I belong to a degrowth group on facebook. The owner of this group posted a link to a youtube video titled “The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy”. I downloaded it sight unseen so that I could watch it on my TV while it’s pissing down with rain outside and I frankly have nothing else better to do……. luckily for those up North in terrible drought, we’ll be sending some your way next weekend. I’ve never liked Jeremy Rifkin’s crazy ideas, and had I realised he was the star attraction of this film, I probably would not have downloaded it in the first place, but having done so, and under the abovemnetioned weather conditions, I went ahead anyway……

The first half hour was for me the best part, because he clearly explains – with some crucial left out items – why we’re in deep shit. What really leaves me flumoxed is how someone who clearly understands thermodynamics and entropy cannot come to grips with their repercussions.

A ‘Third Industrial Revolution’ Would Seal Our Fate — Why Jeremy Rifkin is Dead Wrong

For me, it was extraordinarily hard to find where to start my criticism — not because of the lack of strength of his arguments, but simply because it is just plain hard to even know where to start! Explaining in the face of such universal ignorance of simple ecological limits and boundaries, and for such a long (1 3/4 hours) presentation, I fear I may ramble a bit during this difficult essay.

While I hope this post won’t offend anyone, I just think that some of us have to speak up to show him and his admirers that our generation blindly following his progressivist ideas – at least not in its entirety – is almost as dumb as doing nothing at all…..

His ideas are not ‘radically new’. they are just a new version of the same old ‘more is better’ paradigm — more technology, more energy, more people, more jobs, more work, more impact, more control. He is after all a business man, and his main problem is that he simply doesn’t get the growth problem…. Maybe we have to try something that really is completely new:

Small is better. Simple is better. Local is better. Independent is better.

Less technology, less pollution, fewer cars (to be fair, he does say we’ll reduce the number of cars by 85%), fewer airplanes, highways, fewer shopping malls, less noise, less trade, less work, less destruction, less disruption, less control, less worries… This doesn’t sound so bad after all, does it? But it is the complete opposite of what Rifkin has in mind for this world……

He makes it quite clear that in his ‘radically’ new economy, everything is smart. Smart phones, smart vehicles, smart roads and smart houses….. he talks of retrofitting houses, which I know from experience does not work. Once you’ve built a lemon, a lemon it remains. That’s why I’m going through all the hassles of building my own…

There are serious concerns, expressed many times in this very blog, about the environmental impact that such changes would bring about. As far as we know it is highly unlikely that we have sufficient reserves of resources for producing so called “green/clean” technologies, on a global scale, good enough to replace the current, all-encompassing, fossil fuel-based system……

From what I saw in the video, there will be markets, corporations, stocks, products, consumers, factories, roads, cars, drones, workers, bosses, currency, more debts, taxes, laws — which all seems an awful lot like the system we currently have…. A truly ‘radical’ new economy would, surely, not see the exact same elements as its predecessor?

Rifkin forgets that there already was a “sharing economy”, usually referred to as ‘gift economy’ by anthropologists, and that this original sharing economy lasted for over 95% of our species’ two-hundred-thousand-years existence here on Earth. Ironically, this ancient economic system happens to be the closest to a sustainable form of economy that we have ever known. No resource was overexploited, no ecosystem disrupted and absolutely no pollution resulted…. and most of that was the result of infinitesimally smaller population numbers.

While it’s obvious Rifkin has some understanding of science, he remains an economist after all! Here are some of his failings as I see them…..

Chemistry

Chemistry matters because when we look at the periodic table of elements, we see all there is in our world. In the whole Universe actually… There are only 118 elements available to us. And we will never find replacements for those elements, they simply do not exist…… Of increasing interest are 17 different Rare Earth Elements (REE’s), elements 57–71 (the lanthanides) and scandium and yttrium, most of which are used to create solar panels, batteries, magnets, displays and touchscreens, hardware and other advanced technological appliances.

To obtain them we have to rape and pillage the biosphere. This puts us into a predicament that Rifkin fails to address. Those elements are used because of their unique and desirable qualities, such as the ability to absorb certain wavelengths (particularly efficient in the case of solar panels), produce strong magnets for the massive generators used in wind turbines, and colorful lights for the displays of our mobile phones, computers and TV’s.

Of the 17 REE’s, the only one that is not found in smartphones is the radioactive promethium! I guess the line is drawn at putting radioactive stuff to one’s ear….. Modern smartphones contain almost three quarters of all the elements in the periodic table, and all of them are essential for those devices to function. It is chemically not possible to create something like a smartphone without certain elements; and it is impossible to obtain those elements without destroying vast swaths of the already battered environment.

Geology

From a geological point of view Rifkin’s plans are highly unlikely. We simply don’t have enough resources left to do any of his proposed ‘revolutions’ in the realms of energy and communication.

Biology

Overshoot is what happens when a species follows simple biological laws: if you increase the food availability of any species, its population will increase, period. This is what we humans have done for the past 10,000 years, since the widespread adoption of agriculture. As a result of the food surplus that industrial agriculture creates (as opposed to the “just-enough” food quantity obtained by foragers), human population exploded. The biggest increase in human population was directly caused by the “Green” Revolution, when fossil fuelled chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides were first used on a continental scale. It was like agriculture on steroids…..

I didn’t realise Rifkin was a vegetarian/vegan activist until watching this. He yet again displays his ignorance of the difference between industrial animal husbandry and regenerative agriculture, which, in my not so humble opinion, will be the third revolution…. Maybe someone needs to invent smart cows! Just kidding…….

The fact that Rifkin fails to adequately address overpopulation is reason enough for me to question his competence.

Ecology

Ecosystems function best and are at their most stable, resilient and effective when all components stay within their naturally imposed limits. From an ecological view, anthropocentrism has no foundation whatsoever. Instead of controlling our environment, we would have to let go of all control and hand the reins back to Mother Nature…… Ecosystems are networks (Rifkin, fond of technological and digital metaphors, would probably call them an ‘Internet’!) that seem resilient even when they suffer severe damage. But once a ‘tipping point’ is reached, like human overshoot, collapse is rapid and ruthless. The first of those tipping points might be reached as soon as the 2020’s mark, with increasingly extreme weather events threatening breadbasket regions around the world. Rifkin’s assertion that we have forty years to fix the mess just blew me away…..

Like it or not, we are inevitably a part of the ecosystem surrounding us, whether we act like it or not. Everything we do – and nothing we do is sustainable – has a direct impact on our immediate environment. Thanks to globalization, ecosystems are now impacted on a global scale.

The extraction and processing of REM’s needed to produce all our technology is directly connected to the destruction of ecosystems all around the globe. Several major ecological catastrophes were directly caused by the mining and extraction of REE’s, such as the Samarco tailings dam collapse (2015) in Brazil or the silicon tetrachloride spill by a solar energy company in Henan province, China (2008). As implied by recent, peer reviewed study (paywall) in the prestigious journal Nature, there is no reason to believe that this risk is going to decrease if global demand rises as predicted by all involved scholars and institutions.

Green Clean Smart technology

It should be obvious by now, especially to all followers of this blog, that neither solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric facilities, and electric cars, nor smartphones, computers and other high-tech gadgets come even close to being what might be termed “green” or “clean”. But what Rifkin proposes is nothing short of megalomania.

Smartphones (smart vehicles, smart roads, smart houses, smart toilets and any other ‘smart’ gadget), computers, televisions, electric cars, wind turbines, solar panels, lasers, camera lenses, missiles and numerous other technologies all contain a broad spectrum of rare earth elements (REE’s), without which the production of those gadgets would be utterly impossible (strictly chemically speaking). The production and use of ‘screens’ technology alone, according to Jancovici, consumes one third of all the electricity produced worldwide….. The growth of renewables cannot even keep up with the growth of the internet.

Rifkin makes much ado about a meeting he had with Angela Merkel – herself a scientist – and the amount of renewable energy deployed in Germany, claiming Germany gets 30% of its electricity from these technologies. This isn’t even true…. it might be correct on paper, and on perfect days even more might be generated, but his hopium filled rhetoric would have you believe his dream is already happening….. it isn’t. The recent demolition of a historic church to clear the way for the expansion of an open-cast brown coal mine has outraged locals in western Germany and environmentalists, as politicians moot giving up their own clean energy targets…….

Many of the minerals needed to produce smartphones and electric vehicles are considered ‘conflict minerals’ and are mined under slave-like conditions in Congo and other ‘undeveloped’ countries. The most common conflict minerals, cassiterite (a byproduct of tin mining), wolframite (extracted from tungsten), coltan (extracted from tantalum), cobalt, and gold ore, are all mined in eastern Congo. There is ample evidence to assume that Western corporations have a high economic interest in the region remaining unstable, since they get much better prices for the minerals desperately needed for the production of mobile phones, laptops, and other digital technology

It is impossible to produce even a single smartphone without causing enormous damage to the biosphere in the process. As the graphic above shows (click on it for a larger view), the materials and compounds come from all corners of the world and have to be transported conveniently and cheaply for the industry to continue to function properly and profitably. Container vessels are the backbone of the global economy, and without them nothing would function. They can’t be replaced with anything “renewable”, since no electric engine has as yet been invented that can move such masses over distances longer than 80km!! The 16 biggest container ships (out of a total of about 100,000 vessels) produce as much pollution as all the cars in the world….

In case you’ve never heard this before, the shipping lobby works hard to hide and downplay their impact on climate breakdown from the public. The UN body that polices the world’s shipping business, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), has been absent without leave when it comes to avoiding or even addressing pollution caused by those ships. By international law, nobody is allowed to burn the thick, sulphur-laden fuel called bunker oil, yet the shipping industry does not have to comply with that law. And sulphur is far from being the only pollutant. Every year it is estimated that container vessels belch out one billion tons of CO2 , as much as the entire aviation industry……. click on image for larger view.

Deindustrialise or perish

When we take a careful look at our species’ short history, it becomes obvious in which direction we must go. We got along quite well before people started thinking that they were better than other creatures, and better than their fellow men, the new mindset that emerged after the Agricultural Revolution……..

If we want to stop pathological behavior, pollution, destruction, violence, chronic depression and mental health problems, discontent, and exploitation, if we want to share real things, communicate meaningfully, live in harmony with the biosphere, and nurture the world around us, we have to recognize our true Nature: The Nature within us, the Wilderness that still lays deep in our heart, and the Nature and the Wilderness that are still around us, the biosphere, at the edges of the wastelands we’ve created and in between the cracks in the asphalt and the concrete we’ve coated the living Earth with, and that they are actually the same.