| Abstract |
Climate change is already impacting the quality of life and the economy worldwide. Its impacts are bound to become more severe as more otherwise uncompensated carbon budgets are compounded thus worsening global atmospheric CO2 levels. The goal to keep global warming below 2 °C requires urgent changes in numerous aspects of the industrial world of today. However, energy transitions typically take decades, and achieving the objective to decarbonise gross domestic product, for example by 50% by 2040 will require both the implementation of long-term policies and the deployment of radical innovation in different industrial sectors, as well as decoupling energy demand from economic growth via a steep decline in energy intensity, a significant increase in energy efficiency, the rise of electrification, and the growing use of renewables. Together, these levers have the potential to accelerate the realization of the vision of photovoltaic electricity as a universal energy currency, as well as that of biorefineries and recycling to build on the benefits of the petrochemistry of today while minimizing environmental impacts, not to forget the implementation of energy-efficient smart cities. A proposal is to explore a 'hypermodern-capitalism' model characterized by accelerated changes to sense and respond to trends and competition with the objective to maximize economic and social outcomes by optimizing the production function in terms of both local and global parameters in parallel. Here, including a social cost of carbon into the prices of goods of trade to implement a correction on the subsidy to transportation or production in the form of passing the cost of climate change to future generations is bound to reshuffle the current status quo of comparative advantages and to incentivize changes for achieving industrial sustainability. Globalization has a green future ahead mediated by corporate sustainability responsibility and individual social responsibility. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. |
