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By Ellen Pearlman
Strategic Thinker:
Thomas L. Friedman
Credentials: Friedman has won the Pulitzer Prize three times for his reporting for The New York Times, where he serves as the foreign affairs columnist. He is also the author of four other books, the most recent was The World Is Flat.
Big Idea: The best strategy for the renewal of America is also the best hope for healing the earth.
Book: Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2008
Website:
http://www.thomaslfriedman.com
The amount of energy needed to keep a human being alive varies between 2,000 and 3,000 kilocalories a day, according to "Lighting the Way" a 2007 report from the InterAcademy Council. Average per capita energy consumption in the U.S. is about 230,000 kilocalories a day, enough to meet the biological needs of 100 people.
If you read Thomas L. Friedman's 2005 book The World Is Flat, you know that globalization and its impact on everything and everyone is foremost in his mind. This prize-winning New York Times columnist now has a new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded, which continues to look at the consequences of globalization, along with the double whammies of global warming and massive population growth. With hundreds of millions of people in China and India coming out of poverty and seeking an American-way of life, the drain on our limited global resources will continue to grow. It is not enough for America to become energy efficient, our global problems require more than that.
Friedman's message is clear and alarming: We are running out of time to save the earth, America and ourselves. But if we act, and act now, with tough "green" policies and actions, we could prevail. One-off, short-term steps are not enough. What's required is a systemic, intelligent plan that utilizes technology and innovation to bring about the societal changes that are needed. And by the way, those changes could prove to be just what America needs to build its economy and reputation.
Friedman is not talking about the "10 easy ways to go green" that you'll find listed in most mainstream publications or popular books on the subject. He's looking at making tough choices that go beyond easy. "We need to be looking at fundamental changes in our energy, transportation and agricultural systems rather than technological tweaking on the margins, and this means changes and costs that our current and would-be leaders seem afraid to discuss," says Friedman. "To stop at 'easy' is to say that the best we can do is accept an uninspired politics of guilt around a parade of uncoordinated individual action."
To make his points, Friedman shows how various challenges are all interconnected: energy use, economic growth, species loss, deforestation, petropolitics and global warming. It's not enough to generate clean, reliable and cheap electrons, he says, we need a comprehensive strategy "to ensure that more plants, animals and people have the resources they need to survive." All of this will take a coordinated effort with many pieces coming together, including: national policies, local policies, private sector investments and personal attitudes.
Friedman's project, which he dubs "Code Green," presents an opportunity for America to "revive" itself at home, "reconnect" abroad, and "retool" itself for the future. By tackling these big problems, he says, we also have an opportunity to yield big profits. Of course, conversely, if we fail to rise to the leadership and collaboration levels this mega-effort will require, he says, we will lose big time.
David Rothkopf, energy expert and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment, says this about the challenge of reinventing ourselves again, "Making America the world's greenest country is not a selfless act of charity or naïve moral indulgence. Green is not simply a new form of generating electric power. It is a new form of generating national power-period." So do we continue to outsource more jobs to China or do we build more "knowledge-intensive green-collar technology jobs," asks Friedman?
Next: Six Strategies for Winning in the Green Economy
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