Technological change is path-dependent: the current set of available choices depends on past policies and actions, just as the available technological options in the future will depend on our policies and actions today. In such cases, an early market leader can become “locked in”, whether or not it represents the ideal technology, as occurred with the Windows operating system for computers, for example.66 The current style of industrialization has been described as “carbon lock-in", meaning that carbon-intensive technologies gained an early lead at a time when fossil fuels were cheap and concern about global warming was not yet on the horizon (Unruh and Carrillo-Hermosilla, 2006). Today, the economic benefits of standardization and the low costs of imitating and replicating existing technologies keep the world locked into that same undesirable path. Research on wind power, for example, has found reductions in unit costs as great as 20 per cent from a doubling of production (Junginger, Faaij and Turkenburg, 2005), which made it competitive in the marketplace under many conditions.