Economist Jeremy Rifkin warns that the impact of global warming is reaching “critical and catastrophic” levels in places like Spain, “the country that is in the most danger within the continent at greatest risk on the planet” due to climate change and the alteration of the water cycles.
The climate thinker and activist talks with EFE from Washington just the day the storm reaches Valencia, causing torrential rains and flooding, a consequence of the process of “rewilding of the hydrosphere” that Rifkin points out in his new book Aqua Planet (Paidós).
The author talks about the importance of “renaming” a planet “that is not made of land but of water” and to understand climate change as the alteration of the hydrosphere, made up of water in all its states that is found under and on the surface of the planet.
In the book he points out that floods are the most common natural disaster in Europe since 1990 and are expected to continue to grow.
The increase in global temperature due to the emission of greenhouse gases has accelerated the evaporation of water, which has led to a 7% increase in the concentration of precipitation in clouds and the appearance of more violent atmospheric phenomena.
“We have misunderstood this planet, we have not prepared for what is happening, people are scared to death, but we intend that the same strategy that gave rise to this crisis serves to resolve it and that is why nothing has changed, because no one is doing anything ” laments Rifkin.
“What has led to this crisis is 6,000 years of hydraulic civilization that have sequestered the planet’s waters for the use of a single species that has raised its population to 8,000 million people for whom we now do not have enough water,” he says.
Added to this is the industrial revolution that for more than 250 years has made fossil fuels the center of the economic system, which has caused global warming that has led to extreme weather.
Thus we have reached the sixth mass extinction of life on the planet, with more than 50% of species in danger of becoming extinct in the next 80 years, “many of them during the lives of those who are now children.”
He assures that no one has paid attention to the reorientation of the hydrosphere and predicts the collapse of hydraulic civilizationtaking into account that by 2050 it is expected that 61% of all hydroelectric plants on the planet will be in river basins with a very high or extreme risk of suffering from droughts, floods or both.
“Global warming has released a long-sequestered hydrosphere,” says Rifkin, who believes it remains to be seen whether the human species will be able to readapt to nature instead of continuing to bend it.
“We have to rethink how we relate to nature, how we develop our science and technology, how we organize our economic life, how we educate our children, how we govern ourselves,” says the author, who assures that the rules of the capitalist system no longer work. of the industrial era, which includes socialism as a part of it.
In this sense, it speaks to the need for bioregional governance, beyond political borders, that will unite local communities that share the responsibility of managing a common ecosystem.
“It is the transition from globalization to glocalization,” emphasizes Rifkin, which gives the example of the first official European bioregion, that of the Pyrenees-Mediterranean, created in 2004 by the autonomous communities of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands with the French region of Occitania.
After the collapse of hydraulic civilization, he predicts the transition to an “ephemeral society” with longer periods of migratory life, which will transform the very notion of what infrastructures are, which will tend to be removable and recyclable.
In this context, the thinker predicts temporary 3D printed habitats, indoor vertical agriculture and insect breeding, as well as microwater networks connected by the Internet that will allow its supply for certain uses from rain collection.
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