Review of Jeremy Rifkin's book Third Industrial Revolution

 The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World 

This book is the first to present a solution to the question 'How do we get from here to there?' I heartily recommend this book. It is easy to read, reads more like an adventure story, which it is. Jeremy Rifkin's (JR) ideas have been endorsed by the EU and are already happening in cities like Rome and Utrecht. He has seen how the internet is providing a new way to connect not just information, but also energy production, and commerce, and the far reaching implications of this for breaking through the traditional centralising structures that have dominated much of our social relationships. So in education, health, and governance, the internet is providing lateral peer to peer connections that democratise top-down structures. This also applies to our relationship to nature which has been seen as there to be exploited. JR shows how we need to see our interdependence and work with nature, to connect with respect and love for all creatures, in order to find a sustainable way of life.

The Third Industrial Revolution - Jeremy Rifkin

Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Third Industrial Revolution, is quietly working away to get the foundations of a new energy policy in place in Europe and elsewhere in the next few years. Renewable energy produced in every building allowing millions of people to own and exchange on an 'energy internet', requiring huge investment and providing millions of jobs.

'Today, Internet technology and renewable energies are beginning to merge to create a new industrial infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) that will change the way power is distributed in the 21st century. 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,” a distributed smart grid just like we now generate and share information online. The establishment of a Third Industrial Revolution industrial infrastructure will create thousands of new businesses and millions of jobs and lay the basis for a sustainable global economy in the 21st century. The democratization of energy will also 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.

Like every other communication and energy infrastructure in history, the various pillars of a Third Industrial Revolution must be laid down simultaneously or the foundation will not hold. That’s because each pillar can only function in relationship to the others. The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution, all of which are detailed in the Industrial Policy Communication Update, are (1) shifting to renewable energy; (2) transforming the building stock of every continent into green energy efficient micropower plants to collect renewable energies onsite; (3) deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout theinfrastructure to store intermittent energies; (4) using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy Internet a distributed smart grid that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of energy locally, onsite, they can sell surplus back to the grid and share electricity with their continental neighbors); and (5) transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid.'

http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/initiatives/mission-growth/files/jeremy-rifkin-industrial-policy-communication-update-executive-summary_en.pdf

Join me in suporting this project. email anna@shsh.co.uk phone 07954345550

Zapatistas Silent Mobilization - December 21 2012