This is offense. The green transition will spread globally, but the alt dooms it.

The master plan would pan out as follows. Industrialized countries with high greenhouse gas emissions would power through with the green transition, and this is more and more likely to happen now that, as we saw in Chapter 6, this is becoming a profitable investment opportunity. This includes not only the West, or OECD countries, but also China, which from the standpoint of resources and technological capacity is well positioned to be a green early adopter. These countries have a strong, self-interested incentive to fast-track the adoption of these new technologies to gain an edge in what will be the energy and production system of the future. By so doing they will be capturing network effects, setting regulatory and technological standards, and effectively shaping the very course of the green industrial revolution.66

In the process, early adopters will show the way to the rest of the world, through two channels. First, their actions will prove that the transition is feasible, and even beneficial, given local benefits such as a better air quality and positive effects on citizens’ health and well-being. Second, they will demonstrate how such a complex transformation can be achieved in practice.

When this happens, we will fall back onto a well-known dynamic: the international demonstration effect. First postulated by Estonian economist Ragnar Nurkse in 1957, and later empirically verified by a variety of studies, this is the process by which people in poorer countries tend to adopt the products, technologies, and trends of richer nations. We see this process of emulation within countries, as discussed in the context of the innovation treadmill in Chapter 5. Nurkse, formulating his theory in the aftermath of the introduction of a power ful early information and communication technology—the television—argued that this also applies at the global level. The propagation effect he described is probably even stronger today thanks to the internet and, more specifically, social media.

As green technologies become a permanent fixture in advanced economies, these production methods and consumption patterns are likely to expand throughout the world, just like blue jeans, Coca-Cola, and Facebook have in the past. Initially, through the highly interconnected cosmopolitan rich elites emulating green icons of success and modernity. Later, through the standard innovation treadmill within countries. This, incidentally, is what Lant Pritchett was noting in his example of how advanced-country technologies get propagated to the developing world, to an extent irrespectively of local relative prices (see Chapter 6). Of course, this will leave ample space for local experimentation and adaptation.

Within this context, having abandoned the logic of self-sacrifice, we can then easily imagine rich countries helping out less developed ones in the energy transition, including through financial transfers, for two reasons. First, by pursuing a model based on a rapid green transition that fosters economic growth and jobs, and technological innovation for climate adaptation, advanced economies will have yet more leeway to devote extra resources to foreign aid, including for a global green transition. Again, abundance rather than scarcity fosters international cooperation. Second, aid will also be powered by a logic of national self-interest, given that the companies of early adopting countries will detain an edge in green technology and infrastructure, and governments will want to push their market and standards also abroad. In other terms, development policy, international climate mitigation objectives, geopolitical interests and national industrial policy will all be closely aligned.

Other motives that could favor large financial transfers to ease the transition abroad could include the protection of some specific global common goods, as for example the Amazon Forest. One could see from this perspective the significant international financing connected to the so-called Great Green Wall, to contain desertification in Africa. Clearly, these targeted financial transfers could also be channeled through international and regional development banks.

To a more limited extent, we are likely to observe important financial transfers connected to the hosting of some green energy generation facilities, such as solar panels or windmills. Based on natural factors, the best locations for these facilities are often found in developing countries, which could then export energy to high-consumption countries.67 This could be seen as a sort of energy outsourcing, creating local jobs and transferring technological know-how, just like manufacturing outsourcing has over the past decades.

Finally, there are solid reasons to expect that over the coming decades, as the effects of climate change will be more and more visible, a green agenda will rise to the top of the priority list. This will constitute another push factor for a global green transition, even in the absence of binding treaties. This is particularly the case in emerging economies, which currently are the most reticent to prioritize decarbonization, but which will feel the strongest early pinch from climate and environmental stress.

At this point, the reader could be left wondering: Is there a role for global international agreements, like Paris, and its Glasgow update, or are they useless in light of the above? To be clear, they are not useless at all. Climate treaties play a crucial role by creating forums where countries come together, use standard frameworks to assess their progress, share items of concern, exert some useful peer pressure, and even arrive at some very targeted solutions.68 As with the example of the ozone hole, it is perfectly possible that successful agreements will be signed to adopt some joint policies and fix specific problems. For instance, it is increasingly clear that averting depletion of fish stocks and catastrophic biodiversity collapse calls for, aside from avoiding extreme climate change, establishing no-fishing zones at sea and large natural reserves on land.69 Alliances might similarly be required to stop the damage thawing permafrost and retreating ice shelves in the Arctic and Antarctica.

Multilateral, all-encompassing international treaties should be seen for what they are: culminations of aligned national greening political agendas, rather than stepping stones toward top-down, technocratic decarbonization, or silver bullets to defeat climate change. They should not exclude other binding international agreements that are smaller both in scope (focused on selected environmental policies) and in size (involving fewer parties). Recent proposals for a joint EU–US, or possibly G7, initiative for a common tax on carbon, would fall into the latter category.70 Especially among countries that are relatively close in terms of their value systems, levels of development, industrial structures, and political priorities, agreements like this are within reach.

In this chapter we have gained more reason to doubt that, faced with the threat of catastrophic climate change, the right move is to curtail economic growth. That recommendation is predicated on the delusional principle that, under the pressure of bounded resources, people will come together and share peacefully what is available. In the history of past human experience with climate and environmental stress, and in the principles of evolutionary anthropology and cognitive science, there is no evidence that world peace and humanity-wide sharing would be the most likely outcome.

Abandoning economic growth would weaken the scope for innovation, exacerbate perceived scarcity, and reduce resilience—and do so just as climate change was beginning to unleash its powerful effects. It would, in the face of scarcity and heightened uncertainty, set off a scramble for limited resources as people retreated for protection to their nation state in-groups. We can chastise all this as offensive to morality, but ignoring these human traits and historical lessons will most likely take us where we do not want to go. On the other hand, in my view, our moral compass should guide us all to try and avoid at all costs a return to a zero-sum world and a hyperconflictual foreign relations scenario. History shows how, when the climate and environment start changing, what we should be most afraid of is intergroup conflict. And the only difference today, with respect to the past, is that human weapons are much more deadly.

As societies find themselves between a rock and a hard place—facing catastrophic climate change on one side, and catastrophic conflict over bounded resources on the other—the escape route is narrow but, given the alternative, must be pursued.71 In abstract terms, it involves using technological innovation and human ingenuity to shift away from the logic that salvation can only come with national sacrifice for the global good, or fairshare valuations, to the logic that casts decarbonization efforts as investment opportunities.

In practical terms, under this new logic, industrialized countries can be expected to act enthusiastically as early adopters for green technologies, attracted by the prizes of being at the forefront of the next industrial revolution and able to set its standards for years to come. In turn, this industrial revolution will reverberate through the world, following the standard paths of capitalism and globalization, propelled by the deep-rooted mechanics of emulation, and financed in part by foreign aid.