• RAFA LATORRE

    @rlatorreg

Friday, October 25, 2019 - 02:11

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  • John Lewis Gaddis "I don't see a war between China and the US"

If something distinguishes the best-selling economist and author Jeremy Rifkin, it is the fierce originality with which he deals with phenomena that are visible to everyone. The convinced call it audacity and the skeptics, recklessness.

The novelty of his new book, The Green New Deal Global (Editorial Paidós) is that it is a fairly optimistic approach to the apocalypse . Rifkin not only believes that humanity can face the danger of its extinction but also that the post-carbon revolution it needs to do so will be quite profitable. In the subtitle of his book he dares to date the collapse of fossil fuels, the year 2028, and announces the economic plan to save life on Earth.

Suddenly, he considers that the climatic emergency has caused the new generations of humans to begin to see themselves as members of a species in the face of the identity metaphors of their parents and grandparents. The First Industrial Revolution developed ideological awareness, the Second gave rise to psychological awareness and the Third, Rifkin predicts, is generating biosphere awareness.

The economist does not stop too much in apocalyptic warnings: what he is thinking about is how to live with the disasters caused by climate change, which will demand a new demonstration of the proverbial human resilience .

The Green New Deal is an economic plan like the one that served Franklin D. Roosevelt to lift an entire nation after the Great Depression, whose famous black Thursday of the crack met 90 years ago yesterday. On such a marked anniversary, Jeremy Rifkin received Papel in a hotel suite to explain the plan that will help not only a single nation, but all Humanity, learn to live with increasingly adverse and more unpredictable weather events.

You don't talk so much about combating climate change, but about learning to combat its effects. This is exactly the argument of this book. We are no longer in the era of progress. The great French aristocrat Nicolás de Concordet wrote during the French Revolution that there is no limit to the perfectibility of man, except the duration of his radiance. That was the era of progress. I don't think anyone dares to say something like that now. We are moving towards the era of resilience. We never had supreme dominion over this planet. The ideas of the Enlightenment about the progress without limit of the human being, the belief in nature as a passive force that we can manipulate and redefine and transform at our whim, were a fiction. What I am going to tell you is interesting that you read it in Spain: there is no central government that can handle climate change alone. We need a new economic vision for Spain and for the world. Which one? Now the important thing comes. It is the infrastructures that determine the economic system and not vice versa. Capitalism arises from the infrastructures of the First Industrial Revolution, it was not the infrastructures that emerged from capitalism. It's not the economy, stupid! It's the infrastructure, stupid! All major economic transformations have something in common. All require three elements that interact with each other: a means of communication, a source of energy and a transport mechanism. When these three elements come together, our habitats are transformed and our space-time orientation really changes. That is happening right now. The problem of the ongoing revolution is that it is creating enormous discontent in what we could call the poor green: farmers, farmers, diesel consumers ... How do you deal with this green class struggle? The greatest impact of climate change will affect To poor communities. They do not have public health services to deal with climate change, their sanitation systems are deteriorated, their homes are not very resistant and they will be the first to fall. [A few hours before the interview, the Active Population Survey confirmed the sudden slowdown of Spanish labor market. It is the kind of news that causes a country's priorities to be disrupted. Theorists handle a different definition of urgent and important than politicians.] Let me give you a domestic example. You propose a heavy tax on carbon emissions. In Spain, the opposition criticizes President Sánchez that his measures to reduce the consumption of diesel fuel endanger the automotive industry, on which half a million direct jobs depend. The large income generated by that carbon tax should return to Spanish families in a way that compensates for what that tax would cost. Thus, the burden would fall on the fossil fuel industry. The poor should get a greater return. Let the fossil fuel industry take over. If in France they had put this policy into motion, the yellow vest movement would never have arisen. Never. I also believe that we have to eliminate all fossil fuel subsidies. They have led us to a climate crisis and must pay the consequences. What you say is happening, that many jobs are now in danger, is something really important, yes, but there is a reason for that. In 2019 there was a historical change in the transformation of the world economy. We have lived in the fossil fuel civilization for the past two centuries. This year 2019, the levelized cost of large-scale solar and wind energy was lower than the cost of natural gas. Citigroup was the first to notice what was coming and announced it in a report in 2015. In the worst case scenario, energy companies will never amortize the operating rights they have paid. The issue of obsolete assets does not have as much to do with agreements to combat climate change as with the cost of solar and wind technologies and the generation of green energy and its storage in the market. Something in which you differ radically from the green activists in a phrase like this that I extract from his book: "The market is a guardian angel who watches over Humanity." But go to the next paragraph. I've been critical of the market for 40 years. I have tried to warn generations of executives. What I mean is that he is a guardian angel but he cannot do it on his own. I do not think that any community with which we have worked to provide a smart network wants Google to have full control. It's creepy to think that Google is going to privatize infrastructure. What we have learned is that when you privatize infrastructure, you are deprived of resources. They are not going to improve the private prison they would run because that would only cost them. Central States, also in Spain, have to create codes, regulations, changes in standards, alignment, objectives, incentives and penalties. The regions then have to establish road maps with their communities to design the green infrastructure of the Third Industrial Revolution of the Green New Deal, which is a digital infrastructure controlled by public platforms. Now that you mention this model of government, I am surprised that you use it in His book the example of China. Doesn't Chinese communism collide with the horizontality and decentralization you advocate? It is an interesting question. I did not know China. When President Xi and Prime Minister Li came to the Government and told me they had read my book on the Third Industrial Revolution, I thought it was a joke. And it was not. They began to move very quickly after a first visit and put 80,000 million dollars to complete the digitalization in a Five-Year Plan. Regarding the government model, they understood that they cannot make decisions for 1.3 billion people. I have visited all regions. They are so competitive! Each region wants to overcome the other and keep the jobs. I can't tell you how good competition is between regions. What has to happen in Spain is that you don't just have to say that you want a Green New Deal. They must create a Central Green Bank and then each region must open its own Regional Green Bank. The Central Bank must regulate but must allow each region to be responsible for building its own infrastructure, because it is very difficult to generate the resilience they will need if each region does not have all its population involved. Do you not think that the urgency with which you are considering all these measures can cause young people to lose confidence in the resolving capacity of democracy? To be exasperated by the slowness of the deliberation processes it demands? I don't want anyone to tell me it's too late, because the technology is ready and the market is telling us that fossil fuels are about to collapse. I don't want anyone to tell me that there are other priorities. How can there be other priorities when you move towards extinction? What can those other priorities be? I am very interested to know. I think it's great that young people around the world mobilize and make their voices heard every Friday. Now what they have to do is return to their communities and make what they claim be done. The figure of Greta Thurnberg has divided Spanish public opinion. Many believe that a girl should not be fighting a political battle. People need to personalize because they need a story. But there is more like her. There are already millions of boys aged 15 and 16 who have perfectly understood what they are playing. I think the Spaniards should be grateful and shouldn't have a debate like this. Greta has done a great job. In the midst of a great extinction and when fossil fuels are collapsing, we shouldn't be worried about things like someone's daughter is trying to gain notoriety.

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