Jeremy Rifkin: the resilient society 3.0

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

Welcome to the EnlightED Podcasts, the worldwide conference that focuses on the challenges of education in the new world. Driven by Fundación Telefónica, IE University and South Summit, it gathers leading experts in education, technology and innovation.

When the exhaustion of our current capitalist system is posed, the big question is what could come next. Sociologist and activist Jeremy Rifkin, President of the Foundation on Economic Trends and European Union Policy Advisor, is convinced that we are facing a new industrial revolution 3 that will enable a truly resilient collaboration-based society capable of tackling climate change. He tells Juan Zafra, director of the magazine Telos, how the key lies in education.

Jeremy Rifkin (1:02)

Well, first of all, it's a pleasure to be with all of you today. However, I'm going to start on a rather sombre note, and I hope it'll end up being a liberating reflection.

GDP has been slowing all over the world for the last two decades, and the reason that's happening is productivity has been declining all over the world for several decades. The result is even before the pandemic, we've had structural unemployment in both the industrial and developing countries.

Our young people, especially the Gen Z generation and millennials, are having a very difficult time finding a secure work environment.

Our economists are forecasting 20 more years of low productivity and slow growth. And let me do the numbers for you. After two industrial revolutions in the 19th and 20th century, here's where we stand today. Arguably, half the human race today is far better off than our ancestors were before we began the Industrial Revolution, granted. I think it's also fair to say, however, that 45% of the human race today, making $5 a day or less, which is the poverty level, are no better off, and we might say, in some cases, worse off than when we began the Industrial Age. So while half the human race is doing better, the other half not so, the very wealthy have done very well. Today, the eight richest people in the world, that's eight human beings, their combined wealth now equals the accumulated wealth of one half the human beings living on earth. That's three and a half billion people. There's something very wrong, very dysfunctional about the way we're organizing our economic life. But now we have a more serious crisis.

The Industrial Revolution of the past two centuries has now brought us into real-time climate change.

We have been digging up the burial grounds of a previous period of history, the Carboniferous Era of 350 million years ago, and we've exhumed the dead remains, coal, oil, and gas. And we've created an entire civilization based on fossil fuels. That's what the Industrial Revolution has been all about.

The problem is we have spewed so much carbon dioxide and methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere from burning coal, oil, and gas to move this industrial way of life that we are now in real-time climate change. And I want to explain what climate change is all about. Because if it were explained, all of us, the human race, would be justifiably terrified and determined with one mission in mind. And that is to move us off a carbon-based civilization in 20 years.

Climate change changes the hydrological cycle of the earth, the water cycle. So, you know, we're the watery planet.

Our atmosphere bathes our ecosystems with precipitation, and that's how we maintain life. Here's the problem. For every one degree that the temperature is going up on this planet because of global warming emissions, the atmosphere is sucking up 7% more precipitation from the ground. In other words, the heat from those global warming emissions is forcing precipitation into the clouds. We're getting more concentrated precipitation in the clouds in more radical, unpredictable and extreme water events. I'll use my continent as an example, but we could use any other continent as well. We have 70 below weather sometimes in the winter in the northern part of our continent, and we're getting massive unparalleled snows. In the spring across the United States, we're getting flooding across the entire midsection of the country. Our farmers can't even grow their crops anymore and they're being subsidized by the government. Then in the summer, we're getting droughts and wildfires. California, as I speak to you today, is on fire, and Washington and Oregon State and Idaho and Montana right now. They've been on fire for weeks and weeks. People have lost their lives. Millions of acres have burned down in the western states of the United States and still are in real time. Then in the summer and fall, we get hurricanes. We've had five or six major hurricanes now in the last two months. The most recent hitting the Gulf Coast.