September 10th, 2008 · No Comments

By Harriet Blake

In his new tome Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008) Thomas Friedman pulls no punches on his concerns for the country’s future. The title — Hot, Flat and Crowded — refers to the planet’s global warming crisis, the rise of the middle class throughout the world and over population — and he says to counter that, “green” must become the new “red, white and blue”.

The New York Times foreign affairs columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author says America must replace its addiction to oil with a green energy future.

The term “green,” he recently told Terry Gross on National Public Radio, has been linked to liberal, granola-crunching, hippy, unpatriotic, tree-hugger types. “My book is an attempt to shatter that and re-name ‘green.’”

Green, writes Friedman in the new book, “is the new red, white and blue because it is a strategy that can help to ease global warming, biodiversity loss, energy poverty, petrodictatorship, and energy supply shortages — and make America stronger at the same time. We solve our own problems by helping the world solve its problems. We help the world solve its problems by solving our own problems.”

Friedman, known for writing about globalization in his earlier work, The World is Flat, directs his new work more toward solutions, particularly prescriptions for green change.

He notes on NPR, for instance, that the Senate bill to extend tax credits for solar and wind energy companies needs to get passed. The bill, which expires on Dec. 31, has been raised in Congress in various forms for months and voted down or failed to come up for a vote eight times because Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on a compromise version.

Yet, these alternative energy companies can’t afford to stay in business without tax incentives, unless, Friedman points out, you’re T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oil man who is personally financing wind turbines in that state.

Leadership on the national level is key, he says. “It is much more important to change your leaders than your light bulbs,” he writes. “Leaders write the rules and regulations, and the rules and regulations shape markets and change the behavior and incentives of millions of people at once.” Only if you get the rules right will you get innovation.

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