Jeremy Rifkin

What would happen if we were to awaken one day and suddenly realize that the world we live in appeared eerily alien, as if we’d been teleported to some other distant world? That frightening prospect is now. Our planetary hydrosphere, which animates all of life on Earth, is rebelling in the wake of a global warming climate, spurring biblical spring floods, devastating summer droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires and powerful autumn hurricanes and typhoons, wreaking havoc on ecosystems and society. For too long we have misjudged the very nature of our existence and to what we owe our lifeline. We have come to believe that we live on a land planet when the reality is that we live on a water planet, and now the Earth’s hydrosphere is rewilding in the throes of a changing climate, taking our species and our fellow creatures into a mass extinction event as it searches for a new equilibrium. Jeremy Rifkin calls on us to rethink our place in the universe and realize that we live on Planet Aqua. He takes us on a new journey into the future where we will need to reassess every aspect of the way we live – how we engage nature, govern society, conceptualize economic life, educate our children, and even orient ourselves in time and space. The next stage in the human journey is to rebrand our home Planet Aqua and learn how to readapt to the waters of life. Underpinned by robust research, this major new work by one of the world’s leading public intellectuals aims to redefine the very core of our existence on Planet Aqua.

In The Age of Resilience, Rifkin takes us on a new journey beginning with how we reconceptualize time and navigate space. During the Age of Progress, efficiency was the gold standard for organizing time, locking our species into the quest to optimize the expropriation, commodification, and consumption of the Earth’s bounty, at ever-greater speeds and in ever-shrinking time intervals, with the objective of increasing the opulence of human society, but at the expense of the depletion of nature. Space, observes Rifkin, became synonymous with passive natural resources, while a principal role of government and the economy was to manage nature as property. This long adhered to temporal-spatial orientation, writes Rifkin, has taken humanity to the commanding heights as the dominant species on Earth and to the ruin of the natural world.

New York Times–Bestselling Author: The renowned economic theorist explains how America can—and must—create a post-fossil fuel culture to survive. We can’t keep doing business as usual. Facing a global emergency, a younger generation has spearheaded a national conversation around a Green New Deal—a movement with the potential to revolutionize society. But while the Green New Deal has become a lightning rod in the political sphere, there is a parallel movement emerging within the business community that will shake the very foundation of the global economy in coming years. Key sectors of the economy are fast-decoupling from fossil fuels in favor of ever-cheaper solar and wind energies and the new business opportunities and employment that accompany them. New studies are sounding the alarm that trillions of dollars in stranded fossil fuel assets could create a carbon bubble likely to burst by 2028, causing the collapse of the fossil fuel civilization. The marketplace is speaking, and governments will need to adapt if they are to survive and prosper. In The Green New Deal, Jeremy Rifkin delivers the political narrative and economic plan for the Green New Deal that we need at this critical moment in history. The concurrence of a stranded fossil fuel assets bubble and a green political vision opens up the possibility of a massive shift to a post-carbon ecological era, in time to prevent a temperature rise that will tip us over the edge into runaway climate change. With twenty-five years of experience implementing Green New Deal–style transitions for both the European Union and the People’s Republic of China, Rifkin offers his vision for how to transform the global economy and save life on Earth.

In The Zero Marginal Cost Society, New York Times–bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin uncovers a paradox at the heart of capitalism that has propelled it to greatness but is now taking it to its death—the inherent entrepreneurial dynamism of competitive markets that drives productivity up and marginal costs down, enabling businesses to reduce the price of their goods and services in order to win over consumers and market share. (Marginal cost is the cost of producing additional units of a good or service, if fixed costs are not counted.) While economists have always welcomed a reduction in marginal cost, they never anticipated the possibility of a technological revolution that might bring marginal costs to near zero, making goods and services priceless, nearly free, and abundant, and no longer subject to market forces. Now, a formidable new technology infrastructure—the Internet of things (IoT)—is emerging with the potential of pushing large segments of economic life to near zero marginal cost in the years ahead. Rifkin describes how the Communication Internet is converging with an Energy Internet and Logistics Internet to create a new technology platform that connects all. There are billions of sensors feeding Big Data into an IoT global neural network. Prosumers can connect to the network and use Big Data, analytics, and algorithms to accelerate efficiency, dramatically increase productivity, and lower the marginal cost of producing and sharing a wide range of products and services to near zero, just like they now do with information goods. The plummeting of marginal costs is spawning a hybrid economy—part capitalist market and part Collaborative Commons—with far reaching implications for society, according to Rifkin. Hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives to the global Collaborative Commons. Prosumers are plugging into the IoT and making and sharing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3D-printed products at near zero marginal cost. Students are enrolling in free massive open online courses (MOOCs) that operate at near zero marginal cost. Social entrepreneurs are even bypassing the banking establishment and using crowdfunding to finance startup businesses as well as creating alternative currencies in the fledgling sharing economy. In this new world, social capital is as important as financial capital, access trumps ownership, sustainability supersedes consumerism, cooperation ousts competition, and “exchange value” in the capitalist marketplace is increasingly replaced by “sharable value” on the Collaborative Commons. Rifkin concludes that capitalism will remain with us, albeit in an increasingly streamlined role, primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions, allowing it to flourish as a powerful niche player in the coming era. We are, however, says Rifkin, entering a world beyond markets where we are learning how to live together in an increasingly interdependent global Collaborative Commons.

A New York Times–bestselling account of the next great economic era, with a look into the individuals pioneering its implementation around the world. One of the most influential social thinkers of our time reveals how Internet technology and renewable energy are merging to create the new jobs of the twenty-first century and change the world. In The Third Industrial Revolution, Jeremy Rifkin takes us on a journey into a new economic era where hundred of millions of people produce their own green energy in their homes, businesses, and factories and share it with each other on an “energy Internet.” Rifkin’s Third Industrial Revolution vision has been taken up by the European Union and China and endorsed by the United Nations. In this book, the author goes behind the scenes to meet the heads of state, global CEOs, social entrepreneurs, and NGO leaders who are pioneering the new economic paradigm.

In this sweeping new interpretation of the history of civilization, bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin looks at the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development-and is likely to determine our fate as a species. Today we face unparalleled challenges in an energy-intensive and interconnected world that will demand an unprecedented level of mutual understanding among diverse peoples and nations. Do we have the capacity and collective will to come together in a way that will enable us to cope with the great challenges of our time? In this remarkable book Jeremy Rifkin tells the dramatic story of the extension of human empathy from the rise of the first great theological civilizations, to the ideological age that dominated the 18th and 19th centuries, the psychological era that characterized much of the 20th century and the emerging dramaturgical period of the 21st century. The result is a new social tapestry-The Empathic Civilization-woven from a wide range of fields. Rifkin argues that at the very core of the human story is the paradoxical relationship between empathy and entropy. At various times in history new energy regimes have converged with new communication revolutions, creating ever more complex societies that heightened empathic sensitivity and expanded human consciousness. But these increasingly complicated milieus require extensive energy use and speed us toward resource depletion. The irony is that our growing empathic awareness has been made possible by an ever-greater consumption of the Earth’s resources, resulting in a dramatic deterioration of the health of the planet. If we are to avert a catastrophic destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems, the collapse of the global economy and the possible extinction of the human race, we will need to change human consciousness itself-and in less than a generation. Rifkin challenges us to address what may be the most important question facing humanity today: Can we achieve global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the planet? One of the most popular social thinkers of our time, Jeremy Rifkin is the bestselling author of The European Dream, The Hydrogen Economy¸ The End of Work, The Biotech Century, and The Age of Access. He is the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, D.C.

The best-selling author of The End of Work examines the decline of the American Dream as Americans are increasingly overworked, underpaid, and lacking time and describes its alternative as exemplified in the lifestyle of the New Europe, one that is more leisurely, healthy, prosperous, and sustainable.

In The Hydrogen Economy, best-selling author Jeremy Rifkin takes us on an eye-opening journey into the next great commercial era in history. He envisions the dawn of a new economy powered by hydrogen that will fundamentally change the nature of our market, political and social institutions, just as coal and steam power did at the beginning of the industrial age. Rifkin observes that we are fast approaching a critical watershed for the fossil-fuel era, with potentially dire consequences for industrial civilization. Experts had been saying that we had another forty or so years of cheap available crude oil left. Now, however, some of the world’s leading petroleum geologists are suggesting that global oil production could peak and begin a steep decline much sooner, as early as the end of this decade, sending oil prices through the roof. While the fossil fuel era is entering its sunset years, a new energy regime is being born that has the potential to remake civilization. Hydrogen is the most basic and ubiquitous element in the universe. It is the stuff of the stars and of our sun and, when properly harnessed, it is the “forever fuel.” It never runs out and produces no harmful CO2 emissions. Commercial fuel-cells powered by hydrogen are just now being introduced into the market for home, office and industrial use. The major automakers have spent more than two billion dollars developing hydrogen cars, buses, and trucks, and the first mass-produced vehicles are expected to be on the road in just a few years. In the new era, says Rifkin, every human being could become the producer as well as the consumer of his or her own energy – so called “distributed generation.” When millions of end-users connect their fuel-cells into local, regional, and national hydrogen energy webs (HEWs), using the same design principles and smart technologies that made possible the World Wide Web, they can begin to share energy – peer-to-peer – creating a new decentralized form of energy use. Hydrogen has the potential to end the world’s reliance on imported oil and help diffuse the dangerous geopolitical game being played out between Muslim militants and Western nations. It will dramatically cut down on carbon dioxide emissions and mitigate the effects of global warming. And because hydrogen is so plentiful and exists everywhere on earth, every human being could be “empowered,” making it the first truly democratic energy regime in history.