Jonathan Freedland is a former Washington correspondent and now an editorial page columnist for The Guardian.
When the Soviet Union chucked Sputnik into space in 1957, it galvanized America to come from behind and win the space race. The federal government opened its checkbook to finance an array of projects. Students shifted to new subjects like astronautical engineering and Russian studies to help the United States understand and eclipse the Soviet Union. The moon shot inspired a patriotic nation and produced useful commercial technologies along the way. The space race was expensive, but it worked.
Thomas L. Friedman’s latest book is a plea for a new Sputnik moment. His breezy tour of America’s energy policy documents a nation that has become dangerously dependent on fossil fuels. The bulging bank accounts of oil exporters like Russia, Iran and Venezuela give them the swagger and ability to cause lots of mischief.
Even more worrisome is all the carbon dioxide that comes from burning fossil fuels, not just oil but also coal and, to a lesser degree, natural gas. Since carbon dioxide pollution accumulates in the atmosphere, humans are recklessly changing the climate. The United States’ record is particularly poor because we are, per capita, among the biggest gulpers of oil and belchers of carbon dioxide. The need for American leadership has never been greater.
And if all that’s not bad enough, Mr. Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, shows that the economic opportunities created by a technology-driven world where the economic playing field has been leveled are making these trends a lot worse. The stunning growth of Asia’s tiger economies, especially China’s, has been a miracle for the world’s industrial output but a horror for the environment.
Asia’s growth hinges on coal, which is bad news because today’s coal technologies are particularly intense emitters of carbon dioxide. The best data show that in the last six years alone, China’s coal-fired growth has been so rapid that the country has expanded its coal production by an amount equal to the entire output of the United States coal industry. Couple that with the worldwide population shift into cities, and the result is Mr. Friedman’s title: “Hot, Flat, and Crowded.”
The litany of dangers has been told many times before, but Mr. Friedman’s voice is compelling and will be widely heard. Dependence on fossil fuels is no longer just a topic for woodsy seminars or the grist for conspiracy theories from the threat industry. Mr. Friedman shows that both energy and environmental fears are going mainstream — “green is the new red, white, and blue” — and that is a great opportunity for bipartisanship. Unfortunately, the nation’s cockpit in Washington is stuffed full of special-interest lobbyists and partisan bickerers. China and other nations, Mr. Friedman warns, will seize the opportunities to invest in new green industries and leave us in the dust.
The alarm bells ring with pithy Friedmanisms. My favorite is his broadside against cheap talk about the coming “green revolution.” A revolution is needed, to be sure, because a whole suite of new technologies — from smarter biofuels that cut our dependence on oil to better power plants and a new digital-era electric grid — are badly needed to supplant today’s dirty fuels system. But buzz is not the same as revolution, because real revolutions force new directions, not just new talk. People get hurt.
Today, Mr. Friedman says, “the adjective that most often modifies ‘green revolution’ is ‘easy.’ That’s not a revolution. That’s a party.” This costume party is more about conspicuous environmentalism than facing the hard truths essential to effective energy policy, like what it will really cost to make a change and why that investment is worth it.
Mr. Friedman’s strength is his diagnosis of our energy and environmental nightmares. But blind spots appear when he turns to remedies. One is renewable power. Like most observers, Mr. Friedman assumes that the road out of today’s mess is studded with wind turbines and solar plants. Maybe that’s true, but maybe not. Such renewable resources account for only a tiny fraction of current power supply, and when the titans of today’s energy industry think about cutting carbon dioxide, they are more likely to imagine building carbon-free nuclear power plants or advanced coal plants that safely bury their pollution underground.
These two camps — the emerging renewable-resources industry and the titans who actually have their hands on the controls in today’s energy system — are pulling in different directions. Economists will rightly have heartburn that these 412 pages never dwell much on the cost of different policy options, nor does Mr. Friedman ever question his claim that building a renewable-energy system is automatically a good idea because many new jobs will flow (at unknown expense) into these new industries.
The other blind spot is politics. The most intriguing chapter in Mr. Friedman’s book is his last, which poses the toughest challenge. Can America be like China, where a visionary government can impose a new direction on the country in the face of national emergency? Or will America devolve into a country that is so mired in red tape and local opposition that it builds absolutely nothing anywhere, near anything? Societies like that get stuck because they can’t embrace new technologies, like the cherished wind turbines and the power lines needed to carry their current.
Mr. Friedman’s lament is that the United States is becoming such a place because parochial interests have created gridlock. But most striking is that this seasoned observer of the American political scene offers not much of a blueprint for fixing the political problem except the bromide that we need new leaders who are willing to embrace better policies.
Heads will be nodding across airport lounges, as readers absorb Mr. Friedman’s common sense about how America and the world are dangerously addicted to cheap fossil fuels while we recklessly use the atmosphere as a dumping ground for carbon dioxide. The Sputnik is heading into orbit, thanks to high energy prices, growing fear of the changing climate and pleas like Mr. Friedman’s. But whether we as a nation — and with us, the world — are really prepared to do anything to solve the problem is still in doubt.
David G. Victor, director of the energy and sustainable development program at Stanford University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is writing a book on global warming.
Off the Shelf
A Call to Action, for Earth and Profit
By STEPHEN KOTKIN
Published: September 6, 2008
IN his role as a cheerleader for globalization, Thomas L. Friedman has always been aware that there are environmental consequences. But now, with “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.95), he embraces going green not just as a national security imperative but also as an economic El Dorado.
Lacerating the ubiquitous, feel-good, magaziney “205 easy ways to save the earth,” Mr. Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, exhorts sacrifice to stem rapidly accelerating biodiversity loss. He wants a green revolution as part of nothing less than “nation building” in America.
He also says that renewable energy driven by technology plays to American strengths: great laboratories and entrepreneurs, a start-up culture of risk and reward. If the United States gets serious, it will dominate, creating not just jobs but also whole new industries.
Mr. Friedman’s first book on globalization, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” (1999), was translated into 27 languages; his second, “The World Is Flat” (2005), has sold more than two million copies. So “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” raises outsized expectations. Admirers and critics will have a field day with his take-no-prisoners punditry. Either you agree with him or you wear a dunce cap.
Our planet is becoming hot because flat (globalization, in Mr. Friedman’s lingo) is meeting crowded (ever more people are joining the resource-consuming middle class). As of 1950, all world economic activity was valued at $7 trillion, he says, but now that much in new growth takes place each decade. He quotes scientists and representatives of nongovernmental organizations, as well as some corporate executives, urgently warning of the need to avoid a doubling of carbon in the atmosphere over the next few decades — the course we are on.
Mr. Friedman has an unabashedly American-centric solution: the United States can regain its national purpose and save the world via green innovation. This can happen, he says, if Americans recognize — in the words of John Gardner, founder of Common Cause — “a series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.” Overflowing landfills? Devise products with materials that are more easily reusable, and rack up profits.
The book opens self-referentially, quoting a reader commenting to the author about one of his columns. The content and method will be familiar to Mr. Friedman’s legions of readers: source, anecdote, pop metaphor. Repeat point. In italics. The unfamiliar reader should prepare for hyperbole, neologisms and aphorisms. “Affluenza.” “Code Green.” “The new Energy Climate Era (E.C.E.).” “We’ve already hit the iceberg.” We’re “the proverbial frog in the pail on the stove” (boiled to death after failing to jump out because the temperature rose only incrementally). “We are the flood, we are the asteroid. We had better learn how to be the ark.”
Relentless, the text can also be trenchant. “Our addiction to oil,” he writes, “makes global warming warmer, petrodictators stronger, clean air dirtier, poor people poorer, democratic countries weaker, and radical terrorists richer.” The magnitude of the challenge requires government action, he argues, but government should act so as to spur the greater power of the marketplace. He notes that government shapes the market all the time — think home-mortgage tax breaks — and has long underwritten profligate oil consumption.
Instead, he argues, Washington should shift current incentives by making the cost of hydrocarbons higher, with new taxes (and a price floor), and by making the cost of alternative fuels lower, with tax breaks, until clean industries achieve scale and can compete without subsidies. To Americans who abhor talk of higher taxes, Mr. Friedman asks, would you rather shell out to the Saudi, Russian and Venezuelan treasuries, as you now do, or to the United States Treasury?
Mr. Friedman assures us that if America spends to get clean, others will follow suit — and not claim a license to continue polluting. In a chapter dedicated to China, he writes that a still-unclean United States would give China an excuse to repeat America’s dirty-fuels economic growth, and that if China does not go green, its “emissions and appetites will nullify everything everyone else does to save the earth.”
Finally, Mr. Friedman slams the climate-change skeptics, but also slyly observes that “if climate change is a hoax, it is the most wonderful hoax ever perpetrated on the United States of America.” By responding, America would become immensely more efficient, cleaner and leaner.
When the book tries to explain why this is not already happening, it is less compelling. “If the right things to do are so obvious to the people who know the most about the energy business,” Mr. Friedman asks, “why can’t we put them in place?” His too-pat answer: omnipotent old-industry lobbies and dumb political leaders.
“I am convinced,” he writes in populist guise, “that the public is ready; they’re ahead of the politicians.” So special interests and venal politicos make consumers live in supersized homes and drive gas guzzlers? Who’s reading all those easy-ways-to-go-green articles that he seems to regard as self-indulgent?
One up-and-running energy alternative supported by the government, corn-based ethanol, has costs that may exceed its benefits. But instead of confronting this apparent cautionary tale head on, Mr. Friedman questions biofuels in a mere footnote.
A few anecdotes are long enough to qualify as illuminating case studies, like one about GE Transportation’s energy-efficient locomotives, a hit in emerging markets. The book’s best example may be First Solar Inc., which was founded in Ohio and invented thin-film solar technology, which is cheaper to use and works in more varied climates than regular silicon solar panels. But First Solar found a more hospitable public-policy environment and built its new factory abroad, in the former East Germany.
“A vision without resources is a hallucination,” goes a Pentagon saying quoted by Mr. Friedman, who adds that “right now we are having a green hallucination.” But he remains an optimist: the money is there to be made.
First Chapter
‘Hot, Flat, and Crowded’
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 9, 2008
Where Birds Don't Fly
German engineering, Swiss innovation, American nothing. - Advertising slogan used on a billboard in South Africa by Daimler to promote its Smart "forfour" compact car
In June 2004, I was visiting London with my daughter Orly, and one evening we went to see the play Billy Elliot at a theater near Victoria Station. During intermission, I was standing up, stretching my legs in the aisle next to my seat, when a stranger approached and asked me, "Are you Mr. Friedman?" When I nodded yes, he introduced himself: "My name is Emad Tinawi. I am a Syrian-American working for Booz Allen," the consulting firm. Tinawi said that while he disagreed with some of the columns I had written, particularly on the Middle East, there was one column he especially liked and still kept.
"Which one?" I asked with great curiosity.
"The one called 'Where Birds Don't Fly,'" he said. For a moment, I was stumped. I remembered writing that headline, but I couldn't remember the column or the dateline. Then he reminded me: It was about the new - post-9/11 - U.S. consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.
For years, the U.S. consulate in Istanbul was headquartered in the Palazzo Corpi, a grand and distinctive old building in the heart of the city's bustling business district, jammed between the bazaars, the domed mosques, and the jumble of Ottoman and modern architecture. Built in 1882, and bought by the U.S. government twenty-five years later, Palazzo Corpi was bordered on three sides by narrow streets and was thoroughly woven into the fabric of Istanbul life. It was an easy place for Turks to get a visa, to peruse the library, or to engage with an American diplomat.
But as part of the general security upgrade for U.S. embassies and consulates in the post-9/11 world, it was decided to close the consulate at Palazzo Corpi, and in June 2003 a new U.S. consulate was opened in Istinye, an outlying district about twelve miles away from the center of the city. "The new 22-acre facility - nearly 15 times as big as the old consulate - was built on a solid rock hill," a Federal Times article reported (April 25, 2005), adding that "State now requires buildings to have protective walls that are at least 100 feet away from embassies and consulates. Those walls and barriers also must protect against explosions and ramming attacks from vehicles, and they must be difficult to climb. Guard booths are placed at the perimeter of facilities, and windows and doors are bulletproof and resist forced entries. The new buildings are also strong enough to resist most earthquakes and bombs."
They are also strong enough to deter most visitors, friends, and allies. In fact, when I first set eyes on the new consulate in 2005, what struck me most was how much it looked like a maximum-security prison - without the charm. All that was missing was a moat filled with alligators and a sign that said in big red letters: "Attention! You are now approaching the U.S. consulate in Istanbul. Any sudden movements and you will be shot without warning. all visitors welcome."
They could have filmed the Turkish prison movie Midnight Express there.
But here's a hard truth: Some U.S. diplomats are probably alive today thanks to this fortress. Because on November 20, 2003, as President George W. Bush was in London meeting with then prime minister Tony Blair, and about six months after the new U.S. consulate in Istanbul had been opened, Turkish Muslim terrorists detonated truck bombs at the HSBC bank and the British consulate in Istanbul, killing thirty people, including Britain's consul general, and wounding at least four hundred others. The bomb-ravaged British mission was just a short walk from the Palazzo Corpi.
One of the terrorists captured after the attack reportedly told Turkish police that his group had wanted to blow up the new U.S. consulate, but when they checked out the facility in Istinye, they found it impregnable. A senior U.S. diplomat in Istanbul told me more of the story: According to Turkish security officials, the terrorist said the new U.S. consulate was so secure, "they don't let birds fly" there. I never forgot that image: It was so well guarded they don't even let birds fly there . . .
(That point was reinforced on July 9, 2008, when Turkish police outside the consulate killed three terrorists apparently trying to breach its walls.)
Tinawi and I swapped impressions about the corrosive impact such security restrictions were having on foreigners' perceptions of America and on America's perceptions of itself. As an Arab-American, he was clearly bothered by this, and he could tell from my column that I was too.
Because a place where birds don't fly is a place where people don't mix, ideas don't get sparked, friendships don't get forged, stereotypes don't get broken, collaboration doesn't happen, trust doesn't get built, and freedom doesn't ring. That is not the kind of place we want America to be. That is not the kind of place we can afford America to be. An America living in a defensive crouch cannot fully tap the vast rivers of idealism, innovation, volunteerism, and philanthropy that still flow through our nation. And it cannot play the vital role it has long played for the rest of the world - as a beacon of hope and the country that can always be counted on to lead the world in response to whatever is the most important challenge of the day. We need that America - and we need to be that America - more than ever today.
(Continues . . .)
We’ve written before about alternative measures to gross domestic product. These are generally attempts to take into account how happy, healthy and environmentally friendly a nation is, not just how much it produces in goods and services.
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