Less Debate, More Deployment
How We Lost the Industries We Invented — and How to Take Them Back
In June I’ll join over a thousand “builders” in Detroit for the annual Reindustrialize conference — two days with founders, operators, investors, and a handful of policy people who have deployed real projects at scale. This won’t feature panels on “reviving the soul of the administrative state,” or keynotes about hypothetical policy frameworks; just people working through how to make stuff in America again, and how to do this with more speed.
As valuable as these gatherings are, I’m joining with a feeling of impatience. Not frustration — impatience. There is no shortage of attempted diagnosis in this country right now: everyone has figured out that we hollowed out our manufacturing base. Everyone has a new theory about why this happened, and everyone is eager to expand on their latest analysis. However, we entered the Biden Administration in 2020 with this already well understood, ready to put big legislation in place to actually tackle these re-industrialization challenges — which we did.
Today, the defining question of the clean energy economy is whether and how we will build our way back — or simply produce ever-better analysis of our own decline.
The most useful content I’ve read on this is the book Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III, by Shyam Sankar and Madeline Hart. Sankar is Palantir’s CTO; Hart runs new initiatives across their defense and space business. The book is a serious piece of work — historically grounded, operationally specific, genuinely urgent.
Their core argument is one I find hard to dispute: America invented most of the technologies that define this era and then systematically handed the manufacturing to other countries. This was not an accident. Starting with Ronald Reagan, U.S. presidents deliberately pursued policies that offshored production in the name of free trade. The result is visible today in a hollowed-out industrial base — nowhere more starkly than in defense. Consider that the United States now spends more on defense than the next ten countries combined, yet struggles to produce the artillery shells, naval vessels, and missile components needed to sustain even a limited conflict. We have a military supply chain that is non-competitive in the normal civilian economy. As a result, the institutional machinery has atrophied such that it can’t even meet its miliary mission.
Where the Reindustrialize builder crowd and the Mobilize outsourcing argument converge is on the mechanism. The problem is not ideological — it is logistical. The Pentagon’s dysfunction, the broken procurement system, the separation between Silicon Valley and the defense industrial base are all policy failures with specific owners and specific fixes. Sankar and Hart are right that the forges fell silent and the furnaces went dark not because Americans stopped knowing how to build, but because the institutional machinery connecting invention to production was deliberately dismantled. Now it has to be rebuilt.
Their framing on China is also clarifying in a sea of poor diagnoses, and I think largely correct: China’s dominance across next-generation energy technologies — from batteries to nuclear — is not surprising to anyone who has been paying attention. Every administration from Reagan onward that embraced “free trade” and anti-industrial policy directly pushed our manufacturing to China. When Beijing looked at electrification, they saw what any government with a century of struggle and a long memory of being denied access to modern technology would see: a path to economic sovereignty and national modernization. Their decarbonization was not a response to climate diplomacy. They were pursuing their national interest, and their national interest directly involves dominating the next generation of energy technologies. They only exported solar until it got cheap enough around 2015, then they started deploying at a scale that is genuinely staggering. The cost curve drove commercialization — not the COP negotiation process.
This matters for the clean energy argument specifically — and it’s where I’d push back gently on the Mobilize framing. Sankar and Hart tell a story primarily about the defense industrial base. But the same deindustrialization that hollowed out defense manufacturing also hollowed out our capacity to commercialize civilian technologies we invented. We pioneered the science of advanced batteries: today China dominates battery production. We funded the basic research that made modern semiconductor manufacturing possible: today Taiwan and South Korea build the world’s chips. The pattern holds across every sector where deployment at scale requires sustained manufacturing capacity. The semiconductor story that Mobilize rightly highlights as a warning is also the solar story, the battery story, the wind turbine story, the EV story.
The fix, in all of these domains, is the same: industry partnership with government — loan guarantees, tax credits, permitting reform, patient public capital — is required not to substitute for the market, but to unlock it at scale. The DOE loan guarantee that financed the first Tesla manufacturing facility did not require a multilateral agreement. The IRA tax credits reshaping the economics of clean manufacturing are market incentives, not central planning. Brian Deese’s Modern American Industrial Strategy framework, the NEC industrial base supply chain analyses, and the work done at the DOE Loan Programs Office — that is how you actually implement industrial policy in a democracy. Unglamorous, specific diagnoses and strategic deployment. It works.
Here is the arithmetic I’ll be carrying into Detroit: of the roughly 60 gigawatts added to the American grid last year, only 4.6 gigawatts was natural gas. We now have almost 60 GW of solar module manufacturing capacity in the U.S. and are actively building new cell and solar silicon manufacturing capacity, all becuase of the 45X tax credit. We have 400 GWh of battery manufacturing capacity opeating or under construction — first for EVs, now increasingly for utility-scale storage. Clean energy is being deployed not because of tax credits; those have been repealed. The cost curve and the grid do not care about your politics. The question is whether American companies capture the manufacturing value of what gets built, or whether we watch it flow somewhere else — the way we watched the solar panel industry leave in 2010.
The CHIPS Act, BIL, and IRA opened a new U.S. deployment window. The question now is whether we have the institutional competence and political will to keep the window open.
That is the question the Reindustrialize crowd is grappling with, as should every person, organization, and company focused on U.S. decarbonization. The people in that room are not waiting for a sharper theory of eventual American decline. They are figuring out in real time how to get their manufacturing facility permitted, the financing closed, the workers trained, the product built today.
Mobilize is right that this effort requires empowering exceptional individuals and harnessing the power of capitalism and competition. The builders and operators showing up in Detroit are those individuals. The conference exists because enough of them have decided they need to be part of a community that wants to solve the problem now.
The U.S. answer to China’s long-term industrial planning is not more multilateral diplomacy. It is American builders who gather in places like Detroit and leave with term sheets and project commission dates. It is a functioning DOE Loan Programs Office that has been ordered to “get to yes”. It is national permitting reform that measures outcomes in months, not decades. It is a regulatory system that enables — rather than litigates — deployment of critical national assets.
America has never lacked for ideas. It has never lacked for capital. It has never lacked for the engineering talent to build the things it needs to build. What it lacks, today, is the collective will to cut through its own friction and deploy.
Reindustrialize exists because enough people have decided to step up and fix this problem today. I believe in them. Build it right. Build it now.