Jeremy Rifkin Quotes - Page 3

The American public is not aware that there might be potential allergenic and toxic reactions. With regular food, at least people know which foods they have an allergy to.

Companies that actually survive and flourish are going to change their business model from production to aggregating the networks and the network services and solutions. If you're a construction company or an IT company or a logistics company or an information data operation, to the extent that you can find ways to help build the commons, you can get some commercial value in that.

The public should know that the liability issues here have yet to be resolved, or even raised. If you're a farmer and you're growing a genetically engineering food crop, those genes are going to flow to the other farm.

If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can pray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won't kill your corn.

Cosmologies are made up of small snippets of physical reality that have been remodeled by society into vast cosmic deceptions.

The electronic media introduced this idea to the larger audience very, very quickly. We spent years and years and years meeting with activists all over Europe to lay the groundwork for a political response, as we did here.

The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.

President Obama, I voted for him. I think he's a mature politician, but here's what happened. Obama wanted a green economy. He spent billions of dollars of tax money to create a green economy and it didn't happen. The question is why.

The hydrogen economy will make possible a vast redistribution of power, with far-reaching consequences for society. Today's centralized, top-down flow of energy, controlled by global oil companies and utilities, could become obsolete.

A refuge is supposed to prevent what? The genes from flowing out of sight? This refuge idea won't stop insects from moving across boundaries. That's absurd.

In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn't have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture.

We're creating multiple personas. We're creating a thespian sense of personality where we see ourselves as works of art, and we see everything in our environment as a prop, as a set, as a stage, as a backdrop for filling ourselves in. We don't see ourselves as ever completed. We are in-formation.

They're now turning those seeds into intellectual property, so they have a virtual lock on the seeds upon which we all depend for our food and survival.

With the communication internet, whole industries have been disrupted. You're in the publishing industry, you understand that. Before, we had newspapers, magazines - now you're on the web. I'm in book publishing. I don't have to tell you what's happened to us. Television has taken a hit. The music industry. But, thousands of new businesses have emerged on this new communication revolution platform. Not just Google, Facebook, and Twitter. There are thousands of operations. Businesses that are doing the platforms, the apps. They're mining the big data. They're creating the connections.

Solar and wind are now cheaper in many places than some fossil fuels and within the next two years, three, four, five years at the most. What the exponential curve does isn't going to go away. It is totally over for fossil fuels and nuclear. Nuclear's actually gone out.

I wanted to make sure that this be the first scientific and technology revolution in history in which the public thoroughly discussed all the potential benefits and all the potential harms, in advance of the technology coming online and running its course.

When you're sharing the music, you're not buying the CD. When you're sharing that video, you're not buying the TV. But we thought, really, there'd be a firewall. While near-zero marginal cost would impact virtual goods, we never thought it would move over to the physical world.

If I were Mark Zuckerberg or any of these guys, I would say, "My God. How does the world expect us to deal with this?" I mean, it's too big a responsibility; I think they're going to welcome this. They'll maybe keep it in the private sector, but they'll welcome some form of regulatory operation because they've been so successful that they are a global, public good. Everyone needs them.

Many of the mainstream agricultural scientists, especially at the agricultural schools, but at all of our major universities, are tied into all sorts of contractual relationships and consulting relationships with the life science companies.

Back in the mid-1980s, congressional hearings were held after we brought this litigation, and held up the first experiment. At that time, I went in front of Congress, along with the major agencies involved with this.

I know quite a few farmers all over the United States who have tried this and have said the opposite, that they have to use more herbicides, not less. The same holds true with BT.

So my attorneys brought litigation in the U.S. federal courts. The judge ruled in our favor.

We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.

We are hopeful that you will want to visit our planet in the near future. We are in the process of restoring our environment to its original grandeur, and hope to have completed the task before your RSVP.

What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet.