Jeremy Rifkin-- the third industrial revolution

At the RSA

He begins with the grim picture. 2 events

1. Oil at $147/barrel. This was June, 2011. He calls it the earthquake, the financial collapse several months later was only an aftershock. Our economy is based on oil. Transport, food, energy, clothes, pharmacuticals. And according to the conservative industry estimates, peak oil was in 2006. When oil hits ~150, the economy shuts down. He predicts a continuing 4 year cycle: economy stops, oil price drops, economy re-starts, oil rises until at 150 it shuts everything down again.
   
2. Copenhagen. No agreement on climate change. Yet the median estimate is +3 degrees in the next 50 years, which will radically change weather patterns (each 1 degree change allows the atmosphere to hold 7% more water)
   

Society moves by finding new sources of energy and communication, which then define the social-political realm. First industrial revolution. Water and steam, combined with cheap printing and pervasive public education to create a literate workforce which could function in it. And gave us the top-down, centralized control nation state. Because a nation/state is about as much as can be controlled in a top-down manner. Second i.r. Electricity based communication, oil based energy. Cars and suburbs. These are all elite energy sources. Elite in that they are concentrated and take huge capital investment to make useable. Also need to be militariliy protected. The vision and the reality I will describe it as vision. He claims it is real, today, and Germany is leading the way. First communication: the internet has revolutionized it, just as the printing press did. The key element is decentralization. Anyone can put up a blog. Next comes decentralized engery. Because energy is everywhere. A bit of solar, a bit of wind, a bit of garbage/sewage, a bit of geothermal... He based it on 5 pillars of the third industrial revolution.

1. Renewable, small-scale energy generation (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal, biomass).
   
2. Buildings as power plants. Build the power generation into the archetecture.
   
3. Hydrogen storage tech. Hydrogen fuel cells can transform energy much more efficiently than anything else known (add electricty to water, and you get hydrogen + ox. Burn the hydrogen + ox, and you get almost the full amount back as heat).
   
4. Smart power grid. Use off the shelf internet tech (routers etc) to make the power grid a distributed resource
   
5. Electric transport (cars/trucks/trains/shipping).
   

These pillars are now a EU parliament directive.

The cultural shift. Socialism/capitalism is dead. Now the divide is top-down, opaque vs open source, transparent, distributed.