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Wednesday 3 December 2008

Web Exclusive: Lloyd Evans on Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman, the influential American commentator, addressed Intelligence Squared on his new book, ‘Hot, Flat and Crowded. Why the world needs a green revolution and how we can renew our global future.’

A star turn visited Intelligence Squared on 13th October. Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer prize winning journalist and columnist on the New York Times, came to discuss his new book ‘Hot Flat and Crowded’, an analysis of the global challenges of the 21st century. The topic seemed spectacularly tedious but Friedman caught our interest immediately with his unusual stance. He’s both deeply sceptical of America and devoutly patriotic. His language is chatty and challenging. ‘We’ve lost our groove,’ he said blaming 9/11 for transforming the US into an exporter of fear rather of hope. When he leaves his home town of Washington DC he has to ‘pass through a dozen metal detectors,’ which is fine, he says, provided ‘the last one leads to a great project worthy of our inspirational capacities, not another metal detector.’

The ‘great project’ – Energy Technology - matters more than the war on terror which he analysis as a straightforward military contradiction. America subsidises both sides. Tax dollars fund US armed forces while American energy purchases fund Middle-East terror.

Unlike most green activists Friedman is a natural entertainer. He never uses clichés but freshens every aspect of the debate with inventive new coinages. Rather than ‘global warming’, he talks of ‘global weirding’, dangerously unpredictable weather events where ‘the hots will be hotter, the dries drier, the rains longer, the snows thicker.’ To those who question climate change he says, ‘you can jump out of an 80-storey building and for 79 floors you think you’re flying.’ This is Friedman’s great talent, a knack for creating graphic images that translate complex ideas into simple, concrete language. He asks why China should comply with western demands for reducing its emissions. ‘They’ll say to us, so you went to dinner and had the hors d’oeuvres and the main course and the pudding and you invited us for coffee and now you want us to split the bill? No thanks.’ To address planetary over-crowding he’s invented a new unit of population measurement, the Americom, a community of 300 million people all wanting to live like Americans. In 1953, the year Freidman was born, the world supported two and a half Americoms: the US, Western Europe, and Japan (equalling half an Americom). Now there are nine. Within decades there’ll be a dozen. ‘But the good Lord didn’t design the world for this many Americans.’

The solution is to devise a source of ‘cheap, clean, reliable electrons.’ Whoever makes the breakthrough – and he hopes the inspiration will be American – is destined to found an industry that will become the Microsoft of the 21st century. His blend of devout greenery and faith in the profit-motive seems, at least to Brits, novel and very refreshing. In the US, he says, the green movement was hobbled by its image as irrelevant, hippyish, tree-hugging, retrograde and unAmerican. ‘Being green?’ he says with a quizzical emphasis, ‘isn’t that a bit European.’ For him, going green isn’t just a massive opportunity disguised as an insurmountable difficulty, it’s also ‘capitalist, patriotic and geo-political.’ He produces a graph showing the rising price of oil during the last decade or so. Since 1995 the price has surged from $30 to $130 and it’s no coincidence, he says, that major exporters like Iran and Russia have become less democratic during that time. ‘As the price of oil goes up the pace of freedom goes down.’ And vice versa.

In the quest for new Energy Technology Friedman is inspired by America’s defeat of communism in the 20th century. ‘What Red was to the US in the 1950s, Green is to us now.’ The government must establish ‘price signals’ (ie price controls) which reflect the ‘full burden’ of the costs of fuel. When petrol hit $4 a gallon in the US car use changed. People used mass transport or bought less thirsty cars. If $4 were the legal minimum price, the scientists would start the hunt for new fuel sources in earnest. He leaves us with a characteristic note of ironic pragmatism. ‘The people most affected by climate change haven’t been born yet. And it’s really difficult to build a mass political movement from people who haven’t been born yet.’ Friedman is a strange tapestry of paradoxes, a green who’s good fun, a scientist who tells stories, a poet whose lyrics are pure logic, a missionary whose zeal doesn’t depress you. Best of all, he’s a prophet who foretells your doom and you not only believe him, you love him for it. Phenomenal.

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