Paris (AFP)

The fossil-fueled civilization will collapse by 2028 to be replaced by a new economy based on solar, wind, digital, and nuclear-free, predicts US essayist and economist Jeremy Rifkin.

"The civilization of fossil fuels, which is the basis of the first two industrial revolutions, collapses in real time," he said in an interview with AFP on the occasion of the publication in French of his latest book, "The New Global Green Deal" (editions The Links That Free).

Jeremy Rifkin, who has been advising European officials and Chinese leaders, believes that "solar and wind are becoming so cheap that their average cost is now lower than that of nuclear power, oil, coal or coal. even natural gas ".

"This is a major turning point and we are starting to see trillions of dollars of lost assets in the global fossil fuel complex," he says.

"The lost assets are the exploration rights (oil and gas) that will remain unused, all hydrocarbons that will never be extracted, all pipelines that will be abandoned, power plants that will not be used because they do not will never be amortized. "

For him, the market acts as "a powerful force" in this evolution: "11 trillion dollars have already quickly turned away from fossil fuels, investors do not want to lose their bet," he says, noting: the bank "Citigroup estimates that we could see 100,000 trillion assets lost, it's the biggest bubble in economic history."

- "No need for new taxes" -

For the essayist, convinced of the advent of a new form of capitalism, it is "the nature of the infrastructure that determines the nature of the economic system".

He imagines a future world based on three major types of infrastructure, bringing together local and global populations in what he calls "glocalization": communication networks by smartphones; renewable energy, produced in a decentralized manner and distributed by smart grids; and electric or fuel cell transport, integrated into intelligent logistics chains.

This will require managing a lot of data. It will no longer be controlled by Google, Facebook and other Amazon, but stored in small centers connected to each other and controlled by "assemblies of peers" (experts appointed by local or regional officials).

Pilot projects exist today, with some hydrogen buses or positive energy buildings. In the north of France, Jeremy Rifkin advised the region's president Daniel Percheron and continues to collaborate with his successor Xavier Bertrand.

But he argues for a change of scale, where policy makers will have an important role to play.

"It is the governments that create the infrastructure for the industrial revolution of the twenty-first century.The States must create green banks, the French regions must set up their own green banks and issue green bonds" that will attract investment funds looking for "stable long-term returns, which are those provided by infrastructure," says Rifkin.

However, "you do not need new taxes," he says, just under a year after the start of the crisis of "yellow vests".

- The nuclear condemned -

With these infrastructures, millions of people, associations, small businesses will be able to "create cooperatives for their solar and wind energy and reinject what they do not use into a more and more digitized renewable energy internet. who will be able to cross the countries and even the continents ".

Exit therefore the centralized energy production that dominates today.

"Building a new power plant is completely absurd," he says, "the real price of nuclear power over the lifetime of a plant is $ 112 per megawatt," versus "between $ 29 and $ 40 per megawatt "for solar and wind.

And "there is another problem: lack of water," he warns. "A lot of freshwater is used to cool the reactors, but with climate change, the water in the rivers and lakes is getting warmer" and will become unusable in the summer to cool the plants. This has already happened in the south of France.

© 2019 AFP