Thomas Friedman on Energy

"Hot, Flat and Crowded" is the title of the latest book by three-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York times columnist Thomas Friedman. Thursday I went with a group to hear a prescient lecture by Mr. Friedman to a large audience in Fresno, California. The upshot of the lecture is that we are stretching the earth's resource base and atmospheric capacity past the breaking point. A green energy revolution is imperative, and now. You can see Friedman's web page introducing the book here.

Thirty years ago there were only "two and a half Americas" in the world; that is, populations of people equivalent to the American population who were living at the American standard of resource consumption and depletion. They were the U.S., Western Europe and Japan. Today there are nine. In a few more years there will be fifteen. When Friedman was born in 1953 there were 2.6 billion people in the world. Today there are 6.2 billion. Shortly there will be 9 billion. Massive urban developments on the scale of Manhattan are going up all over the world: in the Persian gulf, China, India, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, for instance. And as a result, the climate has warmed 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit and will go up more, inevitably, in the years ahead.

Friedman's basic and persuasive contention is that dealing with this challenge will form the central story of the twenty-first century. Just as those who led the way into the mercantile, industrial, coal and oil ages led the world in the past, so will those who pioneer sustainable and energy now be the prosperous and stable societies of the future.

Friedman pays tribute to Al Gore for so raising the profile of the issue, but half-jokingly says that if he were to run into the Oscar and Nobel Prize Winner today he would ask him to apologize for understating the case so severely. Ice-free summers in the Arctic Ocean, for instance, once projected for 2100 and revised to 2060, are now foreseen as early as 2012-13, for example. Rising sea levels could displace a billion and a half people, while more powerful storms and longer droughts wreak increasing havoc with food production in many regions.

His prescription for solving this gathering peril is mainly to incentivize the essential choices. Regulation, he says, will play a role but probably will not be determinative. Price, however, can rapidly change behavior. When gas was $2 a gallon, Hummers were selling great. Last year when it went to $4 the company went broke and Toyota dealers had so many people on their waiting lists for the Prius they stopped adding more.

The magnitude of the challenge is huge. Friedman says "if we started building one nuclear power plant a day it would take 36 years to head off runaway greenhouse gas accumulation." It will take a combination of efficiency, conservation and all the effective natural, biological and technological sources we can imagine. So, what he says has to happen is to charge the real cost of things. The cost of coal is not just cost of digging, hauling and burning it and then the power grid, but also the damage it does to the ecosystem, including such items as the mercury and acid rain in the water, the health costs of the miners and sufferers of respiratory diseases, the contribution to glacial melt, stronger storms, sea level rise, and so forth.

Friedman says if those charges were part of the cost consumes had to pay and those funds put into incentives to develop better systems we could make rapid progress. The next Netscape or Google is out there. "Ten thousand guys in ten thousand garages, coming up with 100 interesting ideas, of which 20 are really useful and 2 are transformative," is how Friedman put it.

He is, of course, right. Whether action will be taken in time, at least by this country, seems a highly dubious proposition to me. Just yesterday the U.S. House of Representatives passed its toughest climate measure ever. Though the generally more eco-friendly Democrats have a 70-vote margin there, they only managed to squeak out a bill on a 219-212 vote by exempting 85% of production from these cost targets (purchased in a cap-and-trade regimen). To see more on the climate bill, click here. The short-term thinking and unwillingness to ask anyone to sacrifice now will prevent action until the threat is dire and perhaps beyond avoidance. Still, it was gratifying to see the case being made in front of many of the leading figures of a conservative region, who appeared to receive his message approvingly.