Jeremy Rifkin's Planet Aqua

How water defines our civilization

Vicki Nichols Goldstein and I recently interviewed my friend Jeremy Rifkin. Jeremy is what in the US they call a gadfly or iconoclast and in the rest of the world, a public intellectual. He has written 23 books that have been translated into 35 languages. He's critiqued genetic engineering, the beef industry, promoted hydrogen energy and in his book, ‘The Third Industrial Revolution,’ proposed a pathway beyond fossil fuels to a clean energy future. As a result, he's now a major climate advisor to both the EU and China. Plus, he advised Senator Chuck Schumer on the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Congress passed a few years ago. I. In his latest work “Planet Aqua’ Jeremy's gotten down to the basic source of life on Earth, water and what it means to live on a water planet.

So, Jeremy, as Vicki and I are both big promoters of the 97% of the world that’s salt water I'm curious what got you from your last book, “The Age of Resilience’, about rewilding earth to thinking and then writing about our blue marble planet, what you call Planet Aqua.

Jeremy Rifkin (JR): Here's where I think the problem is. We really basically misjudged the nature of the planet we live on for a long time, and that's what's taken us to the crisis we're now facing. We have long believed that we live on a land planet. And green. And as you know, that was shaken back in December of 1972 when the Apollo astronauts were heading to the moon. And, one of the astronauts had a home camera. He turned around and did a quick photo of our planet from space. It shocked our generation. We thought we would see a beautiful green planet in all the verdant shades of green. Instead, we saw a blue planet with all the shades of blue, with only a veneer of gree and that was a real wake-up call. It changes everything in terms of how we think and act in the future.

So, here's the problem that’s never discussed, and that is that about 200 years ago we began an experiment and we decided to change our energy regime from burning trees and peat, etc. for energy to going beneath the ground and digging up the burial grounds of a previous period of history, the carboniferous era. We exhumed the dead bodies of plant and animal life that had morphed into coal, oil and gas. We took 'em out of the ground and we created the fossil fuel based industrial civilization. The age of progress. Here's the problem. We have spewed massive amounts of these fossil fuels into the atmosphere, and they're blocking the sun’s heat from getting off the earth (i.e. – the greenhouse effect).

CO2, methane, nitrous oxide. So, for every one degree Celsius that the temperature on the planet goes up because of global warming emissions in the atmosphere, the hydrosphere is sucking up 7% more precipitation from the ground. That means we're getting 7% more precipitation from the oceans. That's the biggest part of it. So, more precipitation evaporating more quickly into the clouds, and we're getting extreme water events, these massive atmospheric rivers in the winter, pouring snow into places that never had snow before, we're getting flooding across every continent, every eco-region. And then after the floods, we're getting the droughts fmonth after month, with no water. Then the heat waves come - a hundred degrees, a hundred ten, a hundred twenty, a hundred twenty five degrees Fahrenheit. Then we get the wildfires. And then we get the hurricanes.

Vicki-Nichols Goldstein (VNG): We need to get people to start thinking of this as a water planet and are you having success with your book to actually get people to start thinking in that way?

JR: Back in 2001 Romano Prodi came to DC. He was the president of the European Commissioner at that time and former Prime Minister of Italy. He sat me down in the embassy, held my hand for 25 minutes. I knew I was in trouble. He wouldn't let go, and he said, ‘Look,

You spent 25 years in America, it's not moving on this issue. Come to Europe, we will lead.’ I took him up on it. I’ve commuted for all these years. The last four presidents (of the EU Commission), the current president, we did something really interesting. We asked an anthropological question. We said, forget the whole playbook we're using to deal with this crisis, the enlightenment, the age of progress, the industrial revolution how we approach nature the way we relate to scientific inquiry, how we educate our kids, the economic systems we develop.

All that playbook of the industrial age, the age of progress has taken us to an extinction event. So how do the great paradigm shifts in history occur? That's the question we asked.

How did they occur? What we found was that when you look at history for at least the last 6,000 years, all the great paradigm shifts had the same common denominators. That in a moment of time, five defining technologies emerge and converge to create an infrastructure that fundamentally changes our day-to-day lives. What are they? Number one, new communication revolutions. Number two, new energy regimes. Number three, new modes of mobility and logistics. Number four, new ways of organizing water and number five, new ways to address habitats. ,

David Helvarg (DH): So, let's go right to the water part because as you were saying earlier, there's more moisture in the atmosphere, which means less stability. We've been burning fossil fuels and throwing the whole water system out of whack. So how has hydrology changed civilizations in the way we look at civilizations?

JR: So this all started 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. We began to move from nomadic life to sedentary life. We began to deal with agriculture and pasteurization. And then the big change that happened in Mesopotamia was the beginning of what we call urban hydraulic civilization. They sequestered the hydrosphere. They put in dams and dikes and levees and reservoirs so they could begin to sequester our water planet for the use of one species.

It happened at the same time in this valley of India with their rivers and the Yangtze and Yellow River in China and the the Ku civilization in Asia. Greece, Crete, and of course the Roman Empire with their aqueducts. And then it ended up in the Americas with the Mayan civilization in Central America and Mexico and the Inca civilization.

And yeah, it ended with the great hydroelectric power dams starting with the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead all the way to Three Gorges (in China). And now it's all collapsing in real time because the hydrosphere is changing the whole plan. It makes no difference what we want to do. The Hydrosphere is determining the new ecosystems.

The hydrosphere is determining how we will distribute our species. The hydrosphere will determine all of this. So, the question is, will we begin to understand that instead of sequestering the hydrosphere for our species, which doesn't work, will we now adapt our species to the hydrosphere on a water planet? It’s a completely new paradigm.

So, these infrastructure revolutions are giant social organisms that allow us to bring large numbers of our species together as a living, if you will, social experiment. I'll give you a couple of examples. First, the industrial revolution of Britain in the 19th century. The communication revolution, steam power, printing and the telegraph.

The energy revolution. Coal, no more peat, no more burning forests. They'd already depleted the forest, coal. The mobility revolution - they put in a railroad with a steam engine. The water revolution. They were the first since the fall of Rome to put in modern water systems for purification and sewage. Then the habitat solution, urban development that took us to national governments. It took us to national markets. It took us to shareholding companies, et cetera.

Second, the industrial revolution in the US 20th century, the communication revolution was the telephone that got the whole continent connected in real time, the energy revolution was oil. We struck oil in Texas. We didn't need coal as the primary source. The mobility revolution was the automobile and the water revolution was the great hydroelectric, power dams, et cetera. The habitat building revolution was suburban life with interstate highways that took us to globalization, global markets, the whole works.

What's happening now, is a third industrial revolution. The communication revolutions, the internet. We got four and a half billion people with cell phones in their hands and at a near zero marginal cost. They have more computing power than sent our astronauts to the moon. That's number one distributed. Keep that word in mind. The second is energy. We now have millions and millions of people producing their own solar and wind and harvesting it. Their businesses and their communities and their neighborhoods. It's all distributed. You can't centralize it. The mobility revolution is electric and fuel cell transport, powered by solar and wind from the electricity internet, and using big data and analytics so they can be autonomous.

The final revolution is the water. That's happening now. Water micro grids, people are confused. They don't understand why it floods, then droughts and floods. Which one is it? It's both. Water molecules do not disappear. They've been here for billions of years. They just change.

So water microgrids are now coming in. There's gonna be hundreds of millions of water microgrids on rooftops everywhere, and they're gonna be smart and digital where you can keep the water underground (in the watertable), and then distribute it when you need it. Across communities. And the final thing on this is the changes in habitats, and that's where 3D printing's coming in. We're now 3D printing buildings with a different type of manufacturing. So, this is what takes us into a different economic model. This revolution requires a shift in how we understand economic development.

The first and second industrial revolutions were centralized because of fossil fuels and because they were so expensive. They required a huge amount of financing and shareholding. Companies had to come in and every industry that follows fossil fuels, because they're all related to it, have to be centralized with a handful of big players and the rest doing the little stuff.

What's happening now with the Third industrial revolution, it's all distributed. You're starting to see this now it's called additive manufacturing. Now, subtractive manufacturing was the first and second industrial revolutions. What we do is take a big hunk of material from the planet, more than you need, and then you whittle it down and you leave some because you don't need it. If you're making a house, some of the cement isn't used, some of the wood isn't used, you're making a car, some of the machinery isn't used.

But with 3D printing (you have) what we call additive manufacturing. Totally different. And that is you can take a feedstock, let's use clay. ' Clay is what we use for buildings for hundreds of thousands of years. So, there's an architect in Italy, Cuccinelli. He uses clay and the software tells the clay how to build out an entire building in 24 hours. That's what's really happening in real time, and everything I'm saying here is starting to scale. It just isn't being discussed in the environmental community.

DH: The question is, with the warming that we already have, moisture's increasing the atmosphere, we're gonna have more flooding and droughts, and how do you build a solution within this larger disaster?

JR: We’re gonna have to move, as I said, from globalization to Glocalization. That's the new additive manufacturing. It's a big deal because with this distributed technology, all of its owned by everybody. If you have solar and wind, you're the infrastructure. If you have a cell phone for communication, you're the infrastructure. If you have an electric vehicle, you're the infrastructure, and if you have edge data centers, you're the infrastructure. If you have a 3D printed building to live in, you're the infrastructure. So, what's happening is we're seeing a shift to bioregional governance.

So, what's Bioregional Governance? Climate doesn’t give a crap about sovereign national boundaries. The floods, the droughts, the heat waves, the wildfires, they affect specific ecosystems. So, what's happening is they're beginning to create bio-regional governances. You don't give up nation states, but you extend it across political boundaries so that shared ecosystems can work together across political boundaries to prepare, rescue and restore.This takes us to a more distributed governance where you have to move from geopolitics to biosphere and bioregional governance. And it's all about water. It's all about water. Now, I'm just not sure. We'll get there in time.

VNG: You just said the environmental community isn't really queued into this, so I'm trying to get a sense, are we looking at 10 years out, 50 years out?

(JR): It's happening right now in this hour. There's a new movement called The Blue Deal to go with the Green Deal. The Economic and Social Committee of Europe, which represents every major industry and trade association in the European Union, they’re calling for a blue deal and then the committee of the regions of the EU said, ‘we want a blue deal.’ Now in the EU parliament, they're discussing a blue deal. So, we are moving toward this and Europe has led it every step.

VNG: It seems like there are so many moving parts to really get our head around the fact that water is going to be dominating us versus the other way, and you've given us a lot of examples happening internationally, but I'm very concerned because in the United States, I don't think people are paying attention to this.

JR: In the U.S. it's interesting so let me give you an example of the people I'm really thinking of. Back years ago, the city of San Antonio, which is the sixth largest city in the United States. They have the largest public utility CPS Energy. It's huge. They asked my team to come in and work with them on future energy for Texas. And they were looking at nuclear and wind and our engineers and scientists came in because we're not political. It's all apolitical. It has to do with the technology. So, we said if you go nuclear, you may have billions overrun (in costs), you could bankrupt the city...Then the wind (turbines) went all through Texas and through the Prairie States. They're all in the agricultural states. And the (red state) governments have given them everything they need. This is happening all over the country. It's primarily, you're going to see it's the more agricultural states. That’s where this new paradigm will emerge, at least in the US. That’s the hopeful paradigm shift.

The last thing I would say about this is the Gen Z demonstrations were very interesting to me. When all the ‘Fridays for Future’ kids came out (on strike) in high schools six or seven times in 141 countries, millions of them. I didn't quite understand it until I met with three of them in Milan, these young teenagers.

This wasn't like any protest like David, you and I going way back to Boston.

These were different. There've been protests all through history. But this was different. This is the first time an entire generation across the planet in 141 countries came out on the streets and they saw themselves as an endangered species, and they saw their fellow creatures as part of their evolutionary family.

All the other divisions are still there. Our national loyalties, our government ties, our religious affiliations tribal or blood ties. But there's never been a point where an entire generation saw themselves as an endangered species and their fellow creatures as part of the family. When that little koala bear was taken off that tree in Australia that was on fire (in 2019) every young person in the world was in tears and old people too. So, this book. I don't know how we get people to take a look at it because people don't read, the younger generations in reading. But it's frustrating in one way and hopeful in another because everything I'm saying didn't come from me. There are 148 footnotes in this book, and they're all from studies and journals. They're not just somebody making it up. We need a new worldview to understand that we are a water planet and pretty unique in the universe.

VNG: What I loved about your book, you took us through the history. You really showed us that we have to recognize that we are on a water planet. There's no moving around that. And I'm hoping with the interviews that you're doing and with the distribution of your book, that people really start understanding what you're trying to share.

You can find the more extensive podcast interview with Jeremy at: https://bluefront.org/category/podcast

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