RIFKIN: 'Canada Should Not Be Hostage' to Alberta

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'Canada Should Not Be Hostage' to Alberta: Jeremy Rifkin

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Oilsands take us backward as rest of world moves forward, says famed futurist and EU advisor.

By Geoff Dembicki, September 18, 2014 TheTyee.ca

[Editor's note: The Tyee's sustainability reporter Geoff Dembicki is on a months-long journalistic quest to answer the big question of his millennial generation: Are We Screwed?

Find a complete list of his dispatches as they appear here.]
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Capitalism as we know it, our competitive system of exchange propped up by oil, coal and gas monopolies, is being eclipsed by a new economic model based on clean, decentralized energy and the principles of sharing. That vision of the future was described by Jeremy Rifkin -- famed futurist, business professor, author of 20 books, TED Talks speaker, namedropper of China's Premier Li Keqiang, and advisor to the European Union -- at this week's Zero Waste Conference 2014 in Vancouver.

"By 2050, the capitalist system is going to be totally transformed," he claimed, speaking via webcast from Spain. In Rifkin's idealized future, less and less of us will own cars, toys or other consumer goods -- we'll share them instead. Ultra-efficient 3D printers will replace our wasteful factories. Oil, coal and gas will give way to solar, wind and geothermal. And all of this will be linked through an "Internet of things" that may allow us to radically lower humankind's ecological footprint.

For Rifkin, this new economic system is emerging fastest in places like Germany, the European Union and China. "The outliers here, I must say, are Canada and the United States," he argued. Rifkin referred to America's shale oil boom and Alberta's oilsands as "old technologies moving [us] back to the 20th century." But he gave a qualifier to the delegates in Vancouver. "I would say Alberta's not all of Canada," Rifkin said, to scattered applause. "Canada should not be hostage to one region."

New economic era?

Rifkin's vision for the future is founded on a belief in progress and disruption. He argued that history's major economic transitions -- from hunting to farming, or from feudalism to capitalism -- were caused by rapid advances in communications, energy and transportation. When these three technologies are disrupted at the same time, he said, "they create an infrastructure that changes how we organize our economic life, our relationship to the environment and the way we organize society."

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