Global Green Shift - Author’s book webpage
Winner of 2018 Schumpeter Prize Competition

The greening of industry is described as a global process driven not so much by Western countries concerned with climate change as by China, India and other industrializing countries responding to economic imperatives as they scale up their industrial systems. This is described as economics meeting ecology, or Ceres meeting Gaia.

The world that created modern industry, pioneered in the West, is in decline. It is being transformed by a global green shift, creating new industries based on clean energy, clean water and clean food – all produced in a safe, clean and sustainable way, in abundance, at low (and diminishing) cost and without making further inroads into nature. This twenty-first century world is being driven by newly emerging industrial giants like China and India – just as the twentieth-century infrastructure of oil, automobiles and highways was created by the United States. It is China and India that are feeling the worst effects of industrializing along conventional ‘business as usual’ lines, and which have the greatest incentive to drive their own green shift. But the old world order based on a linear economy and fossil fuels is resisting bitterly, and will not give up without a fight. John A. Mathews explains how these trends and counter-trends are creating a new world order where an industrial system based on the Ceres (Circular Economy and Renewable Energy System) is seeking to take over from the world of fossil fuels, and provide scope for Gaia to become her wild self again. The outcome of this struggle is far from determined. It is the central issue to be resolved in the twenty-first century.

List of Figures; Foreword by Dr Shi Zhengrong; Preface; List of Acronyms; Part I: Dynamics of the Green Transition; 1. Introduction; 2. Evolutionary Dynamics of Our Industrial Civilization; 3. Ecomodernization –with ‘Chinese Characteristics’; 4. Sociotechnical Transitions: A Sixth Wave; 5. No Wonder China and India Are Pursuing Green Growth Strategies So Vigorously; 6. Finance Now Playing a Central Role in the Green Shift; 7. Can the China Model Be Utilized by Other Industrializing Countries?; 8. Green Growth Development Strategies, Local Content Requirements and World Trade; 9. Farewell Fossil Fuels; Part II: Sixth Wave Eco- Innovations; 10. Global Population Peaking […] and Urbanizing; 11. Energy That Is Clean, Cheap, Abundant – and Safe; 12. Reframing Renewables as Enhancing Energy Security; 13. The Myths of ‘Renewistan’; 14. Recirculation and Regeneration of Resources (Circular Economy); 15. Food and Fresh Water Production; 16. Energy, Water, Food for Cities: Deploying a Positive Triple Nexus; 17. Eco- Cities of the Future; 18. When Ceres Meets Gaia; Bibliography; Index.