David Bollier — The New Economic Events Giving Lie to the Fiction That We Are All Selfish, Rational Materialists

On the development of the politics and economics of the commons going on under the radar of mainstream focus. David Bollier riffs off Jeremy Rifkin's new book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society.

"Commoning" has been increasing in scale since the Sixties, and it is well developed now. Yet most people are unaware of it unless they or friend and acquaintances participate in it. Nor is it required to drop out to participate. All that is needed is to tune in. There are plenty of defectors in place already participating in commoning in some way or other. Those committed to self-sufficiency know the value of community and that the commons is indispensable unless one inherits great wealth.

AlterNet
The New Economic Events Giving Lie to the Fiction That We Are All Selfish, Rational Materialists
David Bollier

Jeremy Rifkin— Distributed Capitalism

Energy regimes shape the nature of civilizations... how they are organized, how the fruits of commerce and trade are distributed, how political power is exercised, and how social relations are conducted. The locus of control over energy production and distribution is beginning to tilt from giant fossil fuel based centralized energy companies to millions of small producers, who are generating their own renewable energies in their dwellings and trading surpluses in info-energy commons.

Distributed Capitalism

The new era will bring with it a reorganization of power relationships across every level of society. While the fossil fuel-based First and Second Industrial Revolutions scaled vertically and favored centralized, top-down organizational structures operating in markets, the Third Industrial Revolution is organized nodally, scales laterally, and favors distributed and collaborative business practices that work most effectively in networks. The "democratization of energy" has profound implications for how we orchestrate the entirety of human life in the coming century. We are entering the era of "Distributed Capitalism."

Read the rest at The Huffington Post, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Will Transform Society (Excerpt)

Excerpted from Jeremy Rifkin's The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World, Palgrave Macmillan 2011.

Update: The Third Industrial Revolution and the Economic Imperative of Energy Efficiency by John A. "Skip" Laitner

We can quibble over numbers and the exact set of calculations, but the data I observe indicate that as of last year, we were wasting something like 86 percent of all the energy we threw at the economic process.

That means that, as an economy, we are only 14 percent energy-efficient! As one might imagine, that massive level of waste imposes an equally huge array of costs that further constrain the development of our larger economy. The five pillars in Rifkin's Third Industrial Revolution may be the only smart way forward as the synergies of each pillar lift the economy into a higher level of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and sustainability.

The good news is that many in the business and policy communities increasingly see energy efficiency as a smart, no-regrets investment opportunity for the U.S. Just one example?

It turns out that our current system of generating and delivering electricity to our homes and businesses is an anemic 32 percent energy efficient. That is, for every three units of coal or other fuel we use to generate the power, we manage to deliver only one unit of electricity to our homes and businesses. What we waste in the generation of electricity is more than Japan needs to power its entire economy! What is even more astonishing is that our current level of (in)efficiency has been essentially unchanged since 1960 -- since Eisenhower was in office.

And yet, there are larger numbers of Third Industrial Revolution technologies that can improve our performance. Combined heat and power (CHP) systems, for example, can deliver efficiencies of 70-90 percent or more, at a substantial economic savings. There is also an incredible array of waste-to-energy and recycled energy technologies that can further increase our overall resource efficiency and save us money.

My colleagues at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and I are working on an analysis showing that we could reduce our cumulative energy consumption by as much as one half even as we nearly triple the size of our economy by 2050.

Jeremy Rifkin on The Third Industrial Revolution

The Third Industrial Revolution is the last of the great Industrial Revolutions and will lay the foundational infrastructure for an emerging collaborative age. The forty year build-out of the TIR infrastructure will create hundreds of thousands of new businesses and hundreds of millions of new jobs. Its completion will signal the end of a two-hundred-year commercial saga characterized by industrious thinking, entrepreneurial markets, and mass labor workforces and the beginning of a new era marked by collaborative behavior, social networks and boutique professional and technical workforces. In the coming half century, the conventional, centralized business operations of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions will increasingly be subsumed by the distributed business practices of the Third Industrial Revolution; and the traditional, hierarchical organization of economic and political power will give way to lateral power organized nodally across society....

Like every other communication and energy infrastructure in history, the various pillars of a Third Industrial Revolution must be laid down simultaneously or the foundation will not hold. That's because each pillar can only function in relationship to the others. The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are (1) shifting to renewable energy; (2) transforming the building stock of every continent into 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-sharing intergrid that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of energy locally, on-site, they can sell surplus back to the grid and share electricity with their continental neighbors); and (5) transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid....

The creation of a renewable energy regime, loaded by buildings, partially stored in the form of hydrogen, distributed via smart intergrids, and connected to plug-in, zero-emission transport, opens the door to a Third Industrial Revolution. The entire system is interactive, integrated, and seamless. When these five pillars come together, they make up an indivisible technological platform--an emergent system whose properties and functions are qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. In other words, the synergies between the pillars create a new economic paradigm that can transform the world.

To appreciate how disruptive the Third Industrial Revolution is to the existing way we organize economic life, consider the profound changes that have taken place in just the past twenty years with the introduction of the Internet revolution. The democratization of information and communication has altered the very nature of global commerce and social relations as significantly as the print revolution in the early modern era. Now, imagine the impact that the democratization of energy across all of society is likely to have when managed by Internet technology.

The Third Industrial Revolution build-out is particularly relevant for the poorer countries in the developing world. We need to keep in mind that 40% of the human race stills lives on two dollars a day or less, in dire poverty, and the vast majority have no electricity. Without access to electricity they remain "powerless," literally and figuratively. The single most important factor in raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty is having reliable and affordable access to green electricity. All other economic development is impossible in its absence. The democratization of energy and universal access to electricity is the indispensible starting point for improving the lives of the poorest populations of the world. The extension of micro credit to generate micro power is already beginning to transform life across the developing nations, giving potentially millions of people hope of improving their economic situation.

Read the whole thing at The Huffington Post, The Third Industrial Revolution: Toward A New Economic Paradigm (EXCERPT)