Introduction

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor? —Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism ... with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. —Max Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904)

Now that mankind is in the process of completing the colonization of the planet, learning to manage it intelligently is an urgent imperative. —Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos, Only One Earth (1972)

The traditional development strategies of industrialised countries all present two distinct features whether in Europe, the United States or Japan, despite their differing national and development conditions. One is that high-speed growth is sustained by high consumption of resources (especially non-renewable resources); the other is that the high-speed growth is stimulated by high consumption of the means of subsistence. We call this a traditional development model. In view of China's conditions, it is impossible for China to realise modernisation by following the traditional model. —Hu Angang, "Green development: The inevitable choice for China" (2006)

Most books with greening in the title would be expected to start with the observation that we have only one earth and it is subject to increasing stresses from our ever-expanding industrial system. There would follow an analysis of energy and resource issues, with the aim of showing that "business as usual" cannot be allowed to continue. Capitalism, with its unbridled appetite for expansive consumption and the production that feeds it, would be viewed as the core problem. There might ensue a discussion that critiques the notion of economic growth as something that cannot continue forever in a finite world, leading to a preferred outcome of a steady-state economy as the best approximation to a balance between ecological and economic processes. Whether it is capitalist or not would be left unsaid.

None of this is wrong; it is all too true. And none of this is new; we have heard it all before. Something different is needed if we are to make headway with the greening of capitalism. It requires changes that will really matter and will really have an effect, and that are based on capitalism as it really operates.

My approach is to start at the opposite end, as it were, with the current "third phase" of industrialization that is bringing China and India into the orbit of the industrialized world. As China lifts hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and India follows a similar course, and Brazil and many other developing countries aspire to do so as well, they open up a new pathway for development and the prospect of a new kind of industrial capitalism. There is under way a process of "shifting wealth," whereby the center of gravity of the world economy is shifting east (and to some extent south), thereby raising the prospects for hundreds of millions more to be lifted out of poverty. But no sooner do these extra millions and eventually billions seek to achieve their share of industrial wealth (as did the West through the first and second industrial revolutions) than they encounter a most inconvenient truth. Can the development model that served the already- industrialized countries—with access to the cornucopia of fossil fuels and unlimited resource flows—scale to accommodate the new demands?

The process of industrialization has lifted close to one billion people in Western Europe, North America, and Japan out of the "Malthusian trap" that pinned income to population and set them on a trajectory of rising per capita wealth. This created a "great divergence" between the West and the "rest," accounting for the extreme disparities in wealth, income, and power that have characterized the modern world. In the twentieth century, while serious efforts were made to industrialize in many parts of the world, it was only in East Asia that catch-up, or convergence, was achieved. Now in the twenty-first century these efforts have spread to China and India, and a "great convergence" is under way, reversing the trajectories of the past two hundred years. So the key question is, Can the industrial model that served the West so well now be adapted to meet the new demands? Can it meet the needs of up to six billion people who are looking to achieve middle-income status by 2050 (as envisaged by economists such as Michael Spence)? Can it do so—without subjecting the planet to irreparable harm?

The scale of the changes involved in this next "Great Transformation" is immense. The original Industrial Revolution lifted the population of Great Britain to double the per capita income over a period of around 150 years; the subsequent industrialization of the United States took around 50 years. Now China has doubled its per capita income in 12 years, and India in 16 years. Moreover, China and India are starting from a population of more than one billion, compared to around ten million for the United States and the United Kingdom early in the nineteenth century. So the pace of industrialization in this third round has picked up tenfold, and the number of people involved has expanded a hundredfold—meaning that the current transition involving the new industrial giants China and India is a thousand times more intense than the original Industrial Revolution. Can the same model of dependence on apparently unlimited fossil fuels and resource abundance underpin this latest industrial transition at such a level of intensity?

To pose the question in this way is really to answer it. As soon as the material, resource, and...