Jeremy Rifkin is right, overall, when he says that the present
industrial-consumerist era is coming to an end. He's wrong to say
that it's anything to do with a carbon economy. In the
post-hunter-gatherer era, trees have been burned for fuel and coal
outcrops and oil seepages were exploited wherever found. Even natural
gas was used for street lighting in China at around 200BC. He's wrong
about the 30-year supply of oil. There's at least 100 years of this
left, plus the natural gas associated with it. Also, fracked gas and
methane clathrates will last for centuries yet, particularly if
city-bound excess populations of the undeveloped world follow the
steeply declining fertility trends of the advanced countries. The
last two sources will produce energy with only about half the
residual CO2 as present energy-production methods.
Jeremy Rifkin is quite right about the power-groups at the top (which
I call the 20-class). But man, like all social mammals, has always
tended to stratify. Once a new species comes into existence,
stratification is absolutely necessary to maintain quality control
and to fit the species evermore efficiently into the environment
around it. Be it ever so weakly expressed in some cultures, females
always tend to partner themselves upwards in order to leave
handicapped and inept males behind without issue. The only difference
between today and, say, 300 years ago when the industrial-consumerist
revolution was just getting started, is that we now have more
different types of power-groups than before.
Keith
At 19:04 29/08/2012, Ed wrote:
Jeremy Rifkin was the guest on TVO's Agenda during the past two
nights. His ideas flowed out like tidal waves so I can't remember
everything he said, but his central idea seemed to be that the past
200 years shouldn't be thought of in terms of being market or
ideologically driven but in terms of being driven by the discovery
and availability of carbon - ie. coal, oil and natural gas. A
carbon based economy, he argued, leads to "vertical" economic and
social organization of the kind we've had for the past two or three
centuries. The carbon that fuels the economy is something somebody
gets for us and controls us with. Hence it puts some groups at the
top of the heap and makes everyone else subservient to them in a
highly stratified and multi-specialized system.
Ah, he then said, but the carbon economy has to come to an end, and
in Rifkin's opinion it will end very soon. A carbon based economy
can't last more than another 30 years or so. What then? I didn't
quite fully grasp what he was saying, but it was something like vast
horizontally organized networks based on green energy with everybody
pitching in and everybody benefiting would come into being. It all
sounded very beautiful though somewhat idealistic if one considers
continued rapid population growth, diminishing agricultural
potential, the growth of cities and global warming.
However, it was interesting. If you want to hear what he said
yourselves, go to the TVO/Agenda website and take a look and listen.
Ed
P.S.: Chris Hedges, co-author of "Days of Destruction, Days of
Revolt" is on the Agenda tonight. I've read the book, and it's not
an uplifting happiness pill.
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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