The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World QUOTES

1 " We have come to discover what we suspect is a new political mindset emerging among a younger generation of political leaders socialized on Internet communications. Their politics are less about right versus left and more about centralized and authoritarian versus distributed and collaborative. "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

2 " Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work. "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

3 " The laws of thermodynamics tell us something quite different. Economic activity is merely borrowing low-entropy energy inputs from the environment and transforming them into temporary products and services of value. In the transformation process, often more energy is expended and lost to the environment than is embedded in the particular good or service being produced. "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

4 " three hundred trout are required to support one man for a year. The trout, in turn, must consume 90,000 frogs, which must consume 27 million grasshoppers, which live off of 1,000 tons of grass.”10 "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

5 " Even though the transformation of energy, in all of its various forms, is the very basis of all economic activity, only a tiny fraction of economists have even studied thermodynamics. And only a handful of individuals inside the profession have attempted to redefine economic theory and practice based on the energy laws. "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

6 " The well-being of the biosphere is measured over millennia of history and necessitates a human consciousness that can reflect and project along a similar time table. "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

7 " The new science takes us from a colonial vision of nature as an enemy to pillage and enslave, to a new vision of nature as a community to nurture. The right to exploit, harness, and own nature in the form of property is tempered by the obligation to steward nature and treat it with dignity and respect. The utility value of nature is slowly giving way to the intrinsic value of nature. "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

8 " The gross domestic product (GDP) was created in the 1930s to measure the value of the sum total of economic goods and services generated over a single year. The problem with the index is that it counts negative as well as positive economic activity. If a country invests large sums of money in armaments, builds prisons, expands police security, and has to clean up polluted environments and the like, it’s included in the GDP. Simon Kuznets, an American who invented the GDP measurement tool, pointed out early on that “[t]he welfare of a nation can . . . scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.”28 Later in life, Kuznets became even more emphatic about the drawbacks of relying on the GDP as a gauge of economic prosperity. He warned that “[d]istinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth . . . . Goals for ‘more’ growth should specify more growth of what and for what.”29 "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

9 " democratizing energy. "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

10 " There is a saying in the Middle East that goes something like this: “My grandfather rode a camel, my father drove a car, I travel on a jet, and my grandchild will ride a camel.” Not necessarily. The deserts of the Middle East and North Africa have more solar potential per square inch than any other region in the world—more energy potential, in fact, than all of the oil ever extracted from deep beneath its sand dunes. The "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

11 " This means that for the past thirty years, we have been wasting 86 percent of the energy we use in the production of goods and services. "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

12 " Africa, in particular, has barely begun to exploit its renewable energy potential. Energy analysts say that solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass sources could more than supply the energy needs of every continent. The key is providing a favorable playing field, and that means financial aid, technology transfer, and training programs to assist developing nations, like the ones being advanced by the EU/AU partnership. "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

13 " We think of GDP as a measure of the wealth that a country generates each year. But from a thermodynamic point of view, it is more a measure of the temporary energy value embedded in the goods or services produced at the expense of the diminution of the available energy reserves and an accumulation of entropic waste. Since "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

14 " Bruffee begins with the teacher, whose responsibility is to transfer knowledge into the minds of the students. He does this by creating an authoritative relationship with each student. That is, he calls on individuals and asks each to recite or provide an answer to a directed question. Each student is expected to perform strictly for the teacher, by recitation or by written exam. The relationship is always top-down and one-to-one. Students are discouraged from interacting with each other, whether by posing questions to one another, or assisting each other. Such behavior would breach the authority of the teacher and create an alternative pattern of authority that would be lateral and interactive. Thinking together would be considered cheating. Each student, in turn, is individually evaluated and graded. "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

15 " When the price of oil on the world market began to fall, the American business community and the public lost interest in the great energy crusade. Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, removed the solar panels from the White House roof and scrapped the wood-burning stove in the living quarters. America went back to business as usual, buying even larger gasguzzling vehicles, and using ever greater volumes of energy to support a wasteful, consumer-driven lifestyle. "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

16 " hold. That’s because each pillar can only function in relationship to the others. The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are (1) shifting to renewable energy; (2) transforming the building stock of every continent into micro–power plants to collect renewable energies on site; (3) deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies; (4) using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy-sharing intergrid that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of energy locally, on site, they can sell surplus back to the grid and share electricity with their continental neighbors); and (5) transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid. "

― Jeremy Rifkin , The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World