A Climate for Change: Tom Friedman

Tom Friedman says Americans can prosper by “outgreening” everyone else.

Almost a decade ago, in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he celebrated the arrival of “globalization.” Three years ago, in The World is Flat, he warned that borders, oceans and distance no longer protect us from the information revolution that is leveling the global economic playing field and relocating our jobs. Now he updates and expands this diagnosis by showing how population growth, climate change and the expansion of the world’s middle class are producing a planet that is “hot, flat, and crowded.” Unchecked, these trends will produce dangerous instability; but Friedman remains guardedly optimistic that we can stave off this nightmare, particularly if the United States changes its wasteful energy habits. In this important book, Friedman says we can survive, even prosper, by going green.

[…] Friedman believes we need to become “green hawks,” turning conservation and cleaner energy into a winning strategy in many different arenas, including the military. (“Nothing,” he writes, “will make you a believer in distributed solar power faster than having responsibility for trucking fuel across Iraq.”) We should stop defining our current era as “post-Cold War,” he says, and see it as an “Energy-Climate Era” marked by five major problems: growing demand for scarcer supplies, massive transfer of wealth to petrodictators, disruptive climate change, poor have-nots falling behind, and an accelerating loss of bio-diversity. A green strategy is not simply about generating electric power, it is a new way of generating national power.

Washington Post