There was a time when demand and pricing was what matters because the rise of logistics and transport technologies made it easy to ship things around or even store things for long. So production becomes so isolated from consumption that as long as you can price things right on demand side, you can be producing anything anywhere.
Profit then is just about finding lower cost locations, resources, manpower, materials and so on. Services gradually have those attributes as they are increasingly performed remotely. But when we start considering supply chains of products, issues of resilience as well as carbon emissions, things goes a bit tricky.
The future low carbon world might be one where supply chains are shorter, where consuming local looms large and where decentralisation returns. Powering decentralisation is simply the recognition that there’s both financial economy and carbon economy; that when we need to economise on carbon, we can afford it.