MOC : [[ÉCOLOGIE]] - [[Vidéo débrief de comment j'ai appris la Biologie]] - [[ÉNERGIE]] Recommandé par : [[Bruno Marion]] Date : 2022-07-20 Auteur : [[Jeremy Rifkin]] Tags : #livre #résumé Notes liées : [[Climat, comment éviter un désastre]] - [[Agriculture de régénération]] Note : 5/5 *** *Ces notes sont celles de [[Bruno Marion]]* The major economic transformations in history share a common denominator. They all require three elements, each of which interacts with the others to enable the system to operate as a whole: - a communication medium - a power source - a transportation mechanism In the nineteenth century, steam-powered printing and the telegraph, abundant coal, and locomotives on national rail systems meshed in a common general-purpose technology platform to manage, power, and move society, giving rise to the First Industrial Revolution. In the twentieth century, centralized electricity, the telephone, radio and television, cheap oil, and internal combustion vehicles on national road systems converged to create an infrastructure for the Second Industrial Revolution. Now, we are in the midst of a Third Industrial Revolution. The digitalized Communication Internet is converging with a digitized Renewable Energy Internet, powered by solar and wind electricity, and a digitized Mobility and Logistics Internet of autonomous electric and fuel-cell vehicles, powered by green energy, atop an Internet of Things (IoT) platform, embedded in the commercial, residential, and industrial building stock, that will transform society and the economy in the twenty-first century. The marginal cost of some goods and services in this green digital economy will even approach zero, forcing a fundamental change in the capitalist system. In economic theory, we are taught that the optimum market is one in which businesses sell at marginal cost. Businesses are encouraged to introduce new technologies and other efficiencies that can reduce the marginal cost of producing and distributing their goods and services, enabling them to sell at a cheaper price, win over market share, and bring back sufficient profit to their investors. However, it never occurred to economists that one day there might exist a general-purpose technology platform so hyperefficient in the production and delivery of goods and services that it plunges the marginal cost of economic activity so low that profit margins shrink dramatically, undermining the capitalist business model. At extremely low marginal costs, markets become too slow and eventually irrelevant as business mechanisms. This is what the green digital Third Industrial Revolution does. In the Third Industrial Revolution, the “transaction” of goods gives way to a continuous “flow” of 24/ 7 services. In the new economic system now emerging, ownership gives way to access, and sellers and buyers in markets are replaced, in part, by providers and users in networks. The sharing of a range of virtual and physical goods is the cornerstone of an emerging circular economy, allowing the human race to use far less of the resources of the Earth while passing on what they no longer use to others and, by doing so, dramatically reducing carbon emissions. The Sharing Economy is a core feature of the Green New Deal era. The Sharing Economy is now in its infancy and is going to evolve in many directions. But this much is assured: The Sharing Economy is a new economic phenomenon made possible by the digital infrastructure of communication, energy, and mobility that is changing economic life. The Sharing Economy is the first new economic system to enter onto the world stage since capitalism and socialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Already, a younger generation of digital natives—under the age of forty—are ensconced in this new hybrid economic system. Part of the day, they are sharing all sorts of goods and services for nearly free in open-source commons around the world, much of which is not measured in the GDP or standard economic accounting. The rest of the day, they are increasingly intertwined in capitalist provider/ user networks, paying for access to goods and services. This hybrid economic system is the playing field on which a Green New Deal will emerge in the years ahead. The digital economy also raises risks and challenges, not the least of which is guaranteeing network neutrality to ensure everyone has equal access to the networks, protecting privacy, ensuring data security, and thwarting cybercrime and cyberterrorism. How do we prevent nation-states from hacking into other countries’ social media and spreading misinformation to influence the outcome of their elections? How do we push back against giant internet companies becoming monopolies and commodifying our personal online data for sale to third parties for commercial uses? The dark side of the internet will require vigilant regulatory oversight at the local, state, and national levels, backed up by layers of redundancy built into the system to ensure that any disruption on the smart digital Internet of Things infrastructure can be counteracted by disaggregating, decentralizing, and reorganizing into new networks at the neighborhood or community level at a moment’s notice to absorb the shocks. New studies, however, show that with the shift to an Internet of Things platform and a Third Industrial Revolution, it is conceivable to increase aggregate energy efficiency to as high as 60 percent over the next twenty years, amounting to a dramatic increase in productivity while transitioning into a nearly 100 percent postcarbon renewable energy society and a highly resilient circular economy. Missing is the green Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure, which is the “nervous system” that would connect all these isolated projects. Infrastructure, at the deepest level, is not just an incidental appendage to commerce and social life, as popular lore would have it. It is always new infrastructure that is the indispensable “extended body” of a new body politic. **important** Infrastructure, at the deepest level, is a techno-socio bond that brings together new communications technologies, new energy sources, new modes of mobility and logistics, and new built environments, enabling communities to more efficiently manage, power, and move their economic activity, social life, and governance. - Communication technology is the brain that oversees, coordinates, and manages the economic organism. - Energy is the blood that circulates through the body politic, providing the nourishment to convert nature’s endowment into goods and services to keep the economy alive and growing. - **Mobility and logistics are extensions of our limbs, allowing communities to interact physically across temporal and spatial domains to facilitate the movement of goods, services, and people.** - Buildings are the skin—the semipermeable membranes that allow our species to survive the elements, store the energies and other resources we need to maintain our physical well-being, provide secure and safe places to produce and consume the goods and services we require to enhance our existence, and serve as a congregating place to raise our families and conduct social life. - Infrastructure is akin to an immense technological organism that brings large numbers of people together as an extended figurative family collectively engaging in more complex economic, social, and political relationships. The transformation from a dying fossil-fuel-weighted Second Industrial Revolution infrastructure to a smart green zero-emission Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure is the very nucleus of the Green New Deal. Arguably, most of us in the highly developed nations are far better off than our ancestors were before we began the industrial age. However, it’s also fair to say that nearly half of the population of the world (46 percent), living on less than $ 5.50 per day, the dividing line that defines poverty, is at best only marginally better off than their ancestors, and perhaps no better off. The First and Second Industrial Revolution infrastructures were engineered to be centralized, top-down, and proprietary, and they needed to be vertically integrated to create economies of scale and return profits to investors. Conversely, the Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure is engineered to be distributed, open, and transparent, to achieve network effects, and it scales laterally, allowing billions of people to engage directly with each other both virtually and physically at very low fixed costs and near-zero marginal cost in localities and regions that stretch around the world. All they need is a smartphone and an internet connection to give them instant access to Big Data and a global network of millions of other businesses and their websites. This more intimate and inclusive engagement in commerce, trade, and social life, made possible by a distributed and smart postcarbon Third Industrial Revolution platform, is being accompanied by a shift from globalization to “glocalization” as individuals, businesses, and communities engage each other directly, bypassing many of the global companies that mediated commerce and trade in the twentieth century. On the one hand, the opportunity to connect the human race in a global nervous system, enabling every person, if they so choose, to access every other as part of a diverse and globally connected figurative family—and at near-zero marginal cost—is appealing, especially to a younger generation who think of the planet as their extended home and playing field. On the other hand, what if the smart digital Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure were to be exclusively in the private hands of global companies with little or no accountability to the communities they serve, giving them free license to surveil the lives of every citizen and sell the data they collect to third parties for marketing and advertising, or to political parties and lobbyists to advance their agendas? The sun beams 470 exajoules of energy to Earth every eighty-eight minutes—equaling the amount of energy human beings use in a year. If we could grab hold of one-tenth of 1 percent of the sun’s energy that reaches Earth, it would give us six times the energy we now use across the global economy. In 2017, China accounted for more than 45 percent of the global total investment in renewable energy. Much depends on three factors revolutionizing the transportation sector: the transition from gasoline-powered vehicles to electric and fuel-cell vehicles powered by green energies; the shift to shared vehicle services; and the introduction of self-driving vehicles. Each of these shifts is revolutionary and, standing alone, would be enough to disrupt the transportation sector. Together, feeding off each other, they portend a complete upheaval of mobility and logistics around the world, leaving a trail of stranded assets. The meshing of the Communication Internet and the Renewable Energy Internet makes possible the build-out and scale-up of the autonomous Mobility and Logistics Internet. The convergence of these three internets comprises the kernel of the Internet of Things platform for managing, powering, and transporting goods and services in a Third Industrial Revolution economy. The autonomous Mobility and Logistics Internet is made up of four foundational pillars, which, like the pillars of the Energy Internet, have to be phased in simultaneously for the system to operate efficiently. First, charging stations will need to be installed ubiquitously across land-masses, allowing electric vehicles—cars, buses, and trucks—to power up or send back electricity to the grid. Second, sensors will need to be embedded in devices across logistics networks to allow factories, warehouses, distributors, retailers, and end users to have up-to-the-moment data on logistical flows that affect their value chains. Third, the storage and transit of all physical goods across supply chains will need to be standardized—using smart, digitally enhanced containerization—so that they can be efficiently passed off to any transport vehicle and sent along any passageway, operating across the logistics system in the same way that information flows effortlessly and efficiently across the World Wide Web. Fourth, warehouse operators along the logistics corridors will need to aggregate into cooperative networks to bring all of their assets into a shared logistical space to optimize the shipment of goods, taking advantage of lateral economies of scale. For example, thousands of warehouses and distribution centers might establish blockchained cooperatives to share unused spaces, allowing a carrier to drop off a shipment at any warehouse and pass it on to another carrier from another company who might have more cargo going near the particular destination. This will ensure that all the carriers are fully loaded in their trailers at all times and that shipments are sent along the most efficient path en route to their final destination. For every vehicle shared, however, five to fifteen vehicles are eliminated from production. There are currently 1.2 billion cars, buses, and trucks crawling along in traffic in dense urban areas around the world. The mass production of gasoline-powered internal combustion vehicles has devoured large swaths of the Earth’s natural resources over the course of the past hundred years. Burns’ study suggests that 80 percent of the vehicles currently on the road are likely to be eliminated with widespread adoption of car-sharing services over the course of the next generation. The remaining 240 million vehicles will be electric and fuel-cell, powered by near-zero marginal cost renewable energy. Those shared vehicles, in turn, will be driverless and running on automated smart road systems. A part of the reason for the steep incline in sales of electric vehicles is the rapidly declining price of lithium batteries, which cost $ 1,000/ kWh (kilowatt-hour) in 2010 but by the end of 2017 were only $ 209/ kWh, a 79 percent plunge in price in just seven years. The average energy density of electric vehicle batteries is also improving, at a rate of 5 to 7 percent each year. It should be noted that 96 million barrels of oil are consumed around the world each day, and transport accounts for approximately 62.5 percent of all the oil used. According to the 2017 US Energy and Employment Report compiled by the US Department of Energy, close to 1 million Americans work in the energy efficiency, solar, wind, and electric vehicles sector, which is nearly five times the employment in the fossil fuel electric industry. There are approximately 1.4 billion cows currently on Earth, and they are a major emitter of methane, a greenhouse gas that has 25 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide (CO2). Cows also emit nitrous oxide in their feces. Nitrous oxide has 296 times more global warming potential than CO2. Currently, 6.7 percent of the farmland in the twenty-eight member states of the EU has been given over to organic farming, while only 0.6 percent of agricultural land in the United States is being used to produce organic crops. The way we communicate, harness the Earth’s energy, move around, shelter ourselves, and eat are so basic to the organization of economic and social life that we often take them for granted until a fundamental disruption in the way we think of them and use them forces a revolution in our social orientation and the way we perceive the world around us. The transformation in the way we live our lives in a digitally enhanced ecological society is already proving to be very different than our forebears’ way of life in a mechanized fossil fuel civilization. In this sense, the Green New Deal infrastructure is as much about a change of consciousness as it is about a change in infrastructure. Condorcet’s vision became the philosophical frame of what has become known as the Age of Progress. We now know better, surrounded by the carnage wrought by the fossil fuel civilization. Spirited odes to the Age of Progress and the “perfectibility of Man” are seldom heard, and even then in muted tones. The Age of Resilience is upon us. The decoupling from fossil fuels by the four primary sectors responsible for much of the global warming emissions and their realignment with the emerging renewable energies of a Green New Deal is quickly edging society to the collapse of the fossil fuel civilization. Irrespective of whether new climate policies are adopted or not, global demand growth for fossil fuels is already slowing down in the current technological transition. The question then is whether under the current pace of low-carbon technology diffusion, fossil-fuel assets are bound to become stranded due to the trajectories in renewable energy deployment, transport fuel efficiency and transport electrification. Indeed, the technological transition currently underway has major implications for the value of fossil fuels, due to investment and policy decisions made in the past. Faced with SFFA [stranded fossil fuel assets] of potentially massive proportions, the financial sector’s response to the low-carbon transition will largely determine whether the carbon bubble burst will prompt a 2008-like crisis. The question being asked with growing urgency by some and with incredulity by others is how the fossil fuel civilization could be close to an endgame because of the upstart solar and wind energies when the latter made up only 3 percent of global energy capacity in 2017. Investors, on the whole, are not swayed as much by the size of an enterprise or sector as by its growth curve. They will continue to stay onboard as long as their investment shows increasing growth. If that growth loses momentum, they take notice and often lose interest. When new challengers emerge, even if they are seemingly inconsequential, if they begin to exhibit accelerating growth or even an exponential growth curve, investors begin to shift allegiance to the challenger. The key is the threshold. That is, when a challenger captures just 3 percent of the market from an incumbent, the incumbent’s sales often peak and begin to decline, signaling its eventual demise. Kingsmill Bond, who is the lead energy strategist for the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a UK research organization of specialists tracking climate risks, observes that this rule of creative destruction holds across all areas of commerce but is particularly telling when analyzing the transitions in energy paradigms over history. For example, gas lighting demand peaked when electricity accounted for only 3 percent of the lighting. The notion that variable solar and wind energy will require backup conventional fossil fuel power to prevent power lapses for decades to come has become a kind of modern-day urban myth, spread to a large extent by the gas industry. It’s just not true. Battery storage and hydrogen fuel-cell storage at rapidly declining costs can easily provide backup power to compensate for the variability of solar and wind generation. Choosing the appropriate mix of solar and wind power, recognizing the variability of each of these energies during different seasons relative to the variability in power demands at different times of the year, also helps maintain a dependable flow of electricity. Better demand-side management, upgrading the grid code, and hastening the transition from a servomechanical to a digital grid, making it smarter and more efficient at integrating electricity between base and peak load times, are equally suited to the task of maintaining the stability of electricity demand. Zero marginal cost renewable solar and wind energy soon became the bête noire of the power and electric utilities. Not only is the marginal cost near zero in generating solar electricity, but the generation of the power also usually peaks in the afternoons when the demand for electricity peaks and the electric utilities reap their largest profit margins. In Germany, solar PVs reduced the peak price for electricity by 40–60 percent. Overall, the average daily price of electricity declined by 30–40 percent between 2007 and 2016, eroding profits for the electric utilities. In the United States and around the world, the question of where the money is going to come from to build out and scale up a Green New Deal Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure, customized in each region, is becoming ever more pressing. When we think of a Green New Deal, the issue of “massive federal government expenditures” is inevitably the first roadblock on the way to constructing the grand vision and narrative. Even now, when the crisis is nothing short of the very survival of life on Earth, the naysayers are apt to argue that we can’t afford it, as if the issue of potential extinction is merely a line item to dispose of among the many other weighty government priorities that require attention. Although some government funding at each level—city, county, state, and federal—will be required, it is probable that a good portion of the financing needed to build out the new infrastructure will come from global pension funds. The installation of microgrids will be our nation’s frontline insurance. Were a cyberattack to happen anywhere in the country, homeowners, businesses, and entire communities would be able to quickly go off-grid, reaggregate, and share electricity neighborhood to neighborhood, which would allow society to continue functioning. Forager/ hunter primitive infrastructures, which dominated most of our 200,000-year history, were remarkably similar in their narratives, each exhibiting what anthropologists call a “mythological consciousness” and tribal governance. The advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago and the subsequent emergence of the great hydraulic agricultural infrastructures in Sumer in the Middle East, the Indus Valley in India, and the Yangtze River Valley in China gave rise to “theological consciousness” and centralized governing empires. The First Industrial Revolution infrastructure in the nineteenth century gave rise to “ideological consciousness” and the birth of national markets and nation-state governance. The Second Industrial Revolution global infrastructure in the twentieth century gave rise to “psychological consciousness” and the beginnings of global markets and global governing bodies. The Third Industrial Revolution glocal infrastructure emerging in the twenty-first century is giving birth to “biosphere consciousness” and peer assembly governance. The biosphere, stretching up into the atmosphere and down through the lithosphere and into the oceans, is where all the creatures on Earth live, interact, and flourish. Each of these great paradigm shifts was accompanied by the evolution of our empathic impulse to larger collectivities and worldviews. - In forager/ hunter societies, empathy extended only to blood ties and kinship and the sharing of a common ancestral worldview. - In the great hydraulic agricultural civilizations, empathy extended to those who shared a common religious affiliation. The great religions formed during this era, giving rise to non-blood-related “figurative families” based on religious ties. All converts to Judaism began to empathize with fellow Jews as their extended figurative family. The same with Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims. - In the First Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, empathy extended to figurative families based on a collective sense of national loyalty to the Motherland or Fatherland. Citizens began to empathize with each other based on their nation-state identity. - In the Second Industrial Revolution in the twentieth century, empathy extended to like-minded cosmopolitan and professional ties in an increasingly borderless world. - In the emerging Third Industrial Revolution, a generation of digital natives Skyping in global classrooms, interacting on Facebook and Instagram, gaming in virtual worlds, and obsessively traveling the physical world are beginning to see themselves as a planetary cohort inhabiting a common biosphere. They are extending empathy in a more expansive way, coming to think of themselves as members of a threatened species and empathizing with their common plight on a destabilizing Earth. And a growing number of young people are beginning to take a final step beyond, empathizing with all the other creatures with whom we share an evolutionary heritage. Were the intention of any nation-state or renegade group to surveil, control, cripple, or take down the networks, cheap, simple technology components built into the system at the end user’s door will allow families, neighborhoods, communities, businesses, and local and regional governments to go off-grid at a moment’s notice and decentralize and reaggregate their operations. There is no conceivable path by which a superpower could hold hostage several billion people in millions of communities if they chose to simply go off a Eurasian power grid, or for that matter a global power grid, and go it alone in harvesting their solar and wind energy in their neighborhoods and surrounding communities. While our respective loyalties and commitments are diverse, climate change is forcing us to think of ourselves as an “endangered species” for the first time. Living with that new reality brings the human race together in a common bond that we’ve never before experienced. Today, market forces are deconstructing the fossil fuel civilization. The speed and scope of the disruption are without parallel. The old fossil fuel energies are creating a carbon bubble that is unlike any economic disruption in human history. The key sectors of the economy—ICT/ telecommunications/ internet, electricity, transport, and buildings—are quickly decoupling from fossil fuels and recoupling with renewable energies, establishing the pathway to a Third Industrial Revolution. The thing to bear in mind is that the collapse of the fossil fuel civilization is inevitable, despite any efforts by the fossil fuel industries to forestall it. Market forces are far more powerful than whatever lobbying maneuvers the fossil fuel industry might entertain. This, too, might be difficult to hear for those activists still wedded to the idea that the market is never on the side of the people. I am certainly aware that this is often the case, and for a lifetime I have been critical of various aspects of market capitalism. This time, however, and with this disruption, the market is a guardian angel looking over humanity. But the invisible hand alone will not steer us into the Age of Resilience. Building a new ecological civilization from the ashes will require a far more collective response that marshals our public capital, market capital, and social capital at every level of governance and engages the deep participation of the entire body politic. In the Age of Progress, we could each aspire to go it alone in the marketplace, or at least that’s what the powers that be wanted us to believe. In the climate change world that is now here, we already know that the Age of Progress is history and our future lies in an Age of Resilience that will require a collective effort in every community on a scale never before experienced in our short history on Earth. We noted earlier that the design and engineering of infrastructures both enable and constrain the types of business models and forms of governance that accompany them. Recall that in the case of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, the infrastructures were engineered to be centralized, enclosed in intellectual property, and vertically integrated to create economies of scale in order to return sufficient profits to investors because of the huge up-front costs of locating, extracting, shipping, refining, and delivering coal, oil, natural gas, and petrochemicals to end users. All other sectors, in turn, had to organize their supply chains and value chains and the production of their goods and services in a similar fashion because of their total dependence on the same energy sources and infrastructure dynamics. The temporal/ spatial reach of the First Industrial Revolution infrastructure gave rise to national markets and nation-state governance to oversee them. The Second Industrial Revolution infrastructure gave rise to global markets and international organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank, the OECD, and the World Trade Organization to comanage governance alongside nation-states. As described early on, the Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure comes with a different design and engineering construction. The platform is weighted toward being distributed in operation rather than centralized, and the system itself is optimized if it remains open and transparent to create the network effect rather than being closed off in intellectual property. Last, the distributed open and transparent nature of the system is most efficient and productive if its operations are laterally scaled rather than vertically integrated. The distributed, open-sourced, and laterally scaled design and engineering principles built into the Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure favor an accompanying distributed, open, transparent, and laterally scaled regulatory regime to facilitate and coordinate this new approach to commerce. Our twenty years of experience in the European Union suggest that the codes, regulations, and standards that need to be put in place to operate a green infrastructure across the continent will remain the responsibility of the member states and the European Commission. However, the build-out and scale-up of the Green New Deal economy will ultimately be the responsibility of the 350 governing regions and cities of Europe, with each customizing the infrastructure to its own goals, deliverables, and aspirations within the confines of the EU-wide codes, regulations, and standards, allowing them to interconnect across borders in a coherent continental smart infrastructure. The Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure works most effectively and efficiently if it’s laterally scaled and connects a multitude of small players.