Jeremy Rifkin Quotes

The world's environment can no longer handle beef.

The EU Constitution is something new in human history. Though it is not as eloquent as the French and U.S. constitutions, it is the first governing document of its kind to expand the human franchise to the level of global consciousness. The language throughout the draft constitution speaks of universalism, making it clear that its focus is not a people, or a territory, or a nation, but rather the human race and the planet we inhabit.

In the summer of 2009, a heat wave across France led to a shortage in cooling waters, forcing one-third of the nuclear power plants in the country to shut down.

The new science takes us from a colonial vision of nature as an enemy to pillage and enslave, to a new vision of nature as a community to nurture. The right to exploit, harness, and own nature in the form of property is tempered by the obligation to steward nature and treat it with dignity and respect. The utility value of nature is slowly giving way to the intrinsic value of nature.

The democratization of manufacturing means that anyone and eventually everyone can access the means of production, making the question of who should own and control the means of production irrelevant, and capitalism along with it.

new technologies are going to make the airwaves "so abundant that there would be no justification for the government to ration access to spectrum or to give some services priority over others."46 In the near future, everyone will be able to share Earth's abundant free air waves, communicating with each other for nearly free, just as we will share the abundant free energy of the sun, wind, and geothermal heat.

What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?

In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn't have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture.

The revolution here is from hierarchical to lateral power. That's the power shift. So increasingly a younger generation that's grown up on the internet and now increasingly distributing renewable energies, they're measuring politics in terms of a struggle between centralized, hierarchical, top-down and closed and proprietary, versus distributed, open, collaborative, transparent. This shift, from hierarchical to lateral power, is going to change the way we live, the way we educate our children, and the way we govern the world.

Tie Society, a start-up in Washington, D.C., stocks more than 300 designer ties - each of which, if bought, would cost an arm and a leg. For a monthly fee of $11, subscribers receive a box of sanitized ties to use, and they can change their tie selection monthly.

We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it's going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet.

I know quite a few farmers all over the United States who have tried this and have said the opposite, that they have to use more herbicides, not less. The same holds true with BT.

people who strongly value the pursuit of wealth and possessions report lower psychological well-being than those who are less concerned with such aims.

Automobiles consumed "20 percent of the steel, 12 percent of the aluminum, 10 percent of the copper, 51 percent of the lead, 95 percent of the nickel, 35 percent of the zinc, and 60 percent of the rubber used in the U.S." by 1933.

The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth.

An e-book can be produced and distributed at near zero marginal cost.

A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being's worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons.

A refuge is supposed to prevent what? The genes from flowing out of sight? This refuge idea won't stop insects from moving across boundaries. That's absurd.

The public should know that the liability issues here have yet to be resolved, or even raised. If you're a farmer and you're growing a genetically engineering food crop, those genes are going to flow to the other farm.

Using less of the Earth's resources more efficiently and productively in a circular economy and making the transition from carbon-based fuels to renewable energies are defining features of the emerging economic paradigm. In the new era, we each become a node in the nervous system of the biosphere.

The extension of the empathic bond is the social glue to establishing a global network of millions of human beings. It's probably not surprising that in the most technologically advanced countries, where self-expression is high, the older theological consciousness, with its emphasis on strict external codes, the communal bond, and a hierarchically organized command and control, is losing its hold. Religious hierarchies make less and less sense in a fl at, networked world.

Back in the mid-1980s, congressional hearings were held after we brought this litigation, and held up the first experiment. At that time, I went in front of Congress, along with the major agencies involved with this.

Europe will not accept genetically modified foods. It doesn't make any difference in the final analysis what Brussels does, what Washington does, or what the World Trade Organization does.

So my attorneys brought litigation in the U.S. federal courts. The judge ruled in our favor.

The global financial collapse exposed the longstanding myth that commercial exchange is a primary institution. There are no examples in history where people created commercial markets and exchange before creating a culture.

The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.

This means that for the past thirty years, we have been wasting 86 percent of the energy we use in the production of goods and services.

suggest that the millennial generation, deeply affected by the Great Recession and a stagnant global economy, has begun to shift its psychic priorities from material success to living a meaningful existence.

What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet.

Many of the genetically modified foods will be safe, I'm sure. Will most of them be safe? Nobody knows.

We are learning that the earth functions like an invisible organism. We are the various cells of one living being. Those who work to save the earth are its antibodies.

Starvation does not occur because of a world food shortage. If everyone ate a vegetarian, or better still, a vegan diet there would be enough food for everyone. The only sane way forward is to grow food for humans rather than to feed it to farmed animals..

The industry's not stupid. The industry knows that if those foods are labeled 'genetically engineered', the public will shy away and won't take them.

Humanity cannot afford to acknowledge all of the blood that it spills and the destruction it inflicts on the world in its effort to perpetuate itself. Desacralization is a process that allows us to sever any relationship we might feel to other living things. By draining the aliveness out of things, we can pretend that our control and manipulation are of little consequence. Man the trapper becomes man the taxidermist, disemboweling nature of its spontaneity and movement, and stuffing it with a leaden inanimateness.

It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat.

Being both entrepreneurial and social is no longer an oxymoron, but rather a tautology.

The capitalist era is passing . . . not quickly, but inevitably.

The very notion that millions of workers displaced by the re-engineering and automation of the agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors can be retrained to be scientists, engineers, technicians, executives, consultants, teachers, lawyers and the like, and then somehow find the appropriate number of job openings in the very narrow high-tech sector, seems at best a pipe dream, and at worst a delusion.

They're now turning those seeds into intellectual property, so they have a virtual lock on the seeds upon which we all depend for our food and survival.

Even though the transformation of energy, in all of its various forms, is the very basis of all economic activity, only a tiny fraction of economists have even studied thermodynamics. And only a handful of individuals inside the profession have attempted to redefine economic theory and practice based on the energy laws.

The 10 largest antitrust law firms in the United States have gone into the federal courts charging Monsanto with creating a global conspiracy in violation of the antitrust laws, to control the global market in seeds.

The laws of thermodynamics tell us something quite different. Economic activity is merely borrowing low-entropy energy inputs from the environment and transforming them into temporary products and services of value. In the transformation process, often more energy is expended and lost to the environment than is embedded in the particular good or service being produced.

The coming together of the Communications Internet, the Energy Internet, and the Logistics Internet in an Internet of Things provides the cognitive nervous system and physical means to integrate all of humanity in an interconnected global Commons that extends across the entirety of society.

To bring our human population in line with the biocapacity of the planet and transform our society from scarcity to sustainable abundance, we will need to address the great disparity in ecological footprint between the rich and poor, while simultaneously lowering the overall human population on Earth.

Deep play precedes deep work.

We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.

Time goes forward because energy itself is always moving from an available to an unavailable state. Our consciousness is continually recording the entropy change in the world around us. We watch our friends get old and die. We sit next to a fire and watch it's red-hot embers turn slowly into cold white ashes. We experience the world always changing around us, and that experience is the unfolding of the second law. It is the irreversible process of dissipation of energy in the world. What does it mean to say, 'The world is running out of time'? Simply this: we experience the passage of time by the succession of one event after another. And every time an event occurs anywhere in this world energy is expended and the overall entropy is increased. To say the world is running out of time then, to say the world is running out of usable energy. In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington, 'Entropy is time's arrow'.

It is not uncommon in the modern world for people to retreat into the world of books to escape from the realities of the outside world. The printed word evokes the modern notion of security, with the emphasis on detachment, privacy, autonomy, predictability, and enclosed artificiality.

The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grains represents an ... evil whose consequences may be far greater and longer lasting than any past examples of violence inflicted by men against thier fellow human beings.

We now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn't do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.

stability of the capitalist system is shaken by the alternation of attempts to stop economic progress in order to protect old investments and tremendous collapses when those attempts fail.

He asks, "how hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, eBay, and Google?"33 Wu is putting his finger on a disquieting new reality - that the new communication medium a younger generation gravitated to because of its promise of openness, transparency, and deep social collaboration masks another persona more concerned with ringing up profit by advancing a networked Commons.

We think of GDP as a measure of the wealth that a country generates each year. But from a thermodynamic point of view, it is more a measure of the temporary energy value embedded in the goods or services produced at the expense of the diminution of the available energy reserves and an accumulation of entropic waste. Since

We are hopeful that you will want to visit our planet in the near future. We are in the process of restoring our environment to its original grandeur, and hope to have completed the task before your RSVP.

The modern age has been characterized by a Promethean spirit, a restless energy that preys on speed records and shortcuts, unmindful of the past, uncaring of the future, existing only for the moment and the quick fix. The earthly rhythms that characterize a more pastoral way of life have been shunted aside to make room for the fast track of an urbanized existence. Lost in a sea of perpetual technological transition, modern man and woman find themselves increasingly alienated from the ecological choreography of the planet.

The electronic media introduced this idea to the larger audience very, very quickly. We spent years and years and years meeting with activists all over Europe to lay the groundwork for a political response, as we did here.

Africa, in particular, has barely begun to exploit its renewable energy potential. Energy analysts say that solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass sources could more than supply the energy needs of every continent. The key is providing a favorable playing field, and that means financial aid, technology transfer, and training programs to assist developing nations, like the ones being advanced by the EU/AU partnership.

There is a saying in the Middle East that goes something like this: "My grandfather rode a camel, my father drove a car, I travel on a jet, and my grandchild will ride a camel." Not necessarily. The deserts of the Middle East and North Africa have more solar potential per square inch than any other region in the world - more energy potential, in fact, than all of the oil ever extracted from deep beneath its sand dunes. The

Cisco systems forecasts that by 2022, the Internet of Everything will generate $14.4 trillion in cost savings and revenue.

The interesting thing is, while we die of diseases of affluence from eating all these fatty meats, our poor brethren in the developing world die of diseases of poverty, because the land is not used now to grow food grain for their families.

We are beginning to learn that an empathic moment requires both intimate engagement and a measure of detachment. If our feelings completely spill over into another's feelings or their feelings overwhelm our psyche, we lose a sense of self and the ability to imagine the other as if they were us. Empathy is a difficult balancing act. One has to be open to experiencing another's plight as if it were one's own but not be engulfed by it, at the expense of drowning out the self's ability to be a unique and separate being. Empathy requires a porous boundary between I and thou that allows the identity of two beings to mingle in a shared mental space.
- The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis

consider the fact that a journey from New York to Chicago by stagecoach would have taken three weeks or more in 1847. By 1857, that same trip by rail would have taken 72 hours.12

What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.

raises an interesting question about the new corporate giants that are colonizing large swaths of virtual space. He asks, "how hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, eBay, and Google?

The American public is not aware that there might be potential allergenic and toxic reactions. With regular food, at least people know which foods they have an allergy to.

The greenhouse crisis is the bill coming due for the Industrial Revolution. It's not an accident. It's the logical outcome of our world view - the idea that we can control the forces of nature, that we can have short-term expedient gains without paying for them, that there are no limits to exploitation of the environment, that we can produce and consume faster than nature's ability to replenish.

The insurance companies aren't covering that. Should Monsanto be liable for these losses? Should the state government? Who's going to cover the losses? The fact is, here's an industry with no long-term liability in place.

Basic income is not a utopia, it's a practical business plan for the next step of the human journey.

The well-being of the biosphere is measured over millennia of history and necessitates a human consciousness that can reflect and project along a similar time table.

Every religion holds forth the promise of either defeating time, escaping time, overcoming time, reissuing time, or denying time altogether. We use our religions as vehicles to enter the state of nirvana, the heavenly kingdom, or the promised land. We come to believe in reincarnation, rebirth, and resurrection as ways of avoiding the inevitability of biological death.

The antitrust litigation currently in the federal courts in the U.S. against Monsanto will be the test case in the life sciences, just as the Microsoft case was the test case in the information sciences.

globalization, a grossly misnamed metaphor that disingenuously cloaked government deregulation and the privatization of public goods and services in the wrap of a new global "interconnectivity.

It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there's no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic.

We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.