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Since the 1970s, capitalism has spread across the globe, with the US at the centre, promoting a privatised free market economy and creating an era of ‘wild capitalism’. Whilst capitalism has provided many benefits (such as greater human freedoms and improved quality of life), the past three decades have intensified the contradictions within the system. For the first time, these contradictions are global in nature, threatening the whole world and the existence of our species. The era of wild capitalist globalisation is over, but what comes next as we stand at the crossroads?

1 Is there hope for the environment?
It looks likely that many complex ecological problems are already irreversible. Ecologists, environmentalists and conservationists believe that without radical international intervention, the world faces an environmental disaster. Even those who once strongly opposed this view have been forced to change their mind by the evidence.

Solution Governments urgently need to put in place regulations to protect the world’s natural ecosystems and the plants and animals that inhabit them. Developing countries will need to formulate policies that protect their people from the destructive environmental consequences of early-stage industrialisation.

2 How much longer for fossil fuels?
A ferocious international struggle is under way to secure access to scarce exhaustible resources, especially energy.

Solution Solar energy technology may come to replace fossil fuels, but it won’t be commercially viable for at least another 20 years. Between now and then, global policy makers must seek to prevent irreparable damage to the environment through global warming. Technological progress must ensure that increases in CO2 emissions are kept within sustainable levels for the planet.

3 Who really wields the power?
The idea that there is a ‘global level playing field’ doesn’t hold true in the face of the fact that business power is concentrated in companies from high-income countries — but these economies only account for 15 per cent of the world’s population.

Solution Companies and policy-makers from developing countries face massive challenges when trying to compete on a level playing field, because there is no such thing. Only by imitating those that have gone before them (Britain, the US, Continental Europe, Japan and Korea) and using state industrial policy to stimulate their national firms, can developing countries hope to catch up.

4 Will the rich just get richer and the poor poorer?
There has been a drastic increase in the inequality in the distribution of income, wealth and life chances within both rich and poor countries. The richest 2 per cent of the world’s population holds more than one half of total global wealth, while the bottom half owns barely 1 per cent.

Solution A democratic system of global governance would be one in which the world’s adult population voted for a global parliament. If such a single political body governed the world, large-scale redistribution of income and wealth would gain wide support.

5 Can we prevent global financial meltdown?
Financial markets are more closely interconnected than ever before. The global financial crisis that began in 2007 is shaking the global economic system to its foundations.

Solution Even before the financial crisis, it was increasingly widely understood that market forces needed to be globally regulated. Of all the tasks facing global institutions, this is the most urgent — the global financial crisis is rapidly becoming a global economic crisis, and may well become a social, political and international relations crisis.

Peter Nolan is author of Crossroads (Marshall Cavendish, £20)