Tom Friedman

By KATHERINE JOHNSON
DavidsonNews.net

For best-selling author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, green is the new red, white and blue. The “Green Revolution” will be “the next industrial revolution,” and will be the key to “how America can get its groove back,”  Mr. Friedman told a packed Duke Family Performance hall Tuesday afternoon.

Lecturing on his latest book “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” Mr. Friedman talked about the importance of sustainability and energy-technology innovation in ensuring that America continues to command global respect, and maintains a high standard of living for future generations. The struggle to implement a green revolution is at “a critical juncture… [our] project could not be harder, we do really have exactly enough time starting now,” Mr. Friedman told his audience.

According to Mr. Friedman, energy innovation will lead to the discovery of a new source of “abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons,” and the country that owns the energy technology (ET) revolution “will have the most energy security, economic security, environmental security and innovative companies . . .think the green Googles and Apples.”

A green revolution is desperately need to overcome formidable threats to global stability, he said. The first of these threats is energy and natural resources supply and demand.  Hundreds of millions of people on the planet are living like Americans today, thanks to the rise of the middle class. But “the good lord didn’t design this planet for that many Americans,” he said.

The result of such a large number of people consuming like Americans could be a world that would “look like Target at Christmas . . . so we need to innovate and change the way we do things to avoid burning up and eating up the world,” Mr. Friedman said.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Mr. Friedman cited energy poverty as another a grave threat. About 1.6 billion people on the planet have no access to electricity – a phenomenon Friedman illustrated with a slide of young African students studying in an airport parking lot, because it was the only place they could find light by which to do their homework.

“These kids are doing their homework just like Davidson kids, but in almost total darkness,” he said.

Mr. Friedman cited the existence of “petrodictatorships” as an additional threat to future stability. “The price of oil and pace of freedom have an inverse relationship,” Mr. Friedman said, meaning that countries tend to become less free as the price of oil rises. “Please remember that every time you fill up your gas tank,” he warned.

Mr. Friedman devoted much of his lecture to global warming, offering Hurricane Katrina as an example of the dangers of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “We humans have now introduced so much CO2 into mother nature’s operating system that we don’t even know who made Katrina,” he said, questioning how “natural” the disaster that rocked the U.S. gulf coast in 2006 was.

Mr. Friedman shared a personal anecdote about meeting former Vice President Al Gore after he released his global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” that garnered much acclaim. The film had also critics, however, who accused Al Gore of being “sissy” and “unpatriotic.” Mr. Friedman urged Mr. Gore to write a tongue-and-cheek op-ed apologizing – not for his thesis, but for underestimating global warming.

Mr. Friedman roundly debunked the notion that America is already in the midst of a green revolution. Right now, Americans are in a mentality of “we’re cooked, so let’s party. … It‘s a green party, not a green revolution,” Friedman argued. “It’s only a revolution when someone gets hurt . . . companies are going to have to change in order to survive.”

While those who can afford to pay more for sustainable technology might have to pay more in the short term, he argued that in the end, the more that people invest in sustainable technology, the cheaper it will eventually become. Additionally, overdependence on oil and coal is environmentally as well as politically costly, so the true cost of those commodities is not reflected in its actual price.

Mr. Friedman said he believes the government should impose coal and gas taxes to reflect the hidden costs of gas and coal, and that the stimulus package will stimulate “green innovation.” But ultimately, he said, the impetus for a green revolution must come from “engineers, not bureaucrats.”

The President could impose environmental reforms in a top-down way, but Friedman does not want the U.S. to become “China, even for a day.” “We want democratic government to launch a green revolution, not a top-down process,” he said.

Mr. Friedman ended his lecture with an urgent plea to Davidson students. “The real green revolution will be determined by who writes the rules . . . [and] the rules of your future are being written right now. Exxon-Mobil is not on Facebook . … It’s in the cloakrooms in Congress,” Mr.  Friedman said.

He warned that youth “may live in the digital world, but politics is in the analog world.” For real change to happen, young people must get off Facebook and confront politicians in the real world. “You must convey to Congress what rules we want written.”

RELATED COVERAGE

Nov. 3, 2009, “Tom Friedman visits Davidson College,” a brief article on Mr. Friedman’s visit, including @DavNews Twitter live feed from both a lunchtime Q&A and the afternoon speech.