Jeremy Rifkin: The 'Democratization Of Energy' Will Change Everything. Rampant unemployment, rising food prices, a collapsed housing market, ballooning debt -- to Jeremy Rifkin, the American economist and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, these are not simply symptoms of a temporary economic malaise.
Rather, they are signs that the current world order -- long infused with and defined by fossil fuels -- is collapsing around us. In its place, decentralized systems of advanced, clean-energy production and digital power distribution are already starting to rise, Rifkin suggests, and they will reorder not just the way we turn on our lights, but how whole economies -- indeed, whole societies -- operate. Why? In such a world of democratized energy, cooperation trumps control, and the drive toward productivity is replaced by a quest for sustainability.
Of course, revolutions imply conflict by their very nature, and Rifkin concedes that the transformation he envisions is by no means guaranteed. "What Obama is lacking," he added, "is a narrative. " Jeremy Rifkin: The Third Industrial Revolution: Toward A New Economic Paradigm (EXCERPT) 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. In the mid-1990s, it dawned on me that a new convergence of communication and energy was in the offing. So I went east. But what can we bring to the party? Geography Links. FutureWork - Examining Ourselves. I forwarded this privately to Gail Stewart, and after a little prompting thought perhaps it might not be too late to have it join the wider discourse..... -- Charles Brass Chairman Future of Work Foundation PO Box 122 Fairfield 3078 Australia Ph: 61 3 9459 0244 Fax: 613 9459 0344 The mission of the Future of Work Foundation is "to engage all Australians in creating a better future for work" I'm sharing this interesting post from Bob McDaniel, [EMAIL PROTECTED], with his permission. Wednesday, January 17, 2001 12:02 AM Gail ...
As you requested: "I hope we'll hang in for a bit and see if we can make something from our various contributions", here follow some thoughts inspired by your contribution: Megacorporations are increasingly virtual corporations. Almost by definition such virtual corporations have a flattened organizational structure, permeable boundaries and, while having a nominal national affiliation, in a practical sense are essentially placeless. Information Structure and Spatial Organization.
Emerging Digital Environment. Emergence vs. Evolution Why should a borderless society not exist? In fact, from a complexity viewpoint, we may ask can it be stopped? We are all members of many sub-societies nowadays, virtual communities of diverse wishes and structures. We thus need a political arrangement that can support this structure in an appropriate way. I was initially going to entitle this document "Impact of the Evolving Digital Environment" but that seemed to imply that a digital environment of some sort already exists and has existed, perhaps, for some time.
The concept of emergence allows geographers to consider the possibility that our fundamental object of study - the basic interrelationships between social and biophysical systems - is greater than the sum of the individual pieces (social and bio-physical processes separately). (For a complementary view of emergence see the article by Richard Seel.) A term frequently encountered in recent books describing current change is "convergence". Source: D.R.