The political-economics of the Green Industrial Revolution: Renewable energy as the key to national sustainable communities

Abstract

A Green Industrial Revolution (GIR) consists of renewable energy, smart green sustainable communities, water, and waste along with advanced technologies that are cost-effective in implementing it. The GIR started in China and the EU, but has taken the USA by surprise. The EU, South Korea, and Japan had started a GIR over two decades ago. The GIR can be reflected in the significant paradigm change from the fossil fuels and nuclear power plants of the Second Industrial Revolution (2IR), which had dominated global economics since the late 1890s, to renewable energy in the late 1990s, which has grown, and is growing at an extraordinarily rapid rate into the twenty-first century. While the US had invested and even began to commercialize some of the technologies developed into mass markets by the EU and Japan, it failed in the last two decades to move ahead of corporate vested interests in maintaining the 2IR in large part due to ignoring and even politicizing the science about climate change being caused by humankind. The problem today in the GIR is that the economic stimuli that helped the 2IR emerge into being dominant around the world was based on government basic economic aid such as land grants (oil drilling), mass transportation (rail roads to transport coal and highways today) infrastructures, tax breaks that are still in place today from over a 100 years ago, and finally the entire auto industry that was once hybrid, electric, and even agriculture oil juice-based (Henry Ford, as the farmer) to dependency on fossil fuels especially oil and now natural gas. The GIR needs these same kinds of government financial support mechanisms. The United States of America (USA) needs to make these significant economic paradigm changes now to become a part of the GIR. © Springer-Verlag London 2013.