The Power of Green
By Thomas L. Friedman
This article is excerpted from a piece that originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine.
In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. One thing that always struck me about the term “green” was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as “liberal,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” “girlie-man,” “unpatriotic,” “vaguely French.”
Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic, and patriotic. Living, working, designing, manufacturing, and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader, and more muscular green ideology can bridge the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature, and terrorism.
How do our kids compete in a flatter world? How do they thrive in a warmer world? How do they survive in a more dangerous world? Those are the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st century. But these problems are so large that they can only be effectively addressed by an America with 50 green states — not an America divided between red and blue states.
Because a new green ideology, properly defined, has the power to mobilize liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and atheists, big business and environmentalists around an agenda that can both pull us together and propel us forward. That’s why I say: We don’t just need the first black or woman president. We need the first environmental president. We don’t just need a president who has been toughened by years as a prisoner of war but a president who is tough enough to level with the American people about the profound threats posed by our addiction to oil — and to offer a real plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
Hence my motto: “Green is the new red, white, and blue.”
The good news is that after traveling around America, I can report that green really has gone Main Street. But here’s the bad news: Green has not gone very far down Main Street. It certainly has not gone anywhere near the distance required to preserve our lifestyle. The dirty little secret is that we’re fooling ourselves. We in America talk like we’re already “the greenest generation,” as the business writer Dan Pink once called it. But here’s the really inconvenient truth: We have not even begun to be serious about the costs, the effort, and the scale of change that will be required to shift our country, and eventually the world, to a largely emissions-free energy infrastructure over the next 50 years.
The Law of Petropolitics
Sometime after 9/11 green went geostrategic, as Americans started to realize we were financing both sides in the war on terrorism. We were financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars; and we were financing a transformation of Islam, in favor of its most intolerant strand, with gasoline purchases. How stupid is that?
No wonder more Americans have concluded that conserving oil to put less money in the hands of hostile forces is now a geostrategic imperative. James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, minces no words: “We are funding the rope for the hanging of ourselves.”
No, I don’t want to bankrupt Saudi Arabia or trigger an Islamist revolt there. Its leadership is more moderate and pro-Western than its people. But the way the Saudi ruling family has bought off its religious establishment in order to stay in power is not healthy. Cutting the price of oil in half would help change that. In the 1990s, dwindling oil income sparked a Saudi debate about less Koran and more science in Saudi schools, even experimentation with local elections. But the recent oil windfall has stilled all talk of reform.
That is because of what I call the First Law of Petropolitics: The price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in states that are highly dependent on oil exports for their income and have weak institutions or outright authoritarian governments. And this is another reason that green has become geostrategic. Soaring oil prices are poisoning the international system by strengthening antidemocratic regimes around the globe.
As oil prices went down in the early 1990s, competition, transparency, political participation, and accountability of those in office all tended to go up in Russia, Nigeria, Iran, and Venezuela — as measured by free elections held, newspapers opened, reformers elected, economic reform projects started, and companies privatized. That’s because their petroauthoritarian regimes had to open themselves to foreign investment and educate and empower their people more in order to earn income. But as oil prices went up around 2000, free speech, free press, fair elections, and freedom to form political parties and NGOs all eroded in these countries.
The motto of the American Revolution was “no taxation without representation.” The motto of the petroauthoritarians is “no representation without taxation”: If I don’t have to tax you because I can get all the money I need from oil wells, I don’t have to listen to you.
People change when they have to — not when we tell them to — and falling oil prices make them have to. That is why if we are looking for a Plan B for Iraq — pressing for political reform without going to war again — there is no better tool than bringing down the price of oil. When it comes to fostering democracy, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a neocon or a radical lib. If you’re not also green, you won’t succeed.
The Reality of Warming
The second big reason green has gone Main Street is because global warming has. A decade ago, it was mostly experts who worried that climate change was real and likely to lead to species loss and environmental crises. Now Main Street is starting to worry because people are seeing things they’ve never seen before in their own front yards and reading things they’ve never read before in their papers.
No one knows exactly what will happen. But ever fewer people want to do nothing. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California summed up the new climate around climate when he said to me: “If 98 doctors say my son is ill and needs medication and two say ‘No, he doesn’t, he is fine,’ I will go with the 98. It’s common sense — the same with global warming. We go with the majority, the large majority. ... The key thing now is that since we know this industrial age has created it, let’s get our act together and do everything we can to roll it back.”
But how? Now we arrive at the first big roadblock. Most people have no clue — no clue — how huge an industrial project is required to blunt climate change. Here are two people who do: Robert Socolow, an engineering professor, and Stephen Pacala, an ecology professor, who together lead the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton, a consortium designing scalable solutions for the climate issue.
They argue that human beings can emit only so much carbon into the atmosphere before the buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) reaches a level unknown in recent geologic history and the earth’s climate system starts to go “haywire.” The scientific consensus, they note, is that the risk — of weather patterns getting violently unstable, glaciers melting, prolonged droughts — grows rapidly as CO2 levels “approach a doubling” of the concentration of CO2 that was in the atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution.
“Think of the climate change issue as a closet, and behind the door are lurking all kinds of monsters — and there’s a long list of them,” Pacala said. “All of our scientific work says the most damaging monsters start to come out from behind that door when you hit the doubling of CO2 levels.”
To convey the scale involved, Socolow and Pacala have created a pie chart with 15 different wedges. Some wedges represent carbon-free or carbon-diminishing power-generating technologies; other wedges represent efficiency programs that could conserve large amounts of energy and prevent CO2 emissions. They argue that the world needs to deploy any seven of these 15 wedges, or sufficient amounts of all 15, to have enough carbon-free energy, increase the world economy, and still avoid the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Each wedge, when phased in over 50 years, would avoid the release of 25 billion tons of carbon, for a total of 175 billion tons of carbon avoided between now and 2056.
Here are seven wedges we could chose from: “Replace 1,400 large coal-fired plants with gas-fired plants; increase the fuel economy of two billion cars from 30 to 60 miles per gallon; add twice today’s nuclear output to displace coal; drive two billion cars on ethanol, using one-sixth of the world’s cropland; increase solar power 700-fold to displace coal; cut electricity use by 25 percent; install carbon capture and sequestration capacity at 800 large coal-fired plants.” And the other eight aren’t any easier. They include halting all cutting and burning of forests, since deforestation causes about 20 percent of the world’s annual CO2 emissions.
“There has never been a deliberate industrial project in history as big as this,” Pacala said. Through a combination of clean power technology and conservation, “we have to get rid of 175 billion tons of carbon over the next 50 years — and still keep growing. It is possible to accomplish this if we start today. But every year that we delay, the job becomes more difficult — and if we delay a decade or two, avoiding the doubling or more may well become impossible.”
The China Price
Green has also gone Main Street because the end of Communism, the rise of the personal computer, and the diffusion of the Internet have opened the global economic playing field to many more people, all coming with their own versions of the American dream — a house, a car, a toaster, a microwave, and a refrigerator. It is a blessing to see so many people growing out of poverty. But when three billion people move from “low-impact” to “high-impact” lifestyles, Jared Diamond wrote in Collapse, it makes it urgent that we find cleaner ways to fuel their dreams.
That’s why McKinsey Global Institute forecasts that developing countries will generate nearly 80 percent of the growth in world energy demand between now and 2020, with China representing 32 percent. If Red China doesn’t become Green China there is no chance we will keep the climate monsters behind the door. On some days, says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, almost 25 percent of the polluting matter in the air above Los Angeles comes from China’s coal-fired power plants and factories, as well as fumes from China’s cars and dust from droughts and deforestation around Asia.
The good news is that China knows it has to grow green — or it won’t grow at all. In 2006, China’s E.P.A. and its National Bureau of Statistics re-examined China’s 2004 G.D.P. number. They concluded that the health problems, environmental degradation, and lost workdays from pollution had actually cost China $64 billion, or 3.05 percent of its total economic output for 2004. Some experts believe the real number is closer to 10 percent.
Thus China has a strong motivation to clean up the worst pollutants in its air — much of which come from burning coal. But cleaning up is easier said than done. The Communist Party’s legitimacy and the stability of the whole country depend heavily on Beijing’s ability to provide rising living standards for more and more Chinese.
So, if you’re a Chinese mayor and have to choose between growing jobs and cutting pollution, you will invariably choose jobs: Coughing workers are much less politically dangerous than unemployed workers.
But if China is having a hard time cleaning up its nitrogen and sulfur oxides — which can be done relatively cheaply by adding scrubbers to the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants — imagine what will happen when it comes to asking China to curb its CO2. A coal-fired power plant that captures, separates, and safely sequesters the CO2 into the ground requires either an expensive retrofit or a whole new system. That new system would cost about 40 percent more to build and operate — and would produce 20 percent less electricity.
China — which is constructing the equivalent of two 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants every week — is not going to pay that now. So we come to the nub of the issue: Green will not go down Main Street America unless it also goes down Main Street China, India, and Brazil. And for green to go Main Street in these big developing countries, the prices of clean power alternatives have to fall to the “China price.” The China price is basically the price China pays for coal-fired electricity today because China is not prepared to pay a premium, and sacrifice growth and stability, to get rid of the CO2 that comes from burning coal.
Father Greed
The only way we are going to get innovations that drive costs down to the China price is by mobilizing free-market capitalism. The only thing as powerful as Mother Nature is Father Greed. Some venture capitalists and companies understand that clean-tech is going to be the next great global industry.
Take Wal-Mart. The world’s biggest retailer woke up several years ago, its C.E.O. Lee Scott told me, and realized that with regard to the environment its customers “had higher expectations for us than we had for ourselves.” So Scott hired a sustainability expert, Jib Ellison, to tutor the company. The first lesson Ellison preached was that going green was a new way for Wal-Mart to cut costs and drive its profits. As Scott recalled it, Ellison said, “Lee, the thing you have to think of is all this stuff that people don’t want you to put into the environment is waste — and you’re paying for it!”
So Scott initiated a program to work with Wal-Mart’s suppliers to reduce the sizes and materials used for all its packaging by five percent by 2013. The reductions they have made are already paying off in savings to the company. Wal-Mart is the China of companies, so, explained Scott, “if we place one order we can create a market” for energy innovation.
Yet another force driving us to the China price is Chinese entrepreneurs, who understand that while Beijing may not be ready to impose CO2 restraints, developed countries are, so this is going to be a global business — and they want a slice. Let me introduce the man identified last year by Forbes Magazine as the seventh-richest man in China. His name is Shi Zhengrong and he is China’s leading manufacturer of silicon solar panels.
“People at all levels in China have become more aware of this environment issue and alternative energy,” said Shi, whose company, Suntech Power Holdings, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Shi does most of his manufacturing in China, but sells roughly 90 percent of his products outside China, because today they are too expensive for his domestic market. But the more he can get the price down, and start to grow his business inside China, the more he can use that to become a dominant global player. And if it takes off, China could do for solar panels what it did for tennis shoes — bring the price down so far that everyone can afford a pair.
Beyond the Market
All that sounds great — but remember those seven wedges? To reach the necessary scale of emissions-free energy will require clean power connected to a national grid, not to mention clean fuels for our cars and trucks. The market alone will not get us those alternatives at the scale we need fast enough.
Government’s job is to set high standards, let the market reach them, and then raise the standards more. That’s how you get scale innovation at the China price. The politicians who best understand this are America’s governors, some of whom have started to just ignore Washington, set their own energy standards, and reap the benefits for their states. As Schwarzenegger told me, “We have seen in California so many companies that have been created that work just on things that have do with clean environment.” California’s state-imposed efficiency standards have resulted in per-capita energy consumption in California remaining almost flat for the last 30 years, while in the rest of the country it has gone up 50 percent. “There are a lot of industries that are exploding right now because of setting these new standards,” he said.
The bottom line is this: Clean-tech plays to America’s strength — knowledge, not cheap labor. That’s why embedding clean-tech into everything we design and manufacture is a way to revive America as a manufacturing power.
“Whatever you are making, if you can add a green dimension to it— making it more efficient, healthier and more sustainable for future generations — you have a product that can’t just be made cheaper in India or China,” said Andrew Shapiro, founder of GreenOrder, an environmental business-strategy group.
This is why we need a Green New Deal, in which government’s role is not funding projects, as in the original New Deal, but seeding basic research and setting standards, taxes, and incentives that will spawn all kinds of clean power.
Unfortunately, today’s presidential hopefuls are largely full of hot air on the climate-energy issue. Not one of them is proposing anything hard, like a carbon or gasoline tax, and if you think we can deal with these huge problems without asking the American people to do anything hard, you’re a fool or a fraud.
Being serious starts with reframing the whole issue — helping Americans understand, as the Carnegie Fellow David Rothkopf puts it, “that we’re not ‘post-Cold War’ anymore — we’re pre-something totally new.” I’d say we’re in the “pre-climate war era.” Unless we create a more carbon-free world, we will not preserve the free world. Intensifying climate change, energy wars, and petroauthoritarianism will curtail our life choices and our children’s opportunities every bit as much as Communism once did for half the planet.
Equally important, presidential candidates need to help Americans understand that green is not about cutting back. It’s about creating a new cornucopia of abundance for the next generation by inventing a whole new industry. It’s about getting our best brains out of hedge funds and into innovations that will not only give us the clean-power industrial assets to preserve our American dream but also give us the technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams without destroying the planet. It’s about making America safer by breaking our addiction to a fuel that is powering regimes deeply hostile to our values. And, finally, it’s about making America the global environmental leader, instead of laggard.
Am I optimistic? I want to be. But I am also old-fashioned. I don’t believe the world will effectively address the climate-energy challenge without America, its president, its government, its industry, its markets, and its people all leading the parade. Green has hit Main Street — it’s now more than a hobby — but it’s still less than a new way of life.
Why? Because big transformations usually happen when a lot of aggrieved people take to the streets, the politicians react, and laws get changed. But the climate-energy debate is more muted and slow-moving. Why? Because the people who will be most harmed by the climate-energy crisis haven’t been born yet.
An unusual situation like this calls for the ethic of stewardship. Stewardship is what parents do for their kids: think about the long term, so they can have a better future. In many ways, our parents rose to such a challenge in World War II — when an entire generation mobilized to preserve our way of life. That is why they were called the Greatest Generation. Our kids will only call us the Greatest Generation if we rise to our challenge and become the Greenest Generation.
Thomas L. Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times specializing in foreign affairs. This article is reprinted by permission.
Sidebar:
Want to Cut Your Carbon?
Get Greener with Our Steps to Protect the Climate
For most of us, the goal of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions feels maddeningly abstract — these gases are invisible and difficult to track, and we produce them unconsciously through ordinary daily activities.
Through our C3 campaign, New American Dream is helping individuals quantify the carbon they save by making small but habit-forming changes in their daily routines. By pledging to take a few simple steps in tandem with others, here’s what you could save by taking the first three steps in the campaign:
1. Buy one pound of local food each week and save 1.12 pounds of carbon per month.
2. Carve out one car-free day a week and save 141.3 pounds of carbon per month.
3. Use online forms to reduce unwanted ad mail and save 108 pounds of carbon per year.
We’ll also be promoting these steps in October through December:
• Use a reusable water bottle and a high-quality home filter instead of buying bottled water.
• Wash your clothes in cold water and choose the no-heat cycle on your dishwasher.
• Bring your own bag instead of using disposable bags.
As of press time, New American Dream members had collectively saved a total of 2,129,404 pounds of carbon emissions, and the impact keeps growing! Get counted for your actions at http://c3.newdream.org.