Politics & Power Quote by Jeremy Rifkin

Rifkin stages this as a barrage of practical questions, but the rhythm is prosecutorial. Each line narrows the escape routes: if insurers won’t touch the risk, then the risk is either unpriceable, politically inconvenient, or both. By invoking Monsanto, he pins the debate to a familiar villain in the GMO wars, yet his deeper target is structural: a market that gets to book profits now while externalizing catastrophic costs later.

The subtext is a critique of modern innovation culture as a liability shell game. “Who’s going to cover the losses?” isn’t a neutral inquiry; it’s an accusation that the public will. State government enters the frame not as a solution but as the default backstop when private actors can’t or won’t underwrite uncertainty. Rifkin is pointing to the quiet way “progress” is subsidized: taxpayers absorb the downside, consumers absorb the ambiguity, companies absorb the upside.

Contextually, this is classic Rifkin territory: technological optimism colliding with the unglamorous mechanics of accountability. He’s less interested in litigating whether a particular technology is good or evil than in demanding the missing infrastructure of responsibility: long-term liability regimes, insurance markets that can actually price the hazard, and rules that prevent irreversible harms from being treated as rounding errors.

The line “no long-term liability in place” lands as the tell. It reframes the industry not as cutting-edge but as unfinished, operating on borrowed trust and borrowed time.