The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World
Jeremy Rifkin
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0230341977
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Industrial Revolution, powered by oil and other fossil fuels, is spiraling into a dangerous endgame. The price of gas and food are climbing, unemployment remains high, the housing market has tanked, consumer and government debt is soaring, and the recovery is slowing. Facing the prospect of a second collapse of the global economy, humanity is desperate for a sustainable economic game plan to take us into the future.
Here, Jeremy Rifkin explores how Internet technology and renewable energy are merging to create a powerful "Third Industrial Revolution." He asks us to imagine hundreds of millions of people producing their own green energy in their homes, offices, and factories, and sharing it with each other in an "energy internet," just like we now create and share information online.
Rifkin describes how the five-pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution will create thousands of businesses, millions of jobs, and usher in a fundamental reordering of human relationships, from hierarchical to lateral power, that will impact the way we conduct commerce, govern society, educate our children, and engage in civic life.
Rifkin's vision is already gaining traction in the international community. The European Union Parliament has issued a formal declaration calling for its implementation, and other nations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, are quickly preparing their own initiatives for transitioning into the new economic paradigm.
The Third Industrial Revolution is an insider's account of the next great economic era, including a look into the personalities and players ― heads of state, global CEOs, social entrepreneurs, and NGOs ― who are pioneering its implementation around the world.
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illumination, round-the-clock Internet communication, jet travel, shift work, and a myriad of other activities have dislodged us from our primordial biological clocks. The sun and the changing seasons have become far less relevant to our survival—or at least we thought that was the case. Our increasing reliance on a rich deposit of inert stored sun, in the form of carbon-based fuels, created the illusion that our success on Earth was more dependent on human ingenuity and technological prowess
scientific and popular levels.”41 Re-wilding urban areas provides students with the opportunity to experience nature up close, rekindle the biophilia connection, understand their relationship to their evolutionary kin, and develop biosphere consciousness. That’s why in our TIR master plans we have reconceptualized metropolitan areas like Rome as urban biospheres. If biosphere consciousness is the ultimate aim of education, then every urban environment needs to be embedded into the biosphere so
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2009. Looking out the window, I could see the twinkling lights coming from the infamous Island of Gorée, one of several collection points in Senegal for the transatlantic African slave trade. Dakar is the furthest western point of continental Africa, and as a result, became an embarkation point for transporting slaves to the Americas. A few days later I was having lunch on the beach with Moustapha Ndiaye, a personal advisor to President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, about the possibility of his