"It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there's no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic." -- Jeremy Rifkin
Jeremy Rifkin (born 26 Jan 1945, Denver, Colorado), founder and president of the Foundation On Economic Trends, is an American economist, writer, public speaker, political advisor and activist. Rifkin's work explores the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment.
"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.""Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops.""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.""Europe will not accept genetically modified foods. It doesn't make any difference in the final analysis what Brussels does, what Washington does, or what the World Trade Organization does.""Here we are 17 years later. Those agencies never did come through.""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.""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.""If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can spray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won't kill your corn because it's producing a gene that makes it tolerant of the herbicide.""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.""Many of the genetically modified foods will be safe, I'm sure. Will most of them be safe? Nobody knows.""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.""One thing I've learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There's no fait accompli to any of this.""So my attorneys brought litigation in the U.S. federal courts. The judge ruled in our favor.""The 10 largest antitrust law firms in the United States have gone into the federal courts charging Monsanto with creating a global conspiracy in violation of the antitrust laws, to control the global market in seeds.""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.""The antitrust litigation currently in the federal courts in the U.S. against Monsanto will be the test case in the life sciences, just as the Microsoft case was the test case in the information sciences.""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 industry's not stupid. The industry knows that if those foods are labeled "genetically engineered," the public will shy away and won't take them.""The insurance companies aren't covering that. Should Monsanto be liable for these losses? Should the state government? Who's going to cover the losses? The fact is, here's an industry with no long-term liability in place.""The interesting thing is, while we die of diseases of affluence from eating all these fatty meats, our poor brethren in the developing world die of diseases of poverty, because the land is not used now to grow food grain for their families.""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.""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.""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.""We are already producing enough food to feed the world. We already have technology in place that allows us to produce more than we can find a market for.""We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.""We now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn't do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.""We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.""What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.""What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.""What's different here is that we have now technologies that allow these life science companies to bypass classical breeding. That's what makes it both powerful and exciting.""When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?""You can eliminate, for example, a Brazil nut gene if you know that it will create an allergenic effect."
Jeremy Rifkin was born in Denver, Colorado in 1945, to Vivette Ravel Rifkin and Milton Rifkin, a plastic-bag manufacturer. He grew up on the southwest side of Chicago. Although Rifkin is "not religious," he was raised by his parents as a reformed Jew, a culture to which he still identifies.
He earned a BS in economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1967. He was a locally famed "party animal", and class president. He had an epiphany when one day in 1966 he walked past a group of students picketing the administration building and was amazed to see, as he recalls, that "my frat friends were beating the living daylights out of them. I got very upset." He organized a freedom-of-speech rally the next day. From then on, Rifkin quickly became an active member of the peace movement.
He went on to obtain his masters degree in international affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in 1969.
Rifkin pursued anti-war activities at Fletcher, and later joined VISTA.
In 1977, with Ted Howard, he founded the Foundation on Economic Trends; he currently works out of an office in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C.
Since 1994, Rifkin has been a senior lecturer at The Wharton School's executive education program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he instructs CEOs and senior corporate management from around the world on new trends in science and technology.
Jeremy Rifkin became one of the first major critics of the nascent biotechnology industry with the 1977 publication of his book, Who Should Play God? His 1995 book, The End of Work, is credited by some with helping shape the current global debate on technology displacement, corporate downsizing and the future of jobs. His 1998 book, The Biotech Century, addresses the many critical issues accompanying the new era of genetic commerce. His 2004 book, The European Dream, was an international bestseller and winner of the 2005 Corine International Book Prize in Germany for the best economics book of the year.
After the publication of The Hydrogen Economy, Rifkin worked both in the U.S. and the EU to advance the political cause of renewably generated hydrogen. In the U.S., Rifkin was instrumental in founding the Green Hydrogen Coalition. The GHC consists of 13 environmental and political organizations (including Greenpeace and MoveOn.Org) that are committed to building a renewable hydrogen based economy.
The Foundation on Economic Trends (FOET), based in Bethesda, Maryland, is active in both national and international public policy issues related to the environment, the economy, and biotechnology. FOET examines new trends and their impacts on the environment, the economy, culture and society, and engages in litigation, public education, coalition building and grassroots organizing activities to advance their goals.
Jeremy Rifkin is the principal architect of the Third Industrial Revolution long-term economic sustainability plan to address the triple challenge of the global economic crisis, energy security, and climate change. The Third Industrial Revolution was formally endorsed by the European Parliament in 2007 and is now being implemented by various agencies within the European Commission.
Jeremy Rifkin is the founder and chairperson of the Third Industrial Revolution Global CEO Business Roundtable, comprising more than 100 of the world's leading renewable energy companies, construction companies, architectural firms, real estate companies, IT companies, power and utility companies, and transport and logistics companies. Rifkin's global economic development team is working with cities, regions, and national governments to develop master plans to transition their economies into post- carbon Third Industrial Revolution infrastructures. In 2009, Rifkin and his team developed Third Industrial Revolution master plans for the cities of San Antonio, Texas and Rome, Italy, to transition their economies into the first post carbon urban areas in the world.
Rifkin has advised both the European Commission and the European Parliament. Rifkin has also advised Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain during its presidency of the European Union. Rifkin also served as an adviser to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister Jose Socrates of Portugal, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, and Prime Minister Janez Jan?a of Slovenia, during their respective European Council Presidencies, on issues related to the economy, climate change, and energy security.
Jeremy Rifkin has been influential in shaping public policy in the United States and around the world. He has testified before numerous congressional committees and has had success in litigation to ensure responsible government policies on a variety of environmental, scientific and technology related issues.
Rifkin's work has also been controversial, and opponents have attacked the scientific rigor of his claims as well as some of the tactics he uses to promote his views. A 1989 article about Rifkin in Time bore the title, "The Most Hated Man in Science". Stephen Jay Gould characterised Rifkin's 1983 book Algeny as "a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship".
Nevertheless, the Union of Concerned Scientists has cited some of Rifkin's publications as useful references for consumers and The New York Times once stated that "many in the scholarly, religious, and political fields praise Jeremy Rifkin for a willingness to think big, raise controversial questions, and serve as a social and ethical prophet".
1973, How to Commit Revolution American Style, with John Rossen, Lyle Stuart Inc., ISBN 0-8184-0041-2
1975, Common Sense II: The case against corporate tyranny, Bantam Books, OCLC 123151709
1977, Own Your Own Job: Economic Democracy for Working Americans, ISBN 978-0-553-10487-5
1977, Who Should Play God? The Artificial Creation of Life and What it Means for the Future of the Human, with Ted Howard, Dell Publishing Co., ISBN 0-440-19504-7
1978, The North Will Rise Again: Pensions, Politics and Power in the 1980s, with Randy Barber, Beacon Press, ISBN 0-8070-4787-2
1979, The Emerging Order: God in the Age of Scarcity, with Ted Howard, Putnam, ISBN 978-0-399-12319-1
1980, Entropy: A New World View, with Ted Howard (afterword by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen), Viking Press, ISBN 0-670-29717-8
1983, Algeny: A New Word...A New World, in collaboration with Nicanor Perlas, Viking Press, ISBN 0-670-10885-5
1985, Declaration of a Heretic, Routledge & Kegan Paul Books, Ltd, ISBN 0-7102-0709-3
1987, Time Wars: The Primary Conflict In Human History, Henry Holt & Co, ISBN 0-8050-0377-0
1990, The Green Lifestyle Handbook: 1001 Ways to Heal the Earth (edited by Rifkin), Henry Holt & Co, ISBN 0-8050-1369-5
1991, Biosphere Politics: A New Consciousness for a New Century, Crown, ISBN 0-517-57746-1
1992, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, E. P. Dutton, ISBN 0-525-93420-0
1992, Voting Green: Your Complete Environmental Guide to Making Political Choices In The 90s, with Carol Grunewald Rifkin, Main Street Books, ISBN 0-385-41917-1
1995, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era, Putnam Publishing Group, ISBN 0-87477-779-8
1998, The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World, J P Tarcher, ISBN 0-87477-909-X
2000, The Age Of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life is a Paid-For Experience, Putnam Publishing Group, ISBN 1-58542-018-2
2002, The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth, Jeremy P. Tarcher, ISBN 1-58542-193-6
2004, The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, Jeremy P. Tarcher, ISBN 1-58542-345-9
2010, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness In a World In Crisis, Jeremy P. Tarcher, ISBN 1-58542-765-9
