Third Industrial Revolution: Our industrial civilization is at a crossroads. Oil and the other fossil energies that make up the industrial way of life are dying out, and the technologies made and driven by these energies are antiquated. All industrial infrastructure built from fossil fuels is aging and in disrepair. The result is that unemployment is rising to dangerous levels around the world. Governments, businesses and consumers are riddled with debt and living standards are falling everywhere. A record one billion human beings – nearly one-seventh of the human race – face hunger and famine. Worse still, climate change from fossil fuel-based industrial activity looms on the horizon, jeopardizing our own species' very ability to survive.
Since the start of the Great Recession in the summer of 2008, governments, the business community and civil society have engaged in a heated debate about how to restart the global economy. While austerity measures and fiscal, labor and market reforms are needed, they are not enough to recover the economy. Let me explain through an anecdote. Just a few months after coming to power, the new chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, asked me to come to Berlin to help his administration address the question of how to create new jobs and expand the German economy in the 21st century. I started my remarks by asking the chancellor: “How do you grow the German economy, the EU economy or, for that matter in this, the global economy, in the last stages of a great energy age and an industrial revolution built on it?”
It is becoming increasingly clear that the Second Industrial Revolution is dying out and that industrial induced CO2 emissions are threatening the viability of life on Earth. What we need now is a new economic narrative that takes us to a sustainable post-carbon future. Finding this new vision requires an understanding of the technological forces that precipitate profound transformations in society.
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The greatest economic revolutions in history occur when new communication technologies converge with new energy systems. New energy revolutions enable more expansive and integrated commerce. Follow-up communication revolutions manage the new and complex business activities made possible by new energy flows. In the 19th century, steam-powered printing technology and the introduction of public schools gave rise to a skilled print workforce. to manage the increased flow of commercial activity made possible by coal and steam power technology, inaugurating the first. Industrial Revolution. In the 20th century, the centralized communication of electricity – the telephone, and later radio and television – became the means of communication to manage a more complex and dispersed era of oil, automobiles and suburbs and the mass consumer culture of the Second Revolution Industrial.
Today, Internet technology and renewable energy are beginning to merge to create a new infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution (IRR) that will change the way energy is distributed in the XXI century. In the next generation, hundreds of millions of people will produce their own renewable energy in their homes, offices and factories and will share green electricity with each other on an “Energy Internet” just as we now generate and share information online.
It's becoming clear that the Second Industrial Revolution is dying. What we need now is a new economic narrative that takes us to a sustainable post-carbon future.
Establishing a Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure will create thousands of new businesses and millions of jobs and lay the foundations for a sustainable global economy in the 21st century. However, let me add a cautionary note. Like all other communication and energy infrastructures in history, the various pillars of a Third Industrial Revolution must be established simultaneously or the foundation does not sustains. This is because each pillar can only work in relation to the others. The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are (1) moving to renewable energy; (2) transform the construction stock of all continents into micro-
power plants to collect renewable energy on site; (3) deploy hydrogen and other storage technologies in all buildings and across infrastructure to store intermittent energy; (4) using Internet technology to transform the power grid of all continents into an energy grid that works like the Internet (when millions of buildings generate a small amount of renewable energy locally, they can sell surplus green electricity back to the grid and share it with their neighbors continental); and (5) the transition from the transport fleet to plug-in and fuel cell electric vehicles that can buy and sell green electricity on a smart, continental and interactive.
The creation of a partial, building-loaded renewable energy regime.
Storage in the form of hydrogen, distributed through an Internet of green electricity and connected to a zero-emission plug-in transport, opens the door to a Third Revolution Industrial. The entire system is interactive, integrated and transparent. When these five pillars come together, they form an indivisible technological platform – an emergent system whose properties and functions are qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. In other words, synergies between the pillars create a new economic paradigm that can transform the world.
Public/private financing of the infrastructure of the Third Industrial Revolution around the world will be at the top of the agenda of the international banking and financial community in the first half of the century XXI.
The Third Industrial Revolution is the last of the great Industrial Revolutions and will lay the foundational infrastructure for an emerging collaborative era. Its conclusion will signal the end of a two-hundred-year-old commercial saga characterized by diligent thinking, enterprising markets and Massive workforce and the beginning of a new era marked by collaborative behavior, social networks and work professionals technical. In the next half century, the centralized and conventional commercial operations of the First and Second Revolutions Industrialists will be increasingly incorporated into the distributed business practices of the Third Revolution Industrial; and the traditional hierarchical organization of economic and political power will give way to lateral power, organized nodally by society.
Lateral power is a new force in the world. Steve Jobs and his other generation innovators took us from expensive centralized central computers, owned and controlled by a handful of global companies, for cheap desktop computers and cell phones, allowing billions of people to connect with one another. others. peer-to-peer networks in the social spaces of the internet. The democratization of communications has allowed nearly a third of the world's human population to share music, knowledge, news and social life in an open field, marking one of the great evolutionary advances in the history of our species.
Internet technology and renewable energy are beginning to merge to create a new infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution (IRR) that will change the way energy is distributed in the 21st century.
But as impressive as that achievement is, it's only half the story. New green energy industries are improving performance and reducing costs at an ever-accelerating rate. And just as the generation and distribution of information is becoming almost free, so is renewable energy. The sun, wind, biomass, geothermal heat and hydropower are available to everyone and, like the information, are never used.
When Internet communications manage green energy, every human on Earth becomes their own source of power, literally and figuratively. Billions of human beings sharing their renewable energy laterally in a network of continental green electricity create the basis for the democratization of the global economy and a society fairer.
Energy regimes shape the nature of civilizations – how they are organized, as the fruits of trade and commerce are distributed, how political power is exercised and how social relations are conducted. To understand how the new infrastructure of the Third Industrial Revolution is likely to dramatically change the distribution of economic power in the 21st century, it is helpful step back and examine how the First and Second Industrial Revolutions based on fossil fuels reorganized power relations over the course of the 19th and XX.
Fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – are elite energies for the simple reason that they are only found in selected places. They require significant military investment to ensure their access and ongoing geopolitical management to ensure their availability. They also require top-down command and control systems and massive concentrations of capital to transfer them from underground to end users. The ability to centralize production and distribution – the essence of modern capitalism – is fundamental to the effective performance of the system as a whole. Centralized energy infrastructure, in turn, sets the stage for the rest of the economy, encouraging similar business models across all sectors.
Virtually every other critical sector that has emerged from the oil culture – modern finance, telecommunications, automotive, energy and utilities and commercial construction – and that feed off the fossil fuel tap were similarly predisposed to greatness to achieve their own savings. of scale. And, like the oil industry, they require huge amounts of capital to operate and are centrally organized.
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