A third industrial revolution for Norway

Norway's wealth and prosperity over the last four decades has been built on oil, but Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist and social and economic thinker, says it's time for the country to change. The Third Industrial Revolution is coming, and Norway needs to abandon fossil fuels and move towards a greener future that relies on renewable energy, shared transport and ultra-efficient housing.

Jeremy Rifkin, adviser to the European Union and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, has five words of advice for Norway about its petroleum reserves: "Leave it in the ground."

Rifkin's advice might not seem that welcome in a country that is celebrating fifty years of an industry that has contributed NOK 11,000 billion to Norway's GDP, according to the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate.

But on Tuesday, 3 February Rifkin is the keynote speaker at the 6th annual Lerchendal Conference, where politicians and top-level policymakers from Norway's industries, government, labour unions and academia meet to learn about and craft potential directions for the country's future growth.

The theme for this year's conference is "Change Agents for Green Growth." The conference is organized by NTNU and SINTEF along with the Research Council of Norway and Tekna, the Norwegian Society of Graduate Technical and Scientific Professionals. Other participants in this year's two-day conference include Jonas Gahr Stre, leader of Norway's Labour Party, Anita Krohn Traaseth, CEO of Innovation Norway, Karl Johnny Hersvik, CEO of Det norske oljeselskap ASA, and Gunnar Bovim, NTNU's rector.

Rifkin says the Internet is allowing societies across the globe to make a transition to a new industrial revolution that will bring changes to our lives that will be as profound as those that resulted from the steam engine, the telephone and the computer. This new revolution, powered by the ability of the Internet to allow us to communicate, share and monitor things, will result in what he calls the "zero marginal cost society," where the cost to create consumables such as energy and information -- the marginal cost -- is nearly free after the initial capital investment is made in equipment such as computers, smart phones and solar cells.

The old way of doing business, with big centralized power companies and industries that are totally reliant on fossil fuels, is over, he says. His suggestion for countries like Norway, which are tightly tied to oil, is simple: "Develop an exit strategy."

The Internet of Things

An important part of this coming revolution is what futurists, including Rifkin, call "the Internet of Things." The backbone of the Internet of Things are monitors and devices -- roughly 11 billion now, growing to an estimated 50 billion in the next five years -- that feed information to the Internet, allowing us to monitor everything from the temperatures of our refrigerators to the output of solar panels on our homes, and to run them in the most optimal way possible.

Companies that want to make the transition to this Third Industrial Revolution will need to find a way to make money to help people manage and optimize their use of this information, because once an initial investment is made in a product, the information or energy it produces will be nearly free, and the Internet will enable us to share in an optimal way. It's happening now, he says, and is disrupting existing businesses -- think Airbnb, or car-sharing services found in the USA, like Uber.

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A third industrial revolution for Norway