In The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, Michael T. Klare lays out a convincing and unsettling analysis of the dire circumstances humans have brought upon ourselves as a result of our constantly increasing consumption of the finite ecosystem services on which all of our economic models are predicated.

He highlights the signs that the global oil industry is heaving its dying breaths, acknowledges both the environmental and military ramifications of utilizing unconventional methods of energy extraction, and outlines the broad strokes of a renewable light at the end of the energy tunnel for the world.

Despite presenting a less-than-reassuring picture of our collective well-being and arguing with certainty that “the key resource stockpiles that have sustained global economic expansion for the past sixty-five years are approaching wholesale exhaustion,” Klare is careful to note that this doesn’t mean we’re doomed.

Rather, he concludes that we can choose to survive but we must do so by first acknowledging the need for extreme change, and then choosing the other path before its too late.

According to economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, there is “a paradox deeply embedded in the very heart of the capitalist market system, previously really undisclosed. This paradox has been responsible for the tremendous success of capitalism over the past two centuries, but here’s the irony: the very success of this paradox is now leading to an end game, and a new paradigm emerging out of capitalism — the collaborative commons.”

Rifkin views the collaborative commons as a post-capitalist economy based on sharing and access to zero-marginal cost networks rather than ownership, where resources are recycled and energy is renewable.

He argues that these new collaborative commons have been taking shape for years, and will continue to make up an increasingly large share of the economy over time. He lays out this vision in detail in his books, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World, and The Zero Marginal Cost Society.

In 2015, China announced that they approved their next five-year plan for the economy, spanning from 2016–2020. The plan is the first under President Xi Jinping, and it contained some measures that indicate the country is beginning to shift away from old, dirty energy sources and towards green renewables.

Mark Magnier wrote in the Wall Street Journal at the time, “China’s five-year plan is expected to focus on the environment as part of a bid to improve people’s quality of life and build a ‘moderately prosperous society,’ with implications for many industries including the energy sector.”

The reason for the shift towards renewables can be attributed largely to Rifkin, whose book The Third Industrial Revolution became a cornerstone of China’s plan after Premier Li Keqiang read it and was inspired by Rifkin’s vision for a new global economy.

The goal of the reforms, Keqiang said, is to move from “quantity” of growth to “quality.” This is where Rifkin’s influence becomes clear: the Premier isn’t just talking about how to grow the economy, he’s proposing a fundamental shift in how we reshape the ways in which we value goods and measure growth.

If the U.S. is going to maintain our status and solve many of the domestic issues we see growing worse today, we need to embrace the third industrial revolution and pivot towards investing in it.

We need a 21st century new deal that pumps hundreds of billions of dollars into a domestic renewable energy infrastructure before it’s too late. Not only will this prepare us for the future, it will provide an invaluable opportunity for millions of Americans to earn a living wage and help to rebuild a hollowed out middle class.

If we wait until China and the EU have already caught up, it’ll be too late — the U.S. will be knocked off our geopolitical pedestal, and our economy will suffer.

By then the crucial rare earth materials necessary to build the renewable infrastructure will be immensely difficult to obtain, and the U.S. economy will have suffered massive setbacks as a result of being unable to compete when renewables have become so cost-efficient that corporations and governments decide fossil fuels aren’t worth the investment anymore.

In 2009, the Obama administration acknowledged our need for renewable investments and signed a stimulus package that included $45 billion for renewable technologies. That same year, President Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu described China’s push for renewables as a “Sputnik moment” for the U.S., alluding to the space race of the 1960s.

Ultimately, if we don’t want to play catch up later, we need to take the lead today. We need to adopt a fundamentally new paradigm through which we view our economic system and understand value that incorporates ecosystem services and is not predicated on the concept of ownership.

The profit incentive will always exist, and markets are inevitable, but we need to accept the new reality that a new modern, global Leviathan will be necessary if we want to secure our energy future and preserve our quality of life, while raising standards of living for the rest of the world.

On a local level, we need to ensure that cities have access to sustainable energy, food, water, and other networks that enable a new economy to take shape in which ownership is less important than access to goods.

These smaller, local networks can then be plugged into a larger grid to share energy, information, and goods in a global internet of things. Goods will not be purchased, used, and disposed of — resources will be shared.

While this new paradigm would effectively allow us to “abandon the race altogether,” as Klare said, it still wouldn’t create anything even slightly resembling a utopia. Though conflict as a result of energy would be reduced, conflict over rare earth metals, minerals, and other resources necessary for the new economy would persist.

This is why a deeper paradigm shift is key to building a stable future, and why it must take place on a global level. Only through a globally integrated and locally sustainable web of zero-marginal cost networks can we devise a regime sufficient to satisfactorily distribute the scarcest resources.

Just as Kennedy declared that “we choose to go to the moon” fifty-five years ago, today the choice is ours — we can choose to remain in the past, or take the other path.