Global Green Shift

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 industrialising 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 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 ways, 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.

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.