Jeremy Rifkin
Jeremy Rifkin
Jeremy Rifkinis an American economic and social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor, and activist. Rifkin is the author of 20 books about the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. His most recent books include The Zero Marginal Cost Society, The Third Industrial Revolution, The Empathic Civilization, The European Dream, The Hydrogen Economy, The Age of Access, The Biotech Century, and The End of Work...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
CountryUnited States of America
We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.
The industry's not stupid. The industry knows that if those foods are labeled "genetically engineered," the public will shy away and won't take them.
Turning points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras.
Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?
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.
The world's environment can no longer handle beef.
We now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn't do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.
The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth.
Basic income is not a utopia, it's a practical business plan for the next step of the human journey.
That's a sea change in less than 50 years.
You can't get a guarantee that genes are going to turn on and off the way you want them to. You're dealing with life. It's too unpredictable.
If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can spray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won't kill your corn because it's producing a gene that makes it tolerant of the herbicide.
It should be a tipping point, I hope this is a tipping point,
The insurance companies aren't covering that. Should Monsanto be liable for these losses? Should the state government? Who's going to cover the losses? The fact is, here's an industry with no long-term liability in place.