Jim Carr in Rifkinland

When federal Energy Minister Jim Carr opened the Trudeau government’s two-day Generation Energy Forum in Winnipeg last week, perhaps he should have moved straight to the satire and used the standard opening lines from “This is That,” one of CBC Radio’s comedy shows: “Canada, North America’s third largest nation ... Let’s peer into the heart of this great nation — who it is, where it is, and where it’s going, and how it’s getting there, and who’s involved, and what’s at stake, and where is it ...”

At the Generation Energy Forum, however, there was no room for laughs, at least not intentional ones. About 80 speakers were crammed into about eight hours of working time — and that was just the first day. Day Two allocated about five working hours to 40 more speakers piled up in concurrent and separate sessions, including a “Ministerial Panel” in which eight federal and provincial cabinet members droned through an hour of collaborative self-congratulation as they explored the topic “Driving the Energy Transition Through Pan-Canadian Collaboration.”

As to where Pan-Canada is going on energy and how it’s going to get there and who’s involved and what’s at stake, some disturbingly far-out themes were outlined in the opening “stage-setting” session. That’s when Jim Carr introduced a new guru in the Liberal’s stable of big-thinking standup intellectuals, veteran U.S. anti-corporate activist Jeremy Rifkin.

Why Rifkin? Perhaps the government’s ideological brain trust had become a little disillusioned with Dominic Barton, the global McKinsey partner whose general objective is to “re-imagine capitalism” by inserting a little more government into the mixed-economy blender. With his fixation on the need for more corporate social responsibility, Barton these days probably seems a little too moderate for Prime Minister Trudeau’s principal secretary, Gerald Butts, and other Liberal insiders with more radical agendas. They want it darker. Never mind re-imagining capitalism; what we need is post-capitalism, an end to capitalism, zero carbon, zero oil and zero gas. Zero capitalism.

If so, that’s what they got at the opening session of Carr’s Energy Forum. Rifkin performed as expected and as he has for decades as a master of the TED-talk no-script walkaround technique: Our ecosystems are collapsing ... We need a new economic vision of the world ... We need to be off carbon by mid-century ... Change the way society works ... The sunset of the fossil fuel era ... This is real ... We are scared to death ... Canada should be a lighthouse for the rest of the Americas to move to a more ecologically sustainable planet.

“This is my plea to Canada,” said Rifkin. “We need a beachhead in North America.”

Over two days at the Energy Forum, according to people who were there, nobody challenged Rifkin’s doomsday analysis and extreme conclusions. Most seemed ready to join Rifkin’s beachhead in an overthrow of the carbon-based capitalist system and replace it with what he describes as the coming Third Industrial Revolution and a new Collaborative Commons.

More importantly, nobody Economist Jeremy Rifkin envisions a Third Industrial Revolution powered by the internet and hydrogen as the new energy leader. asked how or why an extremist with a long and obvious history of radical activism was called in by the government of Canada to act as the cheerleader for a rethink of national energy policy and a statist takeover of much of the economy.

Rifkin, now in his 70s, began as an anti-Vietnam war activist in the 1960s before moving on to anti-oil activism in the 1970s. He was an organizer of the 1973 Boston Oil Party, a staged demonstration event to mark the 200th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. “Nixxon, Exxon, ITT — throw the tyrants into the sea,” read one of the Oil Party’s placards.

Rifkin has been at the oil industry’s throat ever since. Over the years he has cranked out more than a dozen books, each a variation on the same down-with-capitalism and up-with-collectivism themes. He tours the world delivering speech after repetitive speech — the same lines, the same themes. And now, like Al Gore, he has a movie coming out.

He also boasts of being an advisor to the European Union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the government of China and the principality of Luxembourg.

Just as nobody raised an eyebrow over the reasons for his presence at Carr’s energy forum, nobody seems to have noticed that Rifkin’s books and speeches are filled with hallucinatory rhetorical diatribes against markets, capitalism, fossil fuels and prosperity. More importantly, his claims to have discovered imminent industrial revolutions, zero-marginal cost economics and miraculous alternative energy systems are more extreme futurology craziness than solid blueprints for a new global economy.

Where to start? We have Beyond Beef in 1992, The End of Work in 1995, The Hydrogen Economy (2002), The European Dream (2004), The Third Industrial Revolution (2011) and his latest, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (2015).

Every one of Rifkin’s books is filled with hyperprojections of technological developments, economic fantasies and wild imaginings about “a world where most goods and services are nearly free, profit is defunct, property is meaningless, and the market is superfluous.”

When it comes to meaninglessness, Rifkin is a master. What can anyone make of this, from Zero Marginal Cost, a book that postulates an economic, existential and physical impossibility? “A 3D printing process embodied in the Internet of Things infrastructure means that virtually anyone in the world can become a prosumer, producing his or her own products for use or sharing, employing open-source software.”

“Prosumer” is the kind of word Rifkin likes to invent, the opposite of “consumer.” Then there’s “freemiums,” the opposite of premiums. Freemiums are said to occur when the internet delivers zero marginal cost products that transform the economy and give consumers free stuff that they used to pay for. Rifkin’s example is the newspaper industry, which used to be able to charge for content but now news and information are available free on the web.

Rifkin says the newspaper industry’s plight is an example of the “growing number of giant capitalist enterprises ... that will not be able to survive for long against the rising tide of near zero marginal costs in the production and delivery of goods and services.”

Sounds plausible, except that the zero marginal cost concept is a piece of economic science fiction. The alleged zero marginal cost of information supplied by the Internet to supplant print media isn’t exactly zero cost. As anyone connected to the internet/telecommunications networks and its products knows, none of it is free. Monthly charges imposed by telecoms, media companies, movie makers and cable channel operators runs to hundreds of dollars a month. Come to think of it, it is television that used to be zero cost over the air; now the internet price is steep. No zero marginal cost from Netflix, nor for the latest iPhone.

Rifkin’s economic science fiction is also technological fiction. His Third Industrial Revolution envisions some kind of great mystical sphere in which the internet and a new abundant source of energy, hydrogen, merge to allow for the creation of a great Collaborative Commons in which all the world’s citizens are joined in blissful utopian happiness.

In The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth, Rifkin describes this future: “The worldwide energy web, like the worldwide communications web, will allow us to connect every human being on the planet with every other in an invisible and interdependent economic and social matrix.”

Rifkin can turn out hyperbolic descriptions of his phantasmagoric visions by the truckload, filling pages and pages of his books juxtaposing a nightmarish present redeemed through the replacement of oil, beef, work and capitalism by green food and hydrogen energy and the Internet of Things (see sidebar excerpt).

It’s hard to exceed his vision of a planet freed of the evil of beef consumption, where humans are released from the capitalistic grip of carnivorism. “The elimination of beef will be accompanied by an ecological renaissance ... By eliminating beef from the human diet, our species takes a significant step toward a new species consciousness, reaching out in a spirit of shared partnership with the bovine and, by extension, other sentient creatures with whom we share the earth.”

Despite his confident imaginings of a beautiful future in a post-Third Industrial Revolution and beef-free world, Rifkin tends to miss the mark on shorter-term predictions. In 2010, with the price of oil at $100, Rifkin boldly declared that it was “never coming down.” In his 2002 book, The Hydrogen Economy, he writes that the major automakers “expect to mass produce the new generation of vehicles before the end of the current decade.”

Well, it’s long past the end of the 2000 decade and hydrogen power is still in basic development. Among other technical problems, hydrogen is hard to manage and takes more energy to create than the energy hydrogen can deliver. And since costs remain exorbitant dramatic change is unexpected. In 2014, Lux Research concluded the although some major auto makers have already invested billions, “we anticipate that about $180 billion to $800 billion will be required by various individual regions to adopt a full-fledged hydrogen economy. In likely absence of such funding, a shift to hydrogen will not happen before 2040, if ever.”

Rifkin wants Canada to become a North American beachhead for his extremist reworking of the world economic order. His objective is to impose a fantastic new regime based on zero oil, zero beef, zero capitalism, and a new Collaborative Commons based on the Internet and 3D printing. Is this what the Trudeau government and its ministers, including Jim Carr, have in mind? Is that what Canadians want?