of energy and new technology. In Racing to the Top, William R. Thompson and Leila Zakhirova argue that the US and China, like previous leading countries, rely on energy transition, or the development of alternative energy, in order to make new technology relatively inexpensive to develop and to fuel. While the US has historically held the lead, its edge in...