Global Green Shift When Ceres Meets Gaia (anthem Other Canon Economics) [Hardcover]

Western industrialism has achieved miracles, promoting unprecedented levels of prosperity and raising millions out of poverty in Europe, North America and, most recently, Japan. Industrial capitalism is now diffusing throughout the East, with China building the worlds largest industrial and manufacturing engine to run on fossil fuels, initially, like all industrial powers before it. But as it does so, China faces the inconvenient truth that the Western model will not scale. China finds itself confronting geopolitical problems in sourcing fossil fuels from abroad and pollution problems at home so severe that it has to find an alternative way, namely, a Chinese version of ecomodernization based on rapid urbanization, renewable energies replacing fossil fuels and a circular economy replacing linear resource throughput, all driven by the greening of finance. This is a feasible model that is likely to prove attractive to other industrializing countries, the diffusion of which will be driven by falling costs associated with learning curves in manufacturing. That Chinas solution involves low-carbon emissions is heartening news for the world as it grapples with climate change. The process of global green growth now underway captures the notion of economics meeting ecology, or Ceres meeting Gaia.