http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/1/20/203028/450#8

This is an interesting challenge.

Imagine how a sustainable empire might work.

How does a commercial empire work?  It creates a technological revolution that increases productivity.  With that surplus, brought about by greater productivity, it takes over markets.

The british empire used coal/steam/iron technology to grab markets from agrarian cultures.

If a new commercial empire that switched to renewable energy/electricity/silicon, lithium, composite based technology and distributed manufacturing, could be started, would it capture markets?  Or would it be coopted by military dictatorship?

Probably both.  The key would be to develop easily replicable manufacturing techniques, as it was with the coal/steam/iron age.  Certain pivotal inventions/discoveries pushed this commercial empire.  

What are the key inventions/discoveries for the next commercial empire?  

Plug and play renewable distributed power switches?  That use internet communication to regulate power flow.  From one home with a solar panel or biogas generator..all the way up to a whole continental grid, made up of millions of these computer switches.  All working together like a colony of ants.

Plugin hybrid vehicles and renewable electric mass transpotation.  All the way from electric assisted bikes and plugin hybrid cars..to plugin hybrid buses and high speed electric commuter rail.

Organic fertlizer/biogas energy systems and mechanized organic farming.  

These are breakthroughs that magnify human productivity in terms of quality of life.  Rather than using more and more resources to raise human standard of living, these developments raise the quality of human life, in symbiosis with the living planet.  That way technological innovation and economic growth can be sustainable.  

Human progress compatible with life.

Would this lend itself to commercial empire if a Walmart, for instance, were to mass produce this model in nation after nation with local production?  Look at their CFL efforts.  How would a commercial empire ever be motivated to go after local production, rather than the lowest cost manufacturing model that Walmart uses?

It's a big problem.  Empire, by it's very nature, concentrates capital and power in fewer and fewer hands.  Sustainable human progress needs protection from empire, that is what representative government was supposed to do.

Taxation without representation?  Ring any bells?  The US was founded as a reponse to the Walmart of revolutionary war times.  The British East India Tea Company backed by the british army and navy.

Would the spread of representative government along with earth friendly technology constitute an empire?  A new kind of empire?  I'm not sure if it would still fit the definition.