JEREMY RIFKIN: The Third Industrial Revolution: Toward A New Economic
Paradigm (EXCERPT)
Jeremy Rifkin, September 25, 2011 | 6:25:06 PM (EST)
Œ
Excerpted from Jeremy Rifkin's The Third Industrial Revolution: How
Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World, Palgrave
Macmillan 2011.

Our industrial civilization is at a crossroads. Oil and the other fossil
fuel energies that make up the industrial way of life are sunsetting, and
the technologies made from and propelled by these energies are antiquated.
The entire industrial infrastructure built off of fossil fuels is aging
and in disrepair. The result is that unemployment is rising to dangerous
levels all over the world. Governments, businesses and consumers are awash
in debt and living standards are plummeting everywhere. A record one
billion human beings--nearly one seventh of the human race--face hunger
and starvation.

Worse, climate change from fossil fuel-based industrial activity looms on
the horizon. Our scientists warn that we face a potentially cataclysmic
change in the temperature and chemistry of the planet, which threatens to
destabilize ecosystems around the world. Scientists worry that we may be
on the brink of a mass extinction of plant and animal life by the end of
the century, imperiling our own species' ability to survive. It is
becoming increasingly clear that we need a new economic narrative that can
take us into a more equitable and sustainable future.

By the 1980's the evidence was mounting that the fossil fuel-driven
industrial revolution was peaking and that human-induced climate change
was forcing a planetary crisis of untold proportions. For the past 30
years I have been searching for a new paradigm that could usher in a
post-carbon era. In my explorations, I came to realize that the great
economic revolutions in history occur when new communication technologies
converge with new energy systems. New energy regimes make possible the
creation of more interdependent economic activity and expanded commercial
exchange as well as facilitate more dense and inclusive social
relationships. The accompanying communication revolutions become the means
to organize and manage the new temporal and spatial dynamics that arise
from new energy systems.

In the 19th century, steam-powered print technology became the
communication medium to manage the coal-fired rail infrastructure and the
incipient national markets of the First Industrial Revolution. In the 20th
century, electronic communications--the telephone and later, radio and
television--became the communication medium to manage and market the
oil-powered auto age and the mass consumer culture of the Second
Industrial Revolution.

In the mid-1990s, it dawned on me that a new convergence of communication
and energy was in the offing. Internet technology and renewable energies
were about to merge to create a powerful new infrastructure for a Third
Industrial Revolution (TIR) that would change the world. In the coming
era, hundreds of millions of people will produce their own green energy in
their homes, offices, and factories and share it with each other in an
"energy Internet," just like we now create and share information online.
The democratization of energy will bring with it a fundamental reordering
of human relationships, impacting the very way we conduct business, govern
society, educate our children, and engage in civic life.

I introduced the Third Industrial Revolution vision at the Wharton
School's Advanced Management Program (AMP), at the University of
Pennsylvania, where I have been a senior lecturer for the past sixteen
years on new trends in science, technology, the economy, and society. The
five-week program exposes CEOs and business executives from around the
world to the emerging issues and challenges they will face in the 21st
century. The idea soon found its way into corporate suites and became part
of the political lexicon among heads of state in the European Union.

By the year 2000, the European Union was aggressively pursuing policies to
significantly reduce its carbon footprint and transition into a
sustainable economic era. Europeans were readying targets and benchmarks,
resetting research and development priorities, and putting into place
codes, regulations, and standards for a new economic journey. By contrast,
America was preoccupied with the newest gizmos and "killer apps" coming
out of Silicon Valley, and homeowners were flush with excitement over a
bullish real estate market pumped up by subprime mortgages.

Few Americans were interested in sobering peak oil forecasts, dire climate
change warnings, and the growing signs that beneath the surface, our
economy was not well. There was an air of contentment, even complacency,
across the country, confirming once again the belief that our good fortune
demonstrated our superiority over other nations.

Feeling a little like an outsider in my own country, I chose to ignore
Horace Greeley's sage advice to every malcontent in 1850 to "Go West,
young man, go West," and decided to travel in the opposite direction,
across the ocean to old Europe, where new ideas about the future prospects
of the human race were being seriously entertained.

I know at this point, many of my American readers are rolling their eyes
and saying, "Give me a break! Europe is falling apart and living in the
past. The whole place is one big museum. It may be a nice destination for
a holiday but is no longer a serious contender on the world scene."

I'm not naïve to Europe's many problems, failings, and contradictions.
But pejorative slurs could just as easily be leveled at the United States
and other governments for their many limitations. And before we Americans
become too puffed up about our own importance, we should take note that
the European Union, not the United States or China, is the biggest economy
in the world. The gross domestic product (GDP) of its twenty-seven member
states exceeds the GDP of our fifty states. While the European Union
doesn't field much of a global military presence, it is a formidable force
on the international stage. More to the point, the European Union is
virtually alone among the governments of the world in asking the big
questions about our future viability as a species on Earth.

So I went east. For the past ten years, I have spent more than 40 percent
of my time in the European Union, sometimes commuting weekly back and
forth across the Atlantic, working with governments, the business
community, and civil society organizations to advance the Third Industrial
Revolution.

In 2006, I began working with the leadership of the European Parliament in
drafting a Third Industrial Revolution economic development plan. Then, in
May 2007, the European Parliament issued a formal written declaration
endorsing the Third Industrial Revolution as the long-term economic vision
and road map for the European Union. The Third Industrial Revolution is
now being implemented by the various agencies within the European
Commission as well as in the member states.

A year later, in October 2008, just weeks after the global economic
collapse, my office hurriedly assembled a meeting in Washington, D.C., of
eighty CEOs and senior executives from the world's leading companies in
renewable energy, construction, architecture, real estate, IT, power and
utilities, and transport and logistics to discuss how we might turn the
crisis into an opportunity.

Business leaders and trade associations attending the gathering agreed
that they could no longer go it alone and committed to creating a Third
Industrial Revolution network that could work with governments, local
businesses, and civil society organizations toward the goal of
transitioning the global economy into a distributed post-carbon era. The
economic development group--which includes Philips, Schneider Electric,
IBM, Cisco Systems, Acciona, CH2M Hill, Arup, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill
Architecture, and Q-Cells, among others--is the largest of its kind in the
world and is currently working with cities, regions, and national
governments to develop master plans to transform their economies into
Third Industrial Revolution infrastructures.

The Third Industrial Revolution vision is quickly spreading to countries
in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. On May 24th, 2011, I presented the five
pillar TIR economic plan in a keynote address at the fiftieth anniversary
conference of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) in Paris, attended by heads of state and ministers from the
thirty-four participating member nations. The presentation accompanied the
rollout of an OECD green growth economic plan which will serve as a
template to begin preparing the nations of the world for a post carbon
industrial future.

In designing the EU blueprint for the Third Industrial Revolution, I have
been privileged to work with many of Europe's leading heads of state,
including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany; Prime Minister Romano Prodi
of Italy; Prime Minister José Luis Rodrà guez Zapatero of Spain; Manuel
Barroso, the president of the European Commission; and five of the
presidents of the European Council.

Is there anything we Americans can learn from what's happening in Europe?
I believe so. We need to begin by taking a careful look at what our
European friends are saying and attempting to do. However falteringly,
Europeans are at least coming to grips with the reality that the fossil
fuel era is dying, and they are beginning to chart a course into a green
future. Unfortunately, Americans, for the most part, continue to be in a
state of denial, not wishing to acknowledge that the economic system that
served us so well in the past is now on life support. Like Europe, we need
to own up and pony up.

But what can we bring to the party? While Europe has come up with a
compelling narrative, no one can tell a story better than America. Madison
Avenue, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley excel at this. What has
distinguished America is not so much our manufacturing acumen or military
prowess, but our uncanny ability to envision the future with such
vividness and clarity that people feel as if they've arrived even before
they've left the station. If and when Americans truly "get" the new Third
Industrial Revolution narrative, we have the unequalled ability to move
quickly to make that dream a reality.

The Third Industrial Revolution is the last of the great Industrial
Revolutions and will lay the foundational infrastructure for an emerging
collaborative age. The forty year build-out of the TIR infrastructure will
create hundreds of thousands of new businesses and hundreds of millions of
new jobs. Its completion will signal the end of a two-hundred-year
commercial saga characterized by industrious thinking, entrepreneurial
markets, and mass labor workforces and the beginning of a new era marked
by collaborative behavior, social networks and boutique professional and
technical workforces. In the coming half century, the conventional,
centralized business operations of the First and Second Industrial
Revolutions will increasingly be subsumed by the distributed business
practices of the Third Industrial Revolution; and the traditional,
hierarchical organization of economic and political power will give way to
lateral power organized nodally across society.

At first blush, the very notion of lateral power seems so contradictory to
how we have experienced power relations through much of history. Power,
after all, has traditionally been organized pyramidically from top to
bottom. Today, however, the collaborative power unleashed by the coming
together of Internet technology and renewable energies, fundamentally
restructures human relationships, from top to bottom to side to side, with
profound implications for the future of society.

The music companies didn't understand distributed power until millions of
young people began sharing music online, and corporate revenues tumbled in

In High School a history teacher made probably one of the most valid points about paths to riches that I think I've ever learned. He said there were three ways to become rich: Inheritance, Stock Market, and Real Estate, of those three only one comes without risk, and that one no one has control over.

This teacher didn't even make this point out of part of his curriculum, and in fact I don't remember why he brought it up, probably in discussion with students during the class. Obviously it made an impression on me, and I find it unfortunate that it isn't the opening and concluding statement in every High School economics class. (Don't ask me what I learned in that class, I was confused from day one in that class, and don't remember anything of value).

My point being this, some of the most potent truths are also so simple you can teach any High School student it in under 5 minutes and it can stick with them for a life time. As a counter-point, it seems that such potent truths are actively suppressed, that teaching the general population simple facts like this would fundamentally change the expectations of the masses, and that would be a social revolution the world has not seen since the age of enlightenment.

N

What I find ridiculous is those on the Left complaining about Obama lying to us, as if that's something new that has NEVER happened before and as if The People had nothing to do with his inability to get things passed. As I see it, where people were REALLY fooled was in reading more progressive messages into what Obama was saying than were actually there and expecting a different result from the same corrupt system that enabled things like war and Wall Street to attempt to drive our economy.

Thom's right, most Americans just kicked back after Obama was elected, as if everything was going to take care of itself and have been whinning ever since that things haven't been working out the way they expected them to; despite Obama telling The People that being elected was only the very beginning of our work, that the truly hard work was still yet to come.

When are people going to get it into their thick heads that our civic duties DO NOT begin and end on Election Day? If you don't like what we have to choose from then get off your duffs, enter the precinct committees, work on things like fair election policies to clean our system up and get out on the streets!

The bigger picture on Madmen, Pan-Am and The Playboy Club is that they can get away with treating women as sex objects if it's a "portrayal" of a bygone era.