Jeremy Rifkin

Why organisations work with Jeremy Rifkin

• He is the architect of an economic framework that the European Parliament adopted by formal declaration in 2007 and that has been translated into multi-hundred-page regional deployment roadmaps in Hauts-de-France, Rotterdam-The Hague, and Luxembourg.
• He has advised four European Commission presidents in sequence (Prodi, Barroso, Juncker, von der Leyen) and held that advisory line through three political cycles, which is rare for any external economic thinker.
• His thesis connects energy, communication, and mobility infrastructure into a single capital story, so boards leave with a way to sequence decarbonisation, digital, and supply chain decisions instead of treating them as separate budget lines.
• His twenty-plus books, including The End of Work, The Third Industrial Revolution, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, The Green New Deal, The Age of Resilience, and Planet Aqua, give him a body of work that named institutional buyers already know, which shortens the credibility conversation inside large organisations.
• He taught CEOs and senior leadership at Wharton Executive Education from 1995 to 2016, so the register is built for senior corporate audiences, not policy seminars.

Biography highlights

• Principal architect of the Third Industrial Revolution economic plan, formally endorsed by the European Parliament in May 2007.
• Advisor to the European Commission under presidents Romano Prodi, Jose Manuel Barroso, Jean-Claude Juncker, and Ursula von der Leyen.
• President of TIR Consulting Group LLC, which has produced full Third Industrial Revolution roadmaps for the Hauts-de-France region, the Metropolitan Region of Rotterdam and The Hague, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
• Author of 20+ books translated into more than thirty languages, including The Third Industrial Revolution, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, The Green New Deal, The Age of Resilience, and Planet Aqua.
• Senior lecturer, Wharton School Executive Education Program, University of Pennsylvania, 1995 to 2016.
• Recipient of the 13th German Sustainability Award (2020) and honorary doctorates from Hasselt University and the University of Liege (2015).

Biography

The European Parliament formally endorsed the Third Industrial Revolution as a long-term economic road map in May 2007. Jeremy Rifkin wrote it. Since then, the framework has been the reference document behind successive Commission decisions on energy, digital, and mobility infrastructure, and behind regional deployment plans in Hauts-de-France, Rotterdam and The Hague, and Luxembourg.

The argument is that every major economic shift in history is a convergence of three infrastructures: communication, energy, and transport. When those three move together, the productive base of the economy is rebuilt. Rifkin’s contribution is to specify what that convergence looks like now, with a digital communication internet, a renewable energy internet, and an automated mobility internet, and to put numbers, sequencing, and policy choices around it.

That is the work he has carried into advisory rooms across four European Commission presidencies, from Prodi to von der Leyen, and into engagements with the Chinese leadership during the run-up to the 13th Five-Year Plan. His TIR Consulting Group brings utilities, ICT firms, and engineering and construction companies into the same room as regional governments to design the roadmaps in detail.

The body of work behind the advisory practice is unusually large. Twenty-plus books, translated into more than thirty languages, running from The End of Work through The Third Industrial Revolution, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, The Green New Deal, The Age of Resilience, and Planet Aqua (2024), selected by Nature among its five best science picks of the year. The German Sustainability Award followed in 2020. Few speakers in the energy and economy field can point to a framework that a parliament has formally adopted and that is being built, region by region, on the ground.

Key speaking topics

• The Third Industrial Revolution
• Energy transition and the renewable energy internet
• The economics of decarbonisation
• Smart infrastructure and the Internet of Things economy
• The future of work in a zero marginal cost economy
• Climate resilience and the age of rewilding
• Water, food, and the planetary economy
• Geopolitics of the green transition

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees building multi-decade capital plans for the energy transition.
• CEOs, CSOs, and heads of strategy in energy, utilities, infrastructure, mobility, real estate, and heavy industry.
• Policy and public affairs leaders working across the EU, national governments, and city regions.
• Investor audiences allocating to climate, infrastructure, and transition capital.

Audience outcomes

• A common framework for connecting energy, digital, and mobility investment decisions into one capital story.
• A clearer view of how EU and major regional climate policy is likely to evolve, and what that means for sector-by-sector capital allocation.
• Specific reference points from the Hauts-de-France, Rotterdam-The Hague, and Luxembourg roadmaps that can be applied to a company’s own transition plan.
• A sharper sense of where the platform, ownership, and competitive economics of energy and mobility are heading as marginal costs fall.
• Language and argument that translate well to a board, to investors, and to regulators.