Code Green: Thomas Friedman puts America on the Alternative Energy Alert

The Midway Review, the journal of politics and culture I edit and design, is out on campus today, and here's a copy of my article. The whole magazine can be found at midwayreview.uchicago.edu as a PDF.

Hot, Flat and Crowded:
Why We Need a Green
Revolution—and How
It Can Renew America
by Thomas L. Friedman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
448 pp., $27.95


If you ask Thomas Friedman, thanks to climate change, globalization and climbing population rates, the earth looks hotter, flatter and more crowded than ever before. It also looks like a self-indulgent scene out of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Hieronymus Bosch’s fifteenth-century triptych of excess and greed decorates the cover of Friedman’s newest book, Hot, Flat and Crowded, suggesting that the way the United States has been tearing through global resources is finally catching up with us.

In the first half of his book, Friedman recounts the development of the global energy crisis. In responding to the crisis, he claims, the United States has done more to isolate itself from the rest of the world and deepen its dependency on foreign oil than promote innovation. Meanwhile, Denmark’s booming wind turbine industry, Brazil’s emphasis on ethanol production, and Japan’s high fuel efficiency standards are each propelling their respective nations into the future a lot faster than we Americans can manage, even with the help of our high powered SUVs. And if we don’t pull our heads out of the ground, where no doubt we’ve been poking around for oil.

Friedman warns that we as a nation risk falling hopelessly behind in technological innovation. In particular, Friedman fears the convergence of three global he says, for which he coins the mnemonic “hot, flat and crowded.” In the next fifty years, he claims, the world’s population will swell 45%, from 6.7 to 9 billion. Outsourcing of business will likewise increase, causing the numbers and spending power of the world’s middle class to rise in turn. Meanwhile, fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas will add CO2 to the atmosphere and fuel global warming. These developments together will produce a greater strain on the Earth’s ecosystem than it has ever felt before.

The thesis isn’t new. Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, walked his American readers through the leveling of the economic playing field in his bestseller The World is Flat, and cautioned them not to rest on the laurels of the business and political tactics that served us so well through the 20th century. And writers as diverse as Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and Al Gore have been decrying the culture of over-consumption for years. But this time, Friedman is hoping to lure the audience of entrepreneurs he snagged with The World is Flat into thinking about the environment, even if their concerns have more to do with profit margins than polar bears.

So what’s different about Friedman’s solution? First, it does not sound much like “205 Easy Ways to Save the Earth,” or any other magazine features telling consumers what cars to drive or light bulbs to buy. Friedman knows going green won’t be easy, simple, or fun for the nation, and insists that only drastic changes in policy can make a lasting impact.

Second, and perhaps more importantly for Friedman, green is no longer synonymous with Birkenstocks and tofu. In one of the many anecdotes that punctuate Friedman’s arguments, he explains how even the U.S. Army has cause for concern: at one point an officer observed that transporting oil across the Iraqi desert puts men needlessly at risk of enemy attack. As he says, “[alternative energy] is now a core national security and economic interest.”

Friedman is calling for U.S. business and governments, and not just hemp-wearing, hybrid-driving consumers, to lead a “Green Revolution.” In doing so, he hopes the United States can set an example for developing nations like China and India, who tend otherwise to envy the U.S.’s trajectory of industrialization, despite its history of utter disregard for environmental matters. This process would involve imposing serious gasoline taxes like Denmark’s to encourage consumer restraint, building masstransit systems to rival Europe’s, and trading in our present dependence on dirty energy for cleaner biofuels and more efficient power plants.

Friedman borrows a number of suggestions from the “Carbon Migration Initiative” proposed by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, both professors at Princeton University: replace 1,400 large coal-fired electric plants with facilities powered by natural gas; double the output of today’s nuclear power facilities to replace coal-based electricity; increase wind power eightyfold to make hydrogen for clean cars; double the fuel efficiency of two billion cars from thirty to sixty miles per gallon.

Again, not the kind of prescription you’ll read in Working Mother magazine. To accomplish all this, Friedman wants to tap into a history of American ingenuity—the panache for self-reinvention that made Americans the pioneers of global industry, put a man on the moon and invented the Internet. He wants green to mean more to the country than the color of Jay Gatsby’s light, but knows it will take the leadership of an FDR or JFK to make this happen.

But just as Ronald Reagan stripped the White House of Jimmy Carter’s solar panels when he took office, it is doubtful whether twenty-first century Americans will take heed should the government tell them to green up their lives. When the Soviets launched Sputnik, Friedman applauded America for successfully spurring itself to surpass the U.S.S.R. in space- exploration. But after the events of September 11th shook America to attention again, in a way much more immediate and devastating than the threat of communism had ever been, the opposite happened. Americans were encouraged to spend more, travel more, and ignore the fact that their nation was at war.

Friedman mocks the low-impact, consumerist trends that have made Green a glamorous color in niche markets. But there is one central question he doesn’t fully answer: How readily will Americans, so accustomed to free-market-forces, support this dramatic shift in federal policy, when they could just as easily switch from incandescent light bulbs to LEDs and call it a day?
Only the next ten years will tell. I’m going to hold on to that article, “205 Easy Ways to Save the Earth,” just in case.