アメリカは未来を作り出すために必要な"物語"をなくした,とはどういうこと？

Jeremy Rifkin might describe you as a green gadfly, one of the environmental visionaries. Both the late 20th and early 21st century. Jeremy is the author of the Third Industrial Revolution, a new book about the energy internet revolution that will save our society. Jeremy, thank you again for appearing on Tech Crunch TV.

Thank you.

Jeremy, in some ways a very uplifting book and yesterday we broadcasted your interview about the book itself. I’d like to talk today about. Perhaps a little bit more of a depressing element to the book which is how, in some ways, you turned your back on America and focused your energies, to excuse the pun, on Europe.

At the beginning of the book you said you didn’t go west, you went east and your whole initiative in terms of building this third industrial revolution. Revolution seems to be focused on Europe rather than America. Given that you are American and based, I think, on the east coast, why did you do this?

You know, I’ve been involved in this whole question of transitioning to a new energy regime since 1973 when we had the first protest. Against the rising oil prices during the Obit crisis in 1973 and as a young man I remember we put together a great. Just in Boston, the great Boston Oil Party, on the 200th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party and 20,000 young people in a blizzard, came out on the dock.

During that two hundred year anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, throwing empty oil barrels into the wharf and into the waters there and protesting. High oil prices during the open crisis. And here we are now in 2011 it’s clear to me that the initiative is moved from America to Europe. Europe is the laboratory.

Now a lot of folks will roll their eyes and say well isn’t Europe a museum, a nice place to visit. It’s not a player. What we forget is that the European union is a political space and it, the 27 member states of the European Union have a higher GDP. Then the fifty states of the United States Union, it’s the leading power of the world, and it’s the leading exporting power in the world.

And, more importantly, what, the reason I went over. There over the last 11 years, I’ve spent most of my time with heads of state in the EU there is they’re coming. Up with the new ideas. They’re asking the tough questions a
bout the future of the human race, the meaning of human nature. What is our journey here on this planet?

How do we build a sustainable, peaceful society? I wish that were the case here in the states too and you know what amazes me the most.

So you’re saying, Jeremy, that we’re not asking those questions in America?

I think we are, I think we’re now squabbling. And fighting with each other and moving to the political extremes and we’re not focused on the big questions. We’re in a very seminole turning point here. We’ve had two events in the last three years that signal an end game for the industrial way of life based on fossil fuels.

The first, of course, was July 2008, when oil hit a $147 a barrel and the prices for everything that we buy went through the roof, from groceries to pharmaceutical products, because they’re all made out of crude oil. And purchasing power plummeted and in July 2008, the entire global economy shut down.

What I’m suggesting and Europe understands is that was the economic earthquake. The financial collapse of the market sixty days later was the aftershock. Europe is starting to deal with the earthquake; we’re still dealing with the aftershock. And every time we try to regrow this global economy at the same rate we were growing before July 2008, now that China and India is in the game with a third of the human race, there is just simply too much demand pressure globally against limited crude oil supplies.

And every time we try to regrow, oil prices go up, all the other prices in the supply chain go up, purchasing power goes down, and we collapse. And that’s what’s happening today. We’re right on the cusp of the second collapse. Bread crude oil is over $100.00 a barrel. Basic products are going up in price.

People have stopped buying and every time we try to restart this engine. We’re going to see a short growth period, then collapse, short growth, collapse, in four year cycles or less. This is an end game and then secondly we’ve got climate change. It’s now affecting in real time, agricultural output and infrastructure.

This is the entropy bill. The engineers listening and watching this understand you cannot escape the second law of thermodynamics. We are paying the entropy bill for two industrial revolutions. Based on fossil fuels so we spewed so much spent CO2 into the atmosphere that the planet’s heating up and now were facing a species crisis not simply.

A structural crisis.

Jeremy you’ve had a lot of success convincing European leaders from Angelo Marco, to David Cameron to Prince Albert of Monaco. This narrative, but you say that President Obama is missing the story, he’s missing the narrative. Talk to me a little bit about that, how and why he is missing the story.

You know, it’s a complete mystery to me because I assume that the internet president was generation, a generational shift would have completely understood the tremendous opportunities with bringing internet communication technologies with energies. So that a generation that voted for him, that grew up in power to creating their own information.

He can say to them now we’re gonna create the possibilities of you creating your own energy and creating this sustainable world and creating millions of jobs in day one and thousands of new businesses. He didn’t do it. His heart was in the right place. I truly believe he wanted a green economy. But he didn’t have this narrative.

He didn’t understand how communication and energy comes together to create a new nervous system. He didn’t understand that you have to bring all the components together, these five pillars and together they are the technology revolution and what he did, if you watch closely, he took every opportunity to talk about a green initiative.

In isolation. He’d visit a battery factory over here or he would visit a solar factory over there and he would give us a list, like a policy list, a laundry list of silo-ed pioneered projects and so the result is we spend billions of dollars of US tax dollars money and we didn’t get much value for, he didn’t connect the dots.

You have to take like an engineer, you have to take systematically. You have to connect these five pillars and when you connect them, renewable energy, converting the buildings to your own power plants, putting in stores like cottages so you can store the energy. Then creating an energy internet so we can share it across continents.

Then plugging in the transport. It’s when you connect them that we have a new economic period of history. That is a mega-technology platform. He has not gotten it but it’s even more serious and I hope I’m not stepping on toes here.

I’m sorry, that’s all we do on Techcrunch TV.

Well, alright, okay, I’m going to put my foot into my mouth here but this really happened. The energy companies are very powerful in the United States. They are a very powerful lobby. And they like to keep centralized power in tap and this is true in Washington too. President Obama and Mr. Chu, the Department of Energy Secretary, they did come up with a plan.

It was completely different than the plan we have in Europe. Their plan was to have big solar parks and wind parks set up in the Mid-West and West. And then put in a high voltage line unidirectional smart grid to send all that green electricity to the eastern areas where the big urban populations are.

So, they were, they do want a smart grid but they don’t want to distribute it. They want to centralize. Well, guess what, the eastern governors and the mid-atlantic governors said no way. If we’re going to raise everyone’s electricity price, we want to make sure we create our own green electricity in our buildings and our communities, in our regions.

So we can create job and business. Then we want to distribute a grid so we can share our surpluses in energy with everyone else. So, again, I think we have centralized top-down thinking. And Washington, and the green economy is all about distributive, collaborative arrangements in lateral policy.

Jeremy in the fact that you are beginning to successfully institute this revolution in Europe. Through your own personal relationships with heads of states, that’s not very lateral is it?

You know, it works on both levels because you absolutely have to have buy in. At the federal level, the BEU, the Brussels level, the federal level, and the local level, because that’s where you create the incentives. But there’s a local level where you bring industry, government, and civil society together to create the nodes, the five pillar nodes.

I’ll give you an example of why you need federal level support. The reason Europe is taking off with this is they’ve introduced speed and tiers, so everyone’s electricity bill goes up just slightly. You don’t even notice it on your bill but the money they collect in a country, then allow them to give someone premium.

If you decide to convert your small factory or your home with a. which photovoltaic power plant, you’ll get premium, and that is, more money for sending your green energy back to the grid than the normal electricity on the grid. This encourages early adoption. It encourages a runaway in technology applications and new
technology innovations.

In Germany alone, when they put in this feed in tariff, listen to this, my fellow Americans, 250,000 jobs created instantly within a few years. In the green energy industry, that matched all the other jobs in all the other energy industries combined, even though it’s only 10% of the energy. So, feed-in tariffs are critical.

And that means you have to have some involvement at the regional and national level. And you have to set up some standards, and incentives, and some goals. But ultimately it has to be community to community.

Jeremy, there’s a large audience of TechCrunch entrepreneurs, perhaps the largest audience you’ll find of American based technology entrepreneurs. What would you say to them? How can they help initiate the five pillars of the third industrial revolution in America?

The tech community in the United States can really move on this quickly. But what they have to understand is the new killer apps are the technologies that alloow us to deepen each of the component pillars – the renewable energies, the conversions of building the power plants, the storage, the hydrogen storage, the energy Internet, and the plug in logistics and transport – deepen each of those pillars.

But then the other technologies that are crucial are the connection technologies between the pillars, the new IT applications that allow us to make connections between the five pillars to create the synergies. It’s the synergies that create a new multiplier effect and create all sorts of new business models.

And I’ll give you one example. And it’s a perfect example. The power and utility companies. Of course, they weren’t too happy with this new idea in Europe when we first created it. They said, “We like to control power from the top. We like to control transmission of and to the end user and we like to sell electrons, we don’t like this model.

Over a period of years we won the utility companies over, not all of them, but many of them, and we said, here’s the new model. And all of your TechCrunch people or internet folks, they’re gonna absolutely understand this intuitively at the get go. We said to the utility companies, get used to it.

Millions and millions of people are going to create their own green electricity. It’s already starting in Europe.

Very briefly, Jeremy.

Alright. Again it can be.

Okay, now. Very briefly.

Okay, alright. They’ll, we’ll get cleaner on electricity, it’s gonna get cheaper and cheaper like cell phones and like personal computers, companies’ new machine is to manage energy flows with clients, copy clients and find ways to reduce the energy used-embedded in the products and logistics, so that corporate clients can stay afloat, increased their productivity, reduce their energy needs and then they can save back and share their profits and productivity with the utility companies.

If the utility companies don’t do this, many of them will go out of business. We’re already seeing thousands of start up companies, and hundreds of them successful, who are aggregating green energy and they’re then finding ways to manage that energy with people on microgrids and across logistic lines.

So you may see an entire new business where the IT and Internet companies began to merge with energy and began to aggregate a flat, online energy Internet across entire countries. Jeremy, finally, in under a minute, what can people do politically here if they agree with you, if they care about this third industrial revolution?

And you need to be very brief there, please.

We have to tell the story of this third industrial revolution. That’s why I wrote the book. These five pillars have to become part of our narrative. What’s missing in America is we’ve lost our imagination. And I see that Mr. Jobs, of course, just passed away. He was a turning point. What made America great is ability to tell a story about the future that’s so compelling, so vivid, that we will rush in, gamble it all, because we know that tomorrow is gonna be a better day.

We need Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, and people all over America, to engage in this new narrative. And roll up our sleeves and say, how can we use the Internet revolution now and complete it by joining with renewable energy so we can have power to the people? Democratize energy, create and distribute capitalism.

On that uplifting note, Jeremy Rifkin, gadfly, author, activist, I wanna thank you so much for appearing on TechCrunch TV. Thanks for the opportunity.