Historischer Blick und Zukunftsbild – Bestsellerautor Jeremy Rifkin kann beides. Er zeigt, wie industrielles Effizienzdenken alle Bereiche des Lebens durchdrungen und uns an den Rand des Abgrunds geführt hat. Ist die Menschheit noch zu retten? Ja, aber dafür bedarf es eines radikalen Wandels unseres Selbstbilds und unseres Denkens. Neue wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse über die Entstehung des Menschen oder den Einfluss biologischer Uhren und elektromagnetischer Felder ermöglichen genau dies: eine neue Geschichte der Evolution, die dem Homo Oeconomicus einen Homo Oecologicus entgegensetzt. Einen Menschen, für den es mehr denn je überlebenswichtig ist, sich an seine Umwelt anzupassen. Rifkin liefert die übergreifende Erzählung für den politischen, wirtschaftlichen und kulturellen globalen Weg vom Zeitalter des Fortschritts in das Zeitalter der Resilienz. »Jeremy Rifkin ist der ökonomische und ökologische Botschafter der weltweiten Energiewende … er präsentiert einen visionären Ansatz, wie ihn in den letzten fünfzig Jahren niemand vorzubringen wagte.« Sigmar Gabriel »Dieses Buch stellt einen Plan vor, der überlebenswichtig ist für die Millionen ohne Arbeit und für einen Planeten, der geheilt werden muss.« Dr. Vandana Shiva »Eine Musslektüre für Investoren, Unternehmen und Entscheider gleichermaßen.« Richard Branson »Für Jeremy Rifkin ist die Zukunft immer schon da. Der amerikanische Bestseller-Autor und Trendforscher sieht die Umrisse dessen, was auf uns zu kommt, meist schon dann, wenn andere am Horizont nur ein ungewisses Flirren wahrnehmen.« Focus

A sweeping new interpretation of the history of civilization and a transformative vision of how our species will thrive on an unpredictable Earth.

The viruses keep coming, the climate is warming, and the Earth is rewilding. Our human family has no playbook to address the mayhem unfolding around us. If there is a change to reckon with, argues the renowned economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, it’s that we are beginning to realize that the human race never had dominion over the Earth and that nature is far more formidable than we thought, while our species seems much smaller and less significant in the bigger picture of life on Earth, undermining our long-cherished worldview. The Age of Progress, once considered sacrosanct, is on a deathwatch while a powerful new narrative, the Age of Resilience, is ascending.

In The Age of Resilience, Rifkin takes us on a new journey beginning with how we reconceptualize time and navigate space. During the Age of Progress, efficiency was the gold standard for organizing time, locking our species into the quest to optimize the expropriation, commodification, and consumption of the Earth’s bounty, at ever-greater speeds and in ever-shrinking time intervals, with the objective of increasing the opulence of human society, but at the expense of the depletion of nature. Space, observes Rifkin, became synonymous with passive natural resources, while a principal role of government and the economy was to manage nature as property. This long adhered to temporal-spatial orientation, writes Rifkin, has taken humanity to the commanding heights as the dominant species on Earth and to the ruin of the natural world.

In the emerging era, says Rifkin, efficiency is giving way to adaptivity as the all-encompassing temporal value while space is perceived as animated, self-organizing, and fluid. A younger generation, in turn, is pivoting from growth to flourishing, finance capital to ecological capital, productivity to regenerativity, Gross Domestic Product to Quality of Life Indicators, hyper-consumption to eco-stewardship, globalization to glocalization, geopolitics to biosphere politics, nation-state sovereignty to bioregional governance, and representative democracy to citizen assemblies and distributed peerocracy.

Future generations, suggests Rifkin, will likely experience existence less as objects and structures and more as patterns and processes and come to understand that each of us is literally an ecosystem made up of the microorganisms and elements that comprise the hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. The autonomous self of the Age of Progress is giving way to the ecological self of the Age of Resilience. The now worn scientific method that underwrote the Age of Progress is also falling by the wayside, making room for a new approach to science called Complex Adaptive Systems modeling. Likewise, detached reason is losing cachet while empathy and biophilia become the norm.

At a moment when the human family is deeply despairing of the future, Rifkin gives us a window into a promising new world and a radically different future that can bring us back into nature’s fold, giving life a second chance to flourish on Earth.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.

An urgent, workable plan to confront climate change and transform America’s economy for a post-fossil fuel world from the New York Times bestselling author of The Third Industrial Revolution.

A new vision for America’s future is quickly gaining momentum. The Green New Deal has caught fire in activist circles and become a central focus in the national conversation, setting the agenda for a new political movement that will likely transform the entire US and world economy. Although the details remain to be hashed out, it has inspired the millennial generation, now the largest voting bloc in the country, to lead America on the issue of climate change.

While the Green New Deal has become an overnight sensation, it takes on added weight in lieu of a parallel movement within the global business community that is going to shake the very foundation of society over the next several years. Behind the scenes, the key sectors that make up the infrastructure of the global economy are quickly decoupling from fossil fuels and recoupling with solar and wind energies that are now near parity in cost and soon to be far cheaper. New studies are sounding the alarm about the prospect of 100 trillion dollars in stranded assets as the economy abandons the old energies of the twentieth century for the new cheaper green energies of the twenty-first century, creating a carbon bubble that is likely to burst by 2028–leading to the collapse of the fossil fuel civilization.

This great disruption is occurring because the marketplace is speaking. Every government will have to follow the market or face the consequences. Governments that lead in the scale-up of a new zero carbon green infrastructure and create the new business opportunities and employment that accompany it will stay ahead of the curve. Governments that fail to lead will be doomed.

In The Green New Deal, New York Times bestselling author and renowned economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin delivers the political narrative, technical framework, and economic plan for the debate now taking center stage across America. The concurrence of a stranded fossil fuel assets bubble and a green political vision opens up the possibility of a massive global paradigm shift into a post-carbon ecological era, hopefully in time to prevent a temperature rise that will tip us over the edge into runaway climate change. With twenty-five years of experience at the forefront of enacting green transitions for both the European Union and the People’s Republic of China, Rifkin offers his indispensable wisdom in a blueprint for how to transform the global economy and save life on Earth.

The industrial revolution, powered by oil and other fossil fuels, is spiraling into a dangerous endgame: the prices of energy and food are climbing, unemployment remains high, the housing market has tanked, consumer and government debt are soaring, and the recovery is slowing. Facing the prospect of a second collapse of the global economy, humanity is desperate for a sustainable economic game plan to take us into the future.Here, Jeremy Rifkin explores how Internet technology and renewable energy are merging to create a powerful “Third Industrial Revolution.” He asks us to imagine hundreds of millions of people producing their own green energy in their homes, offices, and factories and sharing it with each other in an “energy Internet,” just like how we create and share information online.Rifkin describes how the five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution will create thousands of businesses and millions of jobs and usher in a fundamental reordering of human relationships-from hierarchical power to lateral power-that will impact the way we conduct commerce, govern society, educate our children, and engage in civic life.Rifkin’s vision is already gaining traction in the international community. The European Parliament has issued a formal declaration calling for its implementation, and other nations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas are quickly preparing their own initiatives for transitioning into this new economic paradigm.The Third Industrial Revolution is an insider’s account of the next great economic era, including a look into the personalities and players-heads of state, global CEOs, social entrepreneurs, and NGOs-who are pioneering its implementation around the world.

In The Zero Marginal Cost Society, New York Times bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin argues that the capitalist era is passing–not quickly, but inevitably. The emerging Internet of Things is giving rise to a new economic system that will transform our way of life.

In this provocative new book, Rifkin argues that the coming together of the Communication Internet with the fledgling Energy Internet and Logistics Internet in a seamless twenty-first-century intelligent infrastructure–the Internet of Things–is boosting productivity to the point where the marginal cost of producing many goods and services is nearly zero, making them essentially free. The result is that corporate profits are beginning to dry up, property rights are weakening, and the conventional mind-set of scarcity is slowly giving way to the possibility of abundance. The zero marginal cost phenomenon is spawning a hybrid economy–part capitalist market and part “collaborative commons”–with far-reaching implications for society.

Rifkin describes how hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives from capitalist markets to what he calls the global Collaborative Commons. “Prosumers” are making and sharing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3-D printed products at near zero marginal cost. They are also sharing cars, homes, clothes, and other items via social media sites, redistribution clubs, and cooperatives at low or near zero marginal cost. Students are even enrolling in free MOOCs, massive open online courses that operate at near zero marginal cost. And young social entrepreneurs are establishing ecologically sensitive businesses using crowdfunding as well as creating alternative currencies in the new sharing economy. In this new world, social capital is as important as financial capital, access trumps ownership, cooperation supersedes competition, and “exchange value” in the capitalist marketplace is increasingly replaced by “sharable value” on the Collaborative Commons.

Rifkin concludes that while capitalism will be with us for the foreseeable future, albeit in an increasingly diminished role, it will not be the dominant economic paradigm by the second half of the twenty-first century. We are, Rifkin says, entering a world beyond markets, where we are learning how to live together in an increasingly interdependent global Collaborative Commons.