With its wealth of natural resources, Italy could become the world's leading producer of renewable energy, top US economist Jeremy Rifkin said Tuesday.
"Italy is the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy," Rifkin told a conference organized at the Lower House for World Environment Day.
"You are sitting on a treasure trove. I'm talking about your sun, your wind and the snow of the Alps".
The environmental activist said climate change was accelerating the end of the age of oil.
He said Italy could lead the way towards a world based on non-polluting power sources like solar, wind, hydroelectric and hydrogen energy.
"The Renaissance of industrial capitalism came from you. Thanks to your creativity, the technological era developed, with inventions such as the radio and the telephone," said Rifkin, referring to radio inventor Guglielmo Marconi and Antonio Meucci, who is widely recognized to have invented the telephone before Alexander Graham Bell patented it.
"Today Italy could become the portal of energy flows between Europe and Africa because of its special geographic position".
Rifkin, author of the 2002 book The Hydrogen Economy, is the founder and president of the Foundation on Economic trends. He has written 17 books - many of them bestsellers - on the impact of scientific and technological change on the world.
Like many scientists, Rifkin sees hydrogen as the answer to the problem of how to keep energy flowing when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing.
He argues that when these sources are available, some of the energy they provide should be used to obtain hydrogen from water. This could be stored in energy cells and used when required.
"The third industrial revolution, the hydrogen revolution, will bring great political changes with it," said Rifkin.
"Up to now we have exploited oil, coal and uranium, resources that are present in just a few countries, which I call elite energy sources.
"But with hydrogen we will create personal combustion fuel cells available to everyone. It really will be power to the people, a radical transformation of the human conscience".
He claimed atomic energy was a poor alternative to oil, even though it is greenhouse-gas free, because of the risks and the cost of dismantling nuclear plants when they are obsolete.
Tuesday's conference was chaired by former House speaker Pier Ferdinando Casini, chair of the centrist opposition UDC party.
Casini called on all sides of the political spectrum to come to agreement on how to revolutionize energy policies in order to combat climate change.
"Rifkin has sounded the political alarm clock," Casini said.
"Italy must make up for lost time and lead Europe on this issue. There is no left-wing or right-wing when the lives of our children are at stake".
The American expert agreed:
"We cannot afford to disagree on certain subjects if we want to save the human race.
"All scientists, even the most optimistic ones, now say we have no more than 30 years to change course".
After the conference Rifkin took Casini for a spin around Rome in a hydrogen-powered car.
