Welcome to the Third Industrial Revolution: Climate Change, Connectivity and a Unifying Global Purpose
Arianna Huffington
Oct 20, 2015

In his 2009 book "The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis," Jeremy Rifkin posed one of the defining questions of our time: in a hyper-connected world, what is the goal of all that unprecedented technological connectivity? "Seven billion individual connections," he wrote, "absent any overall unifying purpose, seem a colossal waste of human energy."

Now, I'm delighted that The WorldPost is featuring a new series by Rifkin exploring how the possibilities of an even more connected world can lead to solutions to one of our greatest crises: climate change.

With 2015 widely predicted to supersede 2014 as the hottest year on record, the topic's relevance and timeliness are obvious. According to analysis by Climate Central, "13 of the hottest 15 years on record have all occurred since 2000 and ... the odds of that happening randomly without the boost of global warming is 1 in 27 million."



.........For all the promise and possibility of official gatherings, much of the change we need will come from outside the halls of power. This is where technological advances and innovations, including the Internet of Things, are especially important. Rifkin sees tremendous potential in this aspect of increased connectivity: "For the first time in history," he writes, "the entire human race can collaborate directly with one another, democratizing economic life." Advances in digital connectivity, renewable energy sources and smart transportation are allowing us to responsibly shift the way we see the world and our place in it.

Rifkin labels all this the "Third Industrial Revolution" because, "to grasp the enormity of the economic change taking place, we need to understand the technological forces that have given rise to new economic systems throughout history."

In the coming weeks, our series will outline the path ahead for the realization of this Third Industrial Revolution.

Full article~
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/third-industrial-revolution_b_8337742.html

Jeremy Rifkin
Author, 'The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism'

How the Third Industrial Revolution Will Create a Green Economy
Posted: 10/20/2015



...........Now, a new economic paradigm is emerging that is going to dramatically change the way we organize economic life on the planet. The European Union is embarking on a bold new course to create a high-tech 21st century smart green digital economy, making Europe potentially the most productive commercial space in the world and the most ecologically sustainable society on Earth.

The plan is called Digital Europe. The EU vision of a green digital economy is now being embraced by China and other developing nations around the world.

The digitalization of Europe involves much more than providing universal broadband, free Wi-Fi and a flow of big data. The digital economy will revolutionize every commercial sector, disrupt the workings of virtually every industry, bring with it unprecedented new economic opportunities, put millions of people back to work, democratize economic life and create a more sustainable low-carbon society to mitigate climate change. Equally important, this new economic narrative is being accompanied by a new biosphere consciousness, as the human race begins to perceive the Earth as its indivisible community. We are each beginning to take on our responsibilities as stewards of the planetary ecosystems that sustain all of life.

To grasp the enormity of the economic change taking place, we need to understand the technological forces that have given rise to new economic systems throughout history. Every great economic paradigm requires three elements, each of which interacts with the other to enable the system to operate as a whole: new communication technologies to more efficiently manage economic activity; new sources of energy to more efficiently power economic activity; and new modes of transportation to more efficiently move economic activity.

In the 19th century, steam-powered printing and the telegraph, abundant coal and locomotives on national rail systems gave rise to the First Industrial Revolution. In the 20th 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....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-rifkin/third-industrial-revolution-green-economy_b_8286142.html

Synopsis:

Filmed over 211 shoot days in nine countries and five continents over four years, This Changes Everything is an epic attempt to re-imagine the vast challenge of climate change.

Directed by Avi Lewis, and inspired by Naomi Klein’s international non-fiction bestseller This Changes Everything, the film presents seven powerful portraits of communities on the front lines, from Montana’s Powder River Basin to the Alberta Tar Sands, from the coast of South India to Beijing and beyond.

Interwoven with these stories of struggle is Klein’s narration, connecting the carbon in the air with the economic system that put it there. Throughout the film, Klein builds to her most controversial and exciting idea: that we can seize the existential crisis of climate change to transform our failed economic system into something radically better.

Why a run by the undeclared frontrunner demands upending the corporate wing of the Democratic Party
by John Atcheson
Common Dreams

..........And yes, gender equality is a critical issue, but don’t hold your breath looking for progress from Hillary. She’s likely to do as much for women, as Barack Obama has done for African Americans – which is to say damn little, other than a better brand of rhetoric.

So before we proceed with her coronation, maybe it’s time to think back to the 2004 campaign, and the early days of Barack Obama’s candidacy and Presidency.

Remember “hope and change?” At the time, few thought to ask what exactly we were hoping for and what exactly we were changing to.

And of course, what we got was a great slogan, better speeches, very little change and even less hope.

Here’s what Obama promised:

Shutting down Gitmo;
Ending warrantless wiretapping;
Ending foreign wars;
An end to trickle down economics;
Greater regulation of Wall Street and the financial sector;
A public option for health care;
Protecting social security, Medicaid and Medicare;
Serious action on climate change;
Greater equality in opportunity and more broadly shared prosperity …

Here’s what we got: An administration that set up Goldman Sachs south in the Treasury, doubled down on domestic spying; expanded a drone policy that creates between 40 to 60 new terrorists for every one it kills; health care reform that is better than the status quo, but which rewards corporate insurers as much or more than it does citizens; international trade agreements that favor corporate interests, while eviscerating domestic wages, scuttling environmental performance, and crippling US industrial infrastructure. It’s so bad, they’re trying to negotiate it in secret …

The list goes on and on, and so do the betrayals.

Apologists for the DLC branch of the Democratic Party will say Obama had no choice – he was constrained by Congress. But he practiced a brand of preemptive capitulation that meant we always ended up carrying corporate water, and satisfying military imperialists while ignoring or discounting citizens’ civil rights and welfare.

So now enter Hillary Clinton and the deluded Democrats who jones for her Presidency. Maybe it’s time to ask what, specifically, we will get; what we can hope for, and whether it will usher in changes Americans overwhelmingly want (more about this, in a bit).

And here’s the answer – If we nominate Hillary Clinton we will get another DLC Democrat who mouths progressive values during the campaign, then shifts to the right when (and if) elected. In short, citizens get no real choice.

The problem with this isn’t simply that it’s morally bankrupt; economically bad for 95% of Americans; bad for the economy in general; bad for the environment; bad for US competitiveness; and devastating for our children’s future climate – it’s ultimately bad politics, too.

Here’s the deal – the dirty little secret that plutocrats and corporatists in both Parties don’t want us to know: The vast majority of Americans favor progressive policies. Consider:

— 90% of the citizens support legislation requiring background checks for gun purchase, but Congress can’t pass one.

— 74% of Americans want to end subsidies to big oil – but there’s no chance of it happening;

— The majority of citizens favored allowing tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 to expire, but the best we could do is compromise on $400,000

— 70% of Americans consider climate change to be a high priority issue, yet Congress has taken no action;

— Some 80% of Americans favor shoring up Social Security even if it means higher taxes and a similar number support retaining Medicare as is, but we’ve twice offered cuts to both programs as part of a “grand bargain”;

— Or take this gem … more than 80% of Americans want to clamp down on Wall Street but the best we could get was weak-sister legislation that is being completely eviscerated as it is translated into regulations.

This list could be extended across a broad range of issues. The fact is, the people’s interests aren’t being represented in Washington and they won’t be if Hillary Clinton is elected. Her record is clear. She’s an ardent proponent of trade agreements; she’s consistently supported the interests of Wall Street over Main Street; she’s been hawkish on foreign policy; weak on civil protections; hawkish on the deficit (until very recently) and mum on many other issues that demand a progressive advocate.

Yes, she’s beginning to veer to the left in preparation for the primaries, but haven’t we had enough of this?

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see a candidate who actually represented the peoples’ interests tackle the usual corporatists who win the Democratic nominations? Not to mention the sycophantic Republicans who so obviously dance to the tunes of the likes of Addelson, the Koch Brothers and Wall Street?

The fact is we can wage and win a war for a progressive candidate, and we have potential candidates who speak for the people. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, the Progressive Congressional Caucus – each offers common sense and popular alternatives to the corrosive forces of corporatism that is eroding our Democracy.

Corporate money can trump everything but the vote. In the age of the Internet, we can take over this Party. We can raise our own money and turn out our own candidates. We can bypass the bought and paid for media and reach people directly with a message they are dying to hear.

Doubt that? Think back to 2011, when income inequality was a non-issue, ignored by the media and candidates alike. Between September 2011 and October 2011, the Occupy movement erupted, making income inequality one of the main issues in the 2012 election.

We must occupy the Democratic Party. Yes, as constructed, it’s little more than Republican lite – answerable to corporate overlords. But we can change that. We can insist on candidates who represent the people.

Take a look at those polling numbers again – if we used the tools of the Internet to raise money and advocate popular progressives, we just might be able to beat back the plutocrats. It’s at least worth a try.

So let’s go for it. Let’s occupy the Democratic Party.

(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. )

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/04/17/hillary-clinton-and-future-failure-progressive-hope-and-change

Jesse A. Myerson:

It was difficult enough eight years ago when Hillary Clinton only had to defend her vote for the Iraq War. This time around, the insurgent candidate she faces, in important ways outpacing even the last guy, talks about “revolution” and “the working class” in the same sentence, and thus puts her in the unenviable position of having to defend capitalism itself.

Not to worry: Clintonian triangulation is nothing if not versatile. Reminding the audience that “we are not Denmark,” Clinton deployed the frame lately popularized by her husband’s one-time labor secretary, Robert Reich, that it is imperative to “save capitalism from itself.”

Sure she wants to “rein in the excess of capitalism so that it doesn’t run amok and doesn’t cause the kind of inequalities we’re seeing in our economic system.” But the baby mustn’t go out with the bathwater: “We would be making a grave mistake to turn out backs on what built the greatest middle class in history,” she said, praying in aid “all the small businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom in our country for people to do that.” The characteristically Clintonian drive to pander to everyone at once was so strong as to enable her to gracefully drop the implication that there are no small Danish businesses and move right along.

She tipped her hand, though: pressed repeatedly to agree or disagree with Sen. Sanders’s preference for expanding Social Security, Clinton insisted that she’d rather “enhance the benefits for the poorest recipients of Social Security.” Similarly, as to whether she agrees with Sanders’s health care approach, extending Medicare to everyone, Clinton declined to answer (she doesn’t, though), insisting vaguely that “we agree on the goals, we just disagree on the means.”

Here was the vintage neoliberal approach with which the Clintons are justly associated, unchanged by the financial crises and social movements that have shifted the political terrain since its heyday in the 1990s. The means Sanders favors, the ones that work in Denmark and elsewhere, are universal programs aimed at providing the working class with relief from our dependence on capitalist firms for deriving the means of our own subsistence: public pensions so we aren’t at the mercy of a perfidious “savings industry” and public health care, so we go not merely by the grace of a sector Clinton cited as one of her most prized enemies, but which has contributed more than $11 million to her over her career.
(With enemies like this . . .)

Clinton, instead, clings to the idea that small, politically vulnerable, means-tested programs are preferable to large, universal ones, and that the mediation of a marketplace of profit-obsessed firms is just what America’s sick need to help them heal. The question of means is crucial, and we should take great heart that the grassroots foment — the movement for black lives, the climate movement, Occupy Wall Street, the low-wage worker movement — whose salience was in constant evidence throughout the debate, are wide open to unconventional means.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-democratic-primary-debate/

JetBlue Opens Urban Farm at JFK Airport to Feed Passengers and Local Food Banks
EcoWatch
Lorraine Chow | October 8, 2015

JetBlue’s Terminal 5 (T5) at New York’s John F. Kennedy is now home to a 24,000 square-foot farm that will provide a variety of fresh produce for the terminal’s restaurants and to local food banks.



According to a report from the Associated Press, “the airline expects to grow 1,000 potato plants, yielding more than 1,000 pounds of spuds every four to six months, along with an additional 1,100 plants such as mint, arugula, beets, garlic, onions and spinach.”

Unlike a traditional crop field, the produce at T5 grow in plastic milk crates inside a structure that’s strong enough to withstand 160 mph hurricane-force winds, a requirement of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the AP reported.

........"We know people like green space. It's what they have at home. Why not put that at an airport if that's what they love and want?" says Sophia Leonora Mendelsohn, the New York-based airline's head of sustainability. "Your flying experience starts on the ground."

Building a farm at an airport is not simple: It took JetBlue three years to get approval.

Airports are concerned about anything that would attract wildlife, especially birds. That means no growing tomatoes, corn, berries, seeds or sunflowers in its new garden. (The airline originally wanted to grow wheat and use it to make its own JetBlue JFK beer.)

So instead, JetBlue is focusing on potatoes, chives, basil, carrots and other plants deemed safe.

...The project is in partnership with GrowNYC, a non-profit environmental group that focuses on improving New York City block by block. Students will be brought in from local schools to learn about gardening.

Some of the herbs and produce will be used by restaurants in JetBlue's terminal, others will be donated to local food banks....

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/8084f70a7c31486090d0321fcf111259/jetblue-plants-seed-farm-tray-table-concept

Elizabeth Warren torches Big Oil in a signature Elizabeth Warren moment: “We weren’t sent here to work for them”
SALON
10/7/2015

Republicans want to lift the ban on crude oil exports -- but Warren demands to hear from the experts first

by
Sophia Tesfaye

Big Oil would like to export unlimited amounts of crude oil outside of the U.S. to increase their profits, but there is a longstanding ban on crude oil exports standing in the way. What’s a Big Oil executive to do? Spend millions to lobby Congress to change the rules, of course.

...Snip..........

The oil industry has financed organizations whose scholars have generated reports praising the proposal. It has placed op-eds in Capitol Hill newspapers and paid for television spots in key markets..........Industry executives have even pressed foreign governments to communicate their support through “diplomatic channels.” And they have enlisted help from lawmakers from major oil-producing states...........Think tanks have been a critical part of the repeal effort, with prominent centers like the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute issuing reports or sending scholars to Capitol Hill endorsing the move. These same organizations have taken large donations — in some instances exceeding $1 million a year, as was the case for Brookings — in combined contributions from industry donors.........



While the offensive will likely work in the Republican-led House, which is set to vote on repeal this Friday, the White House has already intimated it has no interest in reversing the ban, citing environmental concerns associated with increased production, and at least one Senate Democrat is fed up with the so-called “experts” Big Oil has trouted out before Congress to downplay the effects of climate change.

“We’ve held a hearing on the export ban in July,” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said during a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee last week. “But the only witness — the only witness testifying on the climate effects of this bill was a conservative economist who thinks, quote, ‘No one really knows’ the extent to which humans are causing climate change,” she added incredulously.

“The most obvious effect of lifting the crude oil export ban would be to produce enormous profits for a number of big oil companies,” Warren continued. “And that is a reason by itself to be skeptical of study after study and expert after expert that have been funded by big oil to try to sell this deal.”.........

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/07/elizabeth_warren_torches_big_oil_in_a_signature_elizabeth_warren_moment_we_werent_sent_here_to_work_for_them/