The Third Industrial Revolution

The progress we're still looking at in the West is mostly not so much to better our own lives but to better the world in the long run, and that's a rather poor incentive in a free market. The designs for a world based on renewable energy are there, but in our sluggish economy, they aren't put into application as fast as they could be: we already have enough, so we spend on little else but electronics and keep our cash for the basics. The only thing that's needed to mass-produce them until they become cheap is funding of "loss leaders". Renewable energy might be the most ambitious human endeavor since space flight, and just as with space flight, we need massive collaboration for that.
Enter China. We can talk about what its government should and doesn't do for the good of its people until kingdom comes, but the question that economists really should be focusing on when analyzing the future of the economy is simply what it will do, especially now that it's become the biggest economy in the world.
China is in a precarious situation. Automation is becoming cheaper than outsourcing, and its overproduction in the construction sector is the communist equivalent of the US housing bubble, leaving entire cities of skyscrapers vacant. Its only advantage is that its government has so much power over the economy that it cannot go bankrupt, no matter how much it spends. It has much room to grow in its consumer market, but in its communist model it doesn't profit from this: the state needs a new industrial sector in order to grow.
In the West, there's little demand for renewable energy when we've already dealt with most of the smog in our big cities through cleaner use of existing energy sources. But in China, that won't be enough, and 50,000 protests each year call for renewable energy as millions die of pollution. So in the new five-year plan that started in 2015, China will invest the equivalent of 11 billion dollars into electrical cars. * Funding alone isn't enough to kickstart renewable energy, but it's certainly required.
Once the production process become cheaper, they'll be exported across the world, and other electrical car companies will follow suit. Then, in our economy which is becoming more and more based on saving rather than consumption, it's only a matter of time before people will jump on the opportunity to save on gas costs. Other renewable technologies could follow.
Contrary to popular opinion, storage of renewables isn't an actual problem any more than capture is (see PEM cells), but the only commercial advantage of renewables is that its resources are decentralized. Since existing industrial corporations are already centralized and only small startups could benefit from decentralized energy, no private company has any financial incentive to heavily invest into renewables. In the West, we've sort of accepted that we're going to switch to renewables as and when every other option runs out. But if storage and capture of renewables becomes cheap enough to be ubiquitous, it could allow heavy-duty industrialization to take place anywhere in the world without much need for much resources, especially in combination with the Internet (e.g. open source ecology) and 3D-printers.
This could be the beginning of a new industrial revolution. The First Industrial Revolution was coal (steam engine), the Second was oil (combustion engine) and the third will be solar/wind. The digital revolution is not an Industrial Revolution because information is not a basic energy source that all our industrial machinery is based on. Just like oil allowed our machines to contain their own fuel without depending on railroads, solar/wind energy will allow buildings to contain their own fuel without depending on the grid. In developed countries, this may do no more than satisfy the hippies, but in developing countries, this can change everything and eliminate poverty in rural areas.
Just as the First Industrial Revolution (Napoleon) and the Second Industrial Revolution (Lenin, Mao), the Third Industrial Revolution may cause communist revolutions in developing countries in crisis, perhaps in the Middle-East when oil sales drop. So far the US has always intervened when communists rose to power in developing countries, but in the Middle East, it's become clear that it has reached the limits of its powers.