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A key plank of the ecological modernization perspective is that non-polluting technologies, such as renewable energy projects, can make a big impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Renewable technologies can also be made available to developing countries to help them avoid the high-polluting forms of industrialization which have caused so much environmental degradation.

One widely reported recent example is the massive solar power plant (actually four linked sites) being constructed in Ouarzazate, Morocco, which could supply the energy needs of 1 million people. This is crucial to the country’s ambitious target of generating over 40 per cent of its electricity from renewables – a huge change given its previously heavy reliance on imported fossil fuels such as coal and gas. The technologically innovative aspect of the plant is not just its size – the many rows of solar mirrors cover an area as large as thirty-five football pitches or the size of the capital city, Rabat – but also its attempt to store the energy generated from the sun using salt.

The plant generates heat that melts the salt, which is then able to store the heat, which in turn generates enough steam to power turbines overnight. Morocco’s hot desert climate is a necessary environment for such a scheme. The solar mirrors are more expensive to produce than conventional photovoltaic panels, but the big advantage is that they continue generating power even after sundown. The storage system promises to hold energy for up to eight hours, meaning that a continuous solar energy supply should be possible.

When the plant is completed, the hope is that enough energy will be generated to allow Morocco to export some of it to Europe. The project is a public–private partnership and will cost around $9 billion, much of which is from the World Bank and other private and public financial institutions. But, if it fulfils its promises, the Noor Ouarzazate complex may be one of the most striking and successful practical examples of ecological modernization yet seen.

Sources: World Bank (2015); Harrabin (2015); Neslen (2015).

Science and technology have a particularly crucial role in developing preventative solutions, building in ecological considerations at the design stage. This will transform currently polluting production systems.

Since the mid-1990s, three new areas of debate have entered the ecological modernization perspective. First, research began to expand to the developing countries, significantly challenging the Eurocentrism of the original perspective. Second, once ecological modernizers started to think beyond the West, the theory of globalization became more relevant (Mol 2001). Third, ecological modernization has started to take account of the sociology of consumption and theories of consumer societies. These studies look at how consumers can play a part in the ecological modernization of society and how domestic technologies can be improved to reduce energy consumption, save scarce resources (such as water) and contribute to waste reduction through recycling.

Renewable forms of energy, such as this offshore wind farm in the North Sea, are often cited as clear evidence that an ecological form of modernization is a real possibility.

The possibilities offered by EMT can be illustrated by reference to the waste disposal industry, which gets rid of the waste products that industries and consumers generate every day. Until recently, most of this waste was simply processed and buried in landfill sites. Today, the whole industry is being transformed. Technological developments make it much cheaper to produce newsprint from recycled paper than from wood pulp. Hence there are good economic reasons, as well as environmental ones, to use and reuse paper instead of endlessly cutting down trees. Not just individual companies but whole industries are actively pursuing the goal of ‘zero waste’ – the complete recycling of all waste products for future industrial use. Toyota and Honda have already reached a level of 85 per cent recyclability for the car parts they use. In this context, waste is no longer just the harmful dumping of materials but a resource for industry and, to some extent, a means of driving further innovation.

Significantly, some of the major contributions to recycling, and therefore to sustainable development, have come from areas with a heavy concentration of information technology industries, such as California’s Silicon Valley. Some ecological modernizers suggest that information technology, unlike many older forms of industrial production, is environmentally clean and, the more it plays a part in industrial production, the greater the likelihood that harmful environmental effects will be reduced. However, such optimism may be misguided. IT systems, the internet and cloud computing are energy intensive, demanding huge data-storage facilities. They have been seen as a new form of ‘heavy industry’ rather than as part of some ‘weightless economy’ and, as such, do not provide a simple solution to problems of economic development (Strand 2008).

The issue of energy-intensive information technology is discussed in chapter 13, ‘Cities and Urban Life’. Cloud computing and related matters can be found in chapter 19, ‘The Media’.

Unlike other perspectives, EMT is concerned less with global inequality and more with how businesses, individuals and non-state actors can all play a part in transforming society. This makes it different from sustainable development, which begins from the premise that reducing global inequality is a prerequisite for environmental protection. Ecological modernizers also argue that, if the capitalist economic system can be made to work for environmental protection, capitalism will continue; but, if not, something different will necessarily emerge, because the ecological modernization of global society is already well under way.

Critics have seen EMT as overly reliant on technological fixes and as relatively ignorant of cultural, social and political conflicts. Indeed, with its focus on developments in Europe, technological solutions and free markets, ecological modernization, argues Foster (2012), lies closer to a much older form of capitalist modernization theory than to a genuinely environmental sociology. In this sense, it harks back to the notion of human exemptionalism that environmental sociologists saw as the main ideological obstacle to bringing the environment into sociological theory. Ewing (2017) maintains that the focus on continuing economic growth and profitability puts EMT into the framework of promoting a self-defeating ‘green capitalism’ that is incapable of dealing with today’s global environmental issues with the necessary urgency and, therefore, should be rejected.

Ecological modernization certainly is imbued with technological optimism and does not have a fully worked-out theory of how to get from where we are into a sustainable society. Yet some EM theorists claim to be ‘agnostic’ about the future of capitalism. That is, if capitalism assists in the transition to long-term sustainability, then it could survive; however, if it becomes an obstacle, then it will die, and rightly so. Perhaps the real value of the EMT approach lies in the myriad real-world examples that it produces, alongside the practical technologies and suggestions for change it offers. Collectively, these could make a significant contribution in tackling environmental problems, provided that these can be made financially viable in the Global South as well as in the North.