Third Industrial Revolution

Five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution

By Jeremy Rifkin

Also see his book The Zero Marginal Cost Society

The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are 

1. shifting to renewable energy; 
2. transforming the building stock of every continent into green micro–power plants to collect renewable energies on-site; 
3. deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies; 
4. using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy internet that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of renewable energy locally, on-site, they can sell surplus green electricity back to the grid and share it with their continental neighbors); and 
5. transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell green electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid.               

Describe the future landscape based on the above.  There are three internets: energy, communications and logistics.

Every building has solar collectors and electrical energy storage. Within each building there are sensors that collect data for analysis and reporting of temperatures, humidity, specific electricity usage, and many other variables.  Every building is a micro-power plant connected to a smart micro-grid that is connected to a larger smart grid.  The energy internet connects all the nodes and the nodes all communicate with each other.

Every building has an internet connection to transmit data wirelessly to a central database for analysis and reporting of energy generation and use.  Consumers transform into producers by having a 3D printer that is their own factory, or over the internet they send a digital design to a 3D printer near them.  The communications internet enables the creation of prosumers.

Every building has electrical charging stations for electric cars and trucks.  Fuel cell vehicles have exchange locations.  Solar energy is used to charge the electric vehicles and deliver to local customers the products from prosumers.  Autonomous vehicles and smart transportation grids make transportation safer and more efficient. Global trade uses fewer ships burning fossil fuels.  Airplanes convert to non-fossil fuel engines.  Sensors provide information over the internet to create a smart transportation grid that works as a logistic internet.

Immigration Obama Style

Republicans are afraid Democrats will rally the several million immigrants given a reprieve from deportation to raise their voices politically.  Republicans are fighting immigration reform because it will result in more votes for Democrats.  Obama just elected the next Democratic President of the US.  Not many of the immigrants given reprieve to stay will be able to vote, if any.  However, every other Hispanic is going to shift toward the Democrats.

Texas is Republican now, but by 2020 the 42% Hispanic population will be voting for Democrats.

Republicans can yell and scream, the Senate and House for the next two years can pass legislation that Obama vetoes, the Republicans can try to mount a Presidential campaign for 2016, however they will lose.  And lose by a larger margin in 2020 and lose by a larger margin in 2024.  The Republicans have dug themselves a hole and they are going to pull the dirt in on top of themselves.

Republican Politicians

Republican politicians endear themselves to the rich for donations and conservatives for votes by providing laws to provide security, to protect the status quo and to maintain the illusion of a traditional social structure at the cost of the public giving up moral authority.  The Patriot Act is an example of costly, unnecessary and immoral illusion of security that gave moral authority to government and contractors.  The denial of Climate Change and the consequences is an example of protecting coal and oil industry, as well as the Koch brothers, to protect the status quo.  The fight against gay marriage, denial of racism and prejudice against non-Christian believers is an example of maintaining the illusion of a traditional society when in fact the real world has moved on.

Climate Holocaust

The Bad News

The Climate Holocaust is the catastrophe awaiting one billion people during the 2020s. Another billion people will be forced to migrate, contributing to premature deaths. The collapse of unstable governments worldwide will cause chaos, wars and economic hardship for billions of people. 

The catastrophe will unfold in stages. Corporations in collusion with politicians have had a program of systemic state-sponsored extraction of fossil fuels over decades that has changed the climate.  Even if this program were stopped today, there is a decades-long delay between burning fossil fuels and when humans will experience a change. There are millions of kilometers between the extraction of fossil fuels, the place where CO2 is released into the atmosphere, and the places where the changes in the climate have their greatest consequences. This means the consequences of climate change are separated in time and space from the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. Cause and effect are distant in time and space.

Over decades, numerous currents of gases released to the atmosphere, currents in the ocean, the jet stream currents, currents in society of political and lifestyle and other currents have merged into an uncontrollable system changing the climate. The natural psychological bias of humans has contributed to how humanity arrived at the beginning of this catastrophe. Denial, the things that hinder learning, self-centered lifestyles, American individualism and many other human biases have an effect on the outcome.

While billions of people’s lives are at stake, corporations view climate change as an opportunity to get access to northern hemisphere land and ocean resources previously unavailable. The ideal of individualism and the corporation having legal status of a person under the law contributed to the tendency that already existed in American society to acquire fossil fuel resources to maintain the lifestyle of the wealthy few at the expense of the billions of poor people.  The fossil fuel industry policy is to save the lifestyle of a valuable few while ignoring the consequences to billions.

US government policies and other world government policies have divided the population into two categories: the wealthy 1 percent and the 99 percent. The policies now in place essentially ignore the needs of the 99 percent. There is not yet in existence a clear-cut concept of abandoning a billion people to die and another billion to premature deaths. When climate change begins to be experienced by the wealthy in the present, then they will begin to triage who gets assistance and who does not.

The Good News

After WWII, improvements in global governance and in the lifestyle for millions, and advances in technology, contributed to a golden era in society. The same will happen after the Climate Holocaust ends. A great celebration will occur, then people will get back to work transforming national and global governance organizations so that this can never happen again. But also to continue to deal with and cleanup the consequences. Ideals will again be popular. A new golden era will begin for youth.

Heroes will be celebrated, the wounded will be carried for and the dead will be honored. Society will reorganize around a new set of policies that improve the outcomes for billions of people. The gap between the wealthy 1 percent and the 99 percent will shrink. Global education of youth, men and women, will expand to include everyone. Technology will not have rescued humanity from the Climate Holocaust, but afterwards the youth of the world will embrace technology as a tool for education, governance and social mobility.

Table of Experience

What We Do Not Experience	What We Experience
Climate	Weather
Average Temperatures	Actual Temperature Now
Melting Ice at the Poles	Summer where we live
CO2 Warming the Atmosphere	Air We Breathe
Ocean Currents	Ocean Waves at the Beach
Energy in Feedback Loops	Immediate Cause and Effect
Feedback loops in natural systems	Events, consequences, actions

Why Education Policy?

Systems-based reasons why education policy is difficult to get right:

First, policy is often crafted by committee in highly political and polarized environments.

Second, individuals rarely understand how the system operates, what policy innovations will lead to good outcomes, or even why successful interventions work.

Third, policymakers seldom agree on the system's purpose, how to prioritize conflicting goals, how to measure success, or what principles should guide their actions.

Meditation

Take aways from interview listed below.

1. Practice meditation by holding in your mind the opposite concepts:

a. Things are constantly changing and we engage as if they were permanent.
b. Things are interdependent and we engage as if they were independent.
c. Things are without intrinsic identity and we engage as if they were objects with        intrinsic identities.  (intrinsic identity example: my brother moved, lost weight and got sick, but he is still the same person to me.)

2.  Religious doctrine, Christian or any other, is a useful metaphor to create a set of principles and guidelines to live by.
  


Jay L. Garfield, who has taught philosophy at several universities and is currently the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professor of Humanities, Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

"Buddhist doctrine regarding the nature of reality generally focuses on three principal characteristics of things. The first idea is that all phenomena are impermanent and constantly changing, despite the fact that we engage with them as though they are permanent; the second is that they are interdependent, although we engage with them as though they are independent; the third is that they are without any intrinsic identity, although we treat ourselves and other objects as though they have intrinsic identities."

"...........one way for a Buddhist not taken with the idea of personal rebirth across biological lives to take that doctrine as a useful metaphor: Treat the past reflectively and with gratitude and responsibility, and with an awareness that much of our present life is conditioned by our collective past; take the future seriously as something we have the responsibility to construct, just as much as if we would be there personally. This makes sense of the ideas, for instance, of intergenerational justice, or of collective contemporary responsibility for harms inflicted in the past, as well as our current personal responsibility to future generations."

Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/what-does-buddhism-require/

What Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about Climate Change

Elizabeth Kolbert wrote http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2014/04/14/140414taco_talk_kolbert
about the politics of climate change.

Comparing the current situation with the past experience of dealing with CFCs and Ozone in the Stratosphere. Having read Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway, I remembered that individuals and businesses acted a long time before the government did to stop using aerosols.  Page 117, by the time the FDA announced regulations in 1977, CFC propellants were 1/4 of what they were at the peak.  Why?  Because the American public took action on their own, without any new laws or regulations.  It was very easy, they just stopped buying CFC propellants as much as possible.

How are individual Americans taking action to deal with Climate Change?
Americans are speaking with their pocket books again. Just like they did with CFCs. Americans are shifting the market place to non-fossil fuel energy sources by purchasing renewable energy from their local utilities, their choice of vehicles, their energy savings in the home and by recycling.  They are installing solar energy on schools, businesses and homes at rate that doubles in a very short time frame.  Everyone believes coal plants are going to be shut down over the next 10 to 20 years.  The key measurement is to look at what Americans are spending their money on in terms of non-fossil fuel energy sources and uses.