The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Rifkin Jeremy

Author:Rifkin, Jeremy [Rifkin, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

WHY THE INTERNET PRESIDENT DOESN’T GET IT

I suspect at this juncture my American readers are asking, “What about President Obama?” Obama is the man who most reflects, in the public mind, the generational shift taking place in the world. The young president has confessed that the most difficult thing he had to give up on assuming high office was not his privacy but his precious BlackBerry. He surely would be attracted to the idea of a distributed and collaborative energy revolution patterned after the Internet model—right?

Obama has made green energy a part of his economic recovery plan. But when we look at the fine print, we see that his administration is even more deeply committed to bringing back nuclear power, offshore oil drilling, and experimental technologies to clean up coal emissions, allowing for a vast expansion of coal-fired power plants. And even his green economic recovery program is formulated more along the lines of centralized management and distribution of renewable energies than a distributed model, reflecting the top-down organizational thinking that governed the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. How do we account for his policies?

Let me take you back to 2003 to give you some background on how Washington has come to think about sustainable economic development. Out of the blue, I got a phone call from a senior science fellow in Senator Byron Dorgan’s office asking if I would come in to meet with the senator. Word had gotten back to Washington, DC, about the spadework the European Union was doing to establish an infrastructure for green energies and a low-carbon economy. The senator was particularly keen on hearing more about pillar 3, advancing hydrogen storage. The New York Times had run an article mentioning President Prodi’s hydrogen research initiative, and Dorgan wanted to know more. The senator was the head of the Democratic Policy Committee and responsible for bringing new ideas to the attention of Senate Democrats.

Dorgan, who hails from North Dakota, a conservative coal-producing state, had nonetheless been one of the leading progressive advocates for green energies in the US Senate. He wanted to know what we were doing in Europe and asked my thoughts on what we might possibly do here in the United States. I was candid with him and said that Europe was leaving the United States behind on the way to a green economy, and that catching up might be difficult with a climate change skeptic president in office (President Bush) and the Republican Party controlling both houses of Congress. Nonetheless, he asked me if I would put together a memorandum that he could circulate to his Senate colleagues, similar to the plan I had worked on with President Prodi at the European Commission. I agreed. He then invited me to make a presentation on the Third Industrial Revolution to all of his Senate colleagues at their traditional Thursday lunch session.

The lunch was set for March 20, just hours after the United States began its bombing campaign over Iraq. The senators were clearly

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