In his new book, Thomas Friedman explains why it's also hot and crowded.
By BEN NAPARSTEKThomas Friedman 88 224(photo credit: Courtesy)
Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution
By Thomas L. Friedman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
448 pages; $27.95
Shortly into my chat with Thomas Friedman, it becomes clear we have different agendas. Friedman wants to talk exclusively about his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded - a clarion call for a US-led global green revolution. I also want to discuss the Iraq war, which he cheered with breathless enthusiasm in his twice-weekly New York Times column. "Iraq is a whole other interview," the three-time Pulitzer winner objects.
Sure, the book is an urgent primer on the need for a clean energy system, engagingly written in his usual folksy and anecdotal style. But it's hard not to feel that Friedman - perhaps the most prominent liberal columnist to have boosted the invasion - is trying to turn over a verdant new leaf.
The book is subtitled Why We Need a Green Revolution. His diagnosis? "We're addicted to a dirty fuel system based on fossil fuels or coal or natural gas. That addiction is increasingly toxic. It is driving five problems way beyond their tipping point - and they are climate change, petrodictatorship, energy and natural resource supply and demand, biodiversity laws, and energy poverty."
According to Friedman, the last two decades have seen the rise of "dumb as we wanna be" politics in America: the reluctance of political leaders to address big multigenerational problems. "We've lost our way as a country, and green for me is how we get our groove back - focusing on a green agenda the way we once did on a red anti-Communist agenda."
The working title of the book was Green Is the New Red, White and Blue but he changed it after concluding "we didn't deserve that title."
To lower gas prices and reduce American reliance on foreign oil, Republican hopeful John McCain proposes lifting restrictions on drilling, and in August Democrat candidate Barack Obama reversed his opposition to offshore oil drilling.
"You'd have to have your head examined to be optimistic that a campaign like this is preparing the country for what we need by way of a revolutionary change of energy systems," Friedman says. "Our problem isn't too-high gas prices any more than a crack addict's problem is too high crack prices."
Going green is also a security imperative, in Friedman's analysis. American companies bolster the oil wealth of Middle Eastern states, which sponsor Islamic fundamentalism. Developing renewable energy technologies would make oil cheaper, he says, forcing Arab countries to build their economies through technological innovation, entrepreneurship and educating their people.
He was never persuaded by George W. Bush's argument that Saddam Hussein threatened America's security with weapons of mass destruction. Nor did Friedman swallow the idea of links between Saddam's regime and al-Qaida. The security risk, as he saw it, was not WMDs but PMDs (people of mass destruction) - the culture of hate, nurtured by repressive Islamic states, that spawned Osama bin Laden.
So why attack secular Iraq rather than an Islamic country such as Saudi Arabia or Iran? Because, as Friedman bluntly argued, America could. He construed the attack as an opportunity to export American-style democracy to the Arab world, imagining that the toppling of Saddam's Iraq would unleash democratic movements throughout the region.
The costs of the war, he now admits, have been staggering. "I wrote what I wrote at the time because I believed it. I'm just hoping that the phase that it's in right now will produce a decent outcome. Iraq may be coming out of this tailspin. Maybe a year from now things will look different."
His experience reporting on the sectarian conflict in Lebanon might have given him a hard-bitten view of the Bush team's plan to bring democracy to bitterly factionalized Iraq. Friedman says that in the build-up to the invasion he experienced "a struggle between hope and experience - the experience of Lebanon but also the hope, particularly post-9/11, that the Middle East could give birth to a different kind of politics."
Hope won out, leading him to embrace the Iraq war. But he's not inclined to wring his hands or navel-gaze: "My eyes tend to be focused straight forward and not behind. It's the only way you can really survive if you're sitting where I sit and having the number of people commenting on what you do."
HE NEVER hits back at his critics. By phone, he has the relaxed bonhomie of a country-club regular (allusions to golf, his favorite pastime, pepper his writing) and the upbeat temperament of an adman.
His writing is studded with company and brand names. With their glib metaphors and catchphrases, his columns can read like advertising copy. "To name something is to own it," he remarks. The jingle "hot, flat and crowded," for example, describes the convergence of climate change, globalization and overpopulation that defines our "Energy-Climate Era" (or ECE).
In his 1989 book From Beirut to Jerusalem - the product of a decade reporting from Lebanon and Israel - Friedman coined the term "Hama Rules," referring to the Syrian Army's massacre of more than 10,000 Sunni Muslims in the town of Hama in 1982. The phrase became popular shorthand for the arbitrary brutality of despotic Arab regimes.
In The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), his first book-length paean to globalization, Friedman argued that countries invest in peaceful futures by accepting the "golden straitjacket" of market liberalization. Enmities arising from tribal, national and historical loyalties (symbolized by "the olive tree") disappear, he contended, when societies open up to the international marketplace and become in thrall to consumerism ("the Lexus").
Lexus posited the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, which has it that countries with McDonald's outlets don't fight each other. Shortly after the book was published, America bombed Yugoslavia, thereby torpedoing the theory. But Friedman protests that he "was not laying down physics but a principle of a broad trend."
The hypothesis became the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention in The World Is Flat (2005), with the computer company replacing McDonald's. "No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell's, will ever fight a war against each other," he pontificated.
Give Palestinians economic security and material distractions, the argument runs, and its extremists will no longer care enough about holy sites to blow themselves up. Yet the Palestinians have long perpetuated a conflict that impoverishes them. Atavistic sentiments run deeper than Friedman allows.
Flat reconceived the globalized world in terms of "flatness." The dotcom revolution and the interdependence of markets, technologies and populations leveled the economic playing field, Friedman argued, giving people unprecedented access to the world market.
In practice, though, globalization often means trade within regional blocs rather than an integrated world economy. America and Europe continue to protect their industries rather than compete fairly with less affluent countries, and the international trade regime is dominated by power politics.
Friedman bats away the argument of Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz that globalization has made the world less flat by furthering inequalities in the developing world. "Socialism was a great system for making people equally poor and what markets do is make people unequally rich. The countries that are least globalized - North Korea, Cuba, Sudan pre-oil - are also the poorest."
As an internationally syndicated foreign policy guru, he benefits from the flat world. "This is the golden age of being a columnist. Your opinion can go more places and reach more people. It is the most fun legally you can have that I know of." Pushed for how he imagines illicit fun, the self-described do-gooder states firmly: "I'm not going to go there."
IN THE Middle East, his photo byline is so well-known that he's constantly approached in the streets. Gail Collins, a former opinion editor of the Times, has likened traveling there with Friedman to walking through a mall with Britney Spears. It was Friedman whom King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (then crown prince) used to float his Arab-Israeli peace initiative in 2002, proposing that Arab states give full recognition to Israel if it withdraws to pre-1967 borders.
Friedman became interested in the Middle East at age 15 after traveling to Israel with his parents in 1968 to visit his elder sister, then on student exchange. After studying Arabic language and literature at Brandeis University, he earned a master's degree in Middle Eastern studies at Oxford. While in the UK, he met his wife, Ann Bucksbaum, heiress to a multibillion-dollar shopping-center fortune. A board member of Conservation International, she also edits his columns.
Fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, Friedman became the Times's Beirut bureau chief in 1982 and was transferred to Jerusalem two years later. He openly identified as Jewish in his dispatches from the Middle East, which most of his Jewish-American colleagues avoided for fear of seeming biased. "I wasn't a self-hating Jew," he says.
Even still, Friedman was a controversial figure among Jews. He exposed what he saw as Israeli culpability for the Sabra and Shatilla massacre of 1982 and argued that terrorism played a necessary role in bringing the Palestinian cause to world attention. He was labeled an anti-Zionist by the same right-wing Jewish circles that, since September 11, 2001, have adored him for his excoriating writings on Arab dictatorships.
The editor of Haaretz once joked to Friedman that the newspaper ran his column because he was the only optimist it had. His upbeat outlook is a product of his Midwestern upbringing. "I always brought that Minnesota optimism to the world," he says. "I had a kind of Leave It to Beaver childhood."
But life did not always resemble a sitcom. When Friedman was 19, his father, Harold, a ballbearing salesman and keen golfer, died of a coronary. Harold had attained local celebrity for trailing his teenage son during his high-school golf matches. Still his father's son, Friedman contributes regularly to Golf Digest and toys with the idea of writing a golf book.
Upon turning 55 this year, Friedman qualified for the seniors' championship at his local club. As the first competitive golf match he had played since high school, it unleashed his sentimental side. "A huge limb broke off a tree adjacent to the tee and just came crashing to the ground," he recalls. "I suddenly had this realization that that was my dad, that he was watching. It made me start to cry. I think the old guy was very proud of me."
His mother, Margaret, died earlier this year, aged 89. In an obituary column, he called her "the most uncynical person in the world." A champion bridge player, Margaret served in the navy during World War II, qualifying her for the GI Bill loan with which the Friedmans bought their home. Thomas Friedman has never lost faith with the chestnut of America as a land of opportunity: "I thank God every day that I was born in a country that has given me these opportunities."
America remains more a force for good than ill for Friedman. The US spends more on AIDS relief in Africa than any other country, he points out, adding it was the Bush administration which pushed for UN sanctions on Zimbabwe (blocked by China and Russia) in July.
"I don't think the Iraq war is the be-all and end-all definer of the United States today," he states. Which is perhaps another way of saying that it shouldn't be the sole definer of Thomas Friedman.
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