Homo empathicus?

[azul]

Jeremy Rifkin has comment in today's FT for peace's sake:

(Financial Times) The global economy has shattered. The fossil fuels that propelled an industrial revolution are running out and the infrastructure built with these energies is barely clinging to life. Worse, more than two centuries of rising carbon emissions now threaten us with catastrophic climate change.

~snip

The great turning points occur when new, more complex energy regimes converge with communications revolutions, fundamentally altering human consciousness in the process. This happened in the late 18th century, when coal and steam power ushered in the industrial age. Print technology was vastly improved and became the medium to organise myriad new activities. It also changed the wiring of the human brain, leading to a great shift from theological to ideological consciousness. Enlightenment philosophers - with some exceptions - peered into the psyche and saw a rational creature obsessed with autonomy and driven by the desire to acquire property and wealth.

Today, we are on the verge of another seismic shift. Distributed information and communication technologies are converging with distributed renewable energies, creating the infrastructure for a third industrial revolution. Over the next 40 years, millions of buildings will be overhauled to collect the surrounding renewable energies. These energies will be stored in the form of hydrogen and any surplus electricity will be shared over continental inter-grids managed by internet technologies. People will generate their own energy, just as they now create their own information and, as with information, share it with millions of others.

The new communications revolution will, like its predecessor, change the way we think. We are in the early stages of a transformation from ideological consciousness to biosphere consciousness. Scientists and the public are realising that all life is deeply interdependent. The very way we live leaves a carbon footprint, affecting every other human, our fellow creatures and the earth we cohabit.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/16/business/financialtimes/main6305553.shtml


Every one producing energy and sharing? Sounds happening.