Thomas Friedman's Green Pie in the Sky

Instead of a pie in the face, which Thomas L. Friedman ducked at Brown University a couple of weeks ago, the student pranksters should have tossed a few tough questions to the bestselling author about his fading green bona fides.

For starters, take his ill-informed understanding of coal. Using his New York Times bully pulpit column, Friedman had the audacity to tour a strip mine in Montana last year, and then declare that our "green" future rested on the mirage of "clean coal," a delusional corporate slogan that blithely overlooks any environmental destruction (including the crime of mountaintop removal in Appalachia), transportation problems, major groundwater and waterway issues or an enduring mining safety crisis before the coal train even arrives at some futuristic power plant.

In an exciting period when Friedman's truly green counterparts in the rest of the world -- from Germany to Spain to Israel to the republic of Google -- are seizing the moment to pursue the daily breakthroughs in renewable energy sources, Friedman has tossed his green sensibilities out of the window by hopping on the dirty coal bandwagon and even cheering the development of still prohibitive and emissions-boosting coal-to-liquid technology.

As the self-proclaimed re-namer of the "new idea of green," Friedman should know better. He should have learned his lesson as a one-time cheerleader of ethanol. A couple of years ago, Friedman chided our nation for refusing to put our energy future into the corn and sugar basket. Just like his belief in the chimerical vision of "clean coal," Friedman failed to consider the environmental costs of ethanol, (including deforestation in Brazil and other regions for expanded cultivation), costly water use, and the ensuing tragic food staples shortage in his short-term vision.

Beyond our energy policies, perhaps the most telling aspect of Friedman's misleading green vision goes back to The World Is Flat, his 600-page roller-coaster version of globalization that has baited and hooked a vast readership, including the academic hosts of those pie-throwing yahoos at Brown University and at schools around the world.

In an exhaustive account of "how and why globalization has shifted into warp drive," Friedman describes the short swift time of information technology on earth, the complexities of globalization, the "triple convergence" of the free market, and the explosion of wealth in China and India that is "challenging the rest of us to run even faster."

In his theory of the triple convergence, Friedman holds up a small game company in Bangalore, India, as the perfect example that has enjoyed "enormous success" creating a game called "Saloon," based on a barman cleaning up a saloon in "an American Wild Wild West." Within a backdrop of 5,000 years of history and cultural achievements, in a country booming with green initiatives for sustainable development and village revitalization, Friedman claims this is "one of the most dynamic young pluggers and players" he has ever met in India.

Dynamic players? The next time he visits Brown University, or any campus, Friedman might want to sit in on a course on the life and times of Nobel Prize-winning laureate Rabindranath Tagore, the towering literary figure in India who pioneered reforestation efforts and the sustainable village movement nearly a century ago.

After dazzling his readers with an impressive breakdown of world markets and technological innovations since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Friedman arrives at page 460 in The World Is Flat with a moment of truth:

"To put it bluntly, I don't know how the flattening of the world will come out. Indeed, let me go even further and make a deeper confession: I know that the world is not flat.

Yes, you read me right: I know that the world is not flat. Don't worry. I know.

I am certain, though, that the world has been shrinking and flattening for some time now, and that process has quickened dramatically in recent years. Half the world is directly or indirectly participating in the flattening process or feeling its effect."

Friedman informs us that "as exciting and as visible as the flat Indian high-tech sector is, have no illusions: It accounts for 0.2 percent of employment in India. Add those Indians involved in manufacturing for export, and you get a total of 2 percent of employment in India." In essence, out of a billion souls in India -- 70 percent of whom still live in agricultural-dependent villages -- over 980 million are not plugged in and playing on his flattened field.

The "bad news," Friedman concludes, "in Africa today, as well as rural India, China, Latin America, and plenty of dark corners of the developed world, is that there are hundreds of millions of people who have no hope and therefore no change of making it into the middle class." For Friedman, the only hope for these "dark corners" is to enter the flat world of free markets, service and industry, get an English education and join the urban infrastructure.

And it is here that Thomas Friedman's hugely bestselling work is not only dead wrong, but dangerously ill-informed, outdated and an anathema to the green movement (and to students and faculty at campuses across the country).

"While he was sleeping," as Friedman entitles his first chapter, he overlooks the fact that more than 150,000 Indian farmers committed suicide during the same period of this high tech boom, due to debt, unfair trade practices, and the upheaval from corporate-controlled genetically modified seeds and cash cropping -- one of the most devastating assaults on green development in rural areas. In the process, on a worldwide level, more than one billion dispossessed people -- a third of the world's urban population -- have tacitly followed Friedman's advice and moved into the phenomenon of the global slums, without any possibility of work or future, creating what the United Nations has recently defined as a "silent tsunami" and irreversible urban disaster of choking pollution, waste and desperate violence.

Nearly a decade ago, The International Institute for a Sustainable Future in Bombay (Mumbai), anticipated Friedman's reliance on the most misguided and outdated anti-green urban legend: The urban world and high tech economy will ultimately absorb and integrate the rural villagers into the flat world. Instead, as the International Institute wrote in one of their reports: "The situation continues to worsen in every major city of India, as it does in the major cities of other Asian countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Cambodia, where one out of three urban inhabitants lives in gruesome settlements. By and large, the urban conditions of the majority of people in the cities of Africa and Latin America are as mercilessly cruel as in India and Asia -- the only difference being the magnitude and the level of poverty...The dreams of the millions for ease and material abundance, has become a nightmarish curse. What is our vision of the kinds of cities, towns, and villages in which we want to live? How do we create human settlements that function as self-sustaining eco-habitats?"

Far more than a pie in the face, these are some of the hard questions from the green movement -- especially on his disingenuous touting of "clean coal" -- that Thomas Friedman has been ducking for too long.

Comments

[django707]

All these different titles for Mr. Friedman, "econimist," "pundit," "Middle East Expert..."

May I suggest a more realistic term" "Stealth Free Market Propagandist." Tom Friedman has been shilling for the globalistas, war mongers, and corporate bosses for his entire tenure at the NY Times.

He waved the flag for the invasion of Iraq, belittled the American working class for having their jobs outsourced, and did it all under the false flag of feel good liberalism.

Now he joins the chorus bemoaning the botching of the Iraq war, claiming those hearts and minds were there to be won but we blew it. We didn't blow anything. The 3 trillion dollar boondoggle went exactly as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Halliburton, Blackwater, et al dreamed it would go.

And globalist cheerleaders like Friedman helped them get there.

Tom Friedman is the type of phony who points to the attic when the nazis are at the front door.

[JScott]

Indeed, and basically the bottom line is he's an economist that deals in numbers and quantities, as they relate to economic activity and narrow in scope and not an enviromentalist but of course the (corporate) media blithely ignores that. Oh and don't overlook he married wealth, well at least he followed his precepts in that respect, make lotsa money as easily and as fast as you can, and da*n the consequences and 'externalities'.

[newshawk14]

Friedman has never impressed me much, and I doubt if his understanding of science amounts
to much. Two interesting ways of sequestering CO2, are if you use high pressure liquid CO2 on
concrete structural beams, it enormously strengthens them. Also, if you use the same technique
with the fly ash from a coal fired power plant, it makes wonderful roofing tiles. It's a good way of
getting rid of a little CO2, but would hardly make a dent, in the overall problem.

[freshnotbitter]

The Time's man on the spot in the mid east will always be a jelly roll willing to say anything and probably someone who spends most of his time writing sweet nothings with the greatest of ease.

Kristol and Friedman should be fired immediately.

[GWChimpzilla]

Friedman's subconscious MO has always been that there's no difference between optimism and wishful thinking. So stark is this that the term "Friedman Unit" was coined to describe wishful-thinking coming from the mouths of pundits when they described how our efforts in Iraq would turn the corner in Iraq in 'six months'. Always in another six months.

[Novista]

For the contrarian view of Friedman's vision, try "The Long Emergency".

Plenty of discussion in that about the energy problem, and the unsustainability of 'the American Dream'.

[KillTheMessenger]

There is nothing like "clean coal" in the real world but there is also no short term solution without coal in the same real world. If we can make coal "cleaner" by just ten percent, we are on to something. As long as that does not mean neglecting ramping up the real solution solar (everything else is a long term non-starter) advances in coal technology have to be welcomed.

[Marlyn]

"the real solution solar" ???

The air is so dirty that it covers the solar panels making them inefficient. But we've got wind ... lots of it.

[WAstateliberal]

Thanks for this article, Mr. Biggers. A highly recommended read.

[scepticalobserver]

My problem with coal, clean or not, is the plan by the Air Force to build 6 new coal liquefaction plants in a search for a new long-term fuel source.

If the military begins to compete for energy resources consumers will lose. They will plead for priority on supply and because they'll offer lucrative contracts the coal companies will be more than glad to comply. It might take some pressure off the oil markets, but it will just be another stranglehold by another huge monopoly. We'll be trading OPEC for home-grown control by the coal lobby.

[KillTheMessenger]

DOD uses a measly 1.6% (or so) of US oil consumption. The military, while a huge energy hog, is not the problem. The problem are over sized car engines in over sized cars. The problem begins and ends at home: in millions of garages and driveways.

[Marlyn]

Right now, the military consumes 50% of USA oil.

[Nardwilly]

From May 21, 2007 "Energy Bulletin"

"FACT 1: The DoD's total primary energy consumption in Fiscal Year 2006 was 1100 trillion Btu. It corresponds to only 1% of total energy consumption in USA."


http://www.energybulletin.net/29925.html

In 21st century USA, ignorance is unnecessary.

[zull2]

The majority of the real pollution in regards to clean coal occurs during the actual mining and production of the coal. Anthracite coal, which is the actual term (I'm really sick of people using the marketing term "clean coal"), burns clean as it has been processed free of pollutants as you would find in lignite coals (the types that were burned extensively in 18th/19th century England). However, the process of processing out the byproducts, and the resulting disposal of those byproducts, is the real problem. Too often, bloggers like this just want to rant about something without explaining their point. When you say "clean coal", it's a marketing term that refers to anthracite, but many folks only hear "coal" and think the discussion is about lignite.

[joebhed]

I am anything but a fan of Tom Friedman. His contribution is self-overblown.
Up to a point, I agree with mp .
First, to coal.
The degree of future coal use will depend on a lot of current unknowns.
I think it important that we pursue clean-coal technologies right now.
Having said that, mountaintop mining a la West Virginia ought to be recognized as a crime against the planet, and its inhabitants, humanity. Those committing that crime should be jailed at hard labor rebuilding those mountains.
As for the other means of mining coal, the unions representing the workers should be responsible for determining the safety standards required to operate any coal mine. I think it appropriate that we have a moratorium awaiting that change.
And, in that meantime, an economic war on carbon ought to be fought for the timeliest possible development of carbon capture and storage technology, with a goal of its commercialization in ten years, and its widespread appplication to retrofit in fifteen years.
In the meantime we should begin tomorrow morning shutting down the dirtiest coal plants in the country, while simultaneously replacing them with newer state-of-the-art coal technologies.
All of this change should be funded by an immediate tax on carbon that funds both the technology development and the coal plant replacements.
And, of course, the tax would also fund maximization of cost-effective energy efficiency investment policies along with the maximum amount of renewable energy technologies of all kinds.

[mpkirby]

HuffPost's Pick

Does globalization not happen if it only affects 2% of the indian population?

If your point is that Friedman's arguements don't apply to everyone on the planet, I think he'd be the first to admit that.

Since 50% of this country's electricity comes from coal would a better statement be.

"The future of this country lies with coal -- Now do you want it to be clean?"

To change that large a percentage of the electrical generation capacity will require decades of work.

I guess I'm not sure your point. Friedman is an economist with a fairly strong focus on globalization. I'm not sure he is either green or not green.

Eventually this country has to come to the realization that the 50% of electricity generated from coal and 20% from nuclear needs to be replaced with something.

And solar and wind just aren't going to do it for a while -- So instead of hand-wringing and protesting, perhaps something a bit more constructive would be useful.

How do we:
- Create and Invest in technologies that produce this 70% of electrical production
- Conserve so we don't have to build as much.
- Maximize the investment in existing infrastructure -- Clean coal? Reduced emissions? Partial C02 sequestration?

I think economics that recognizes both "green" and "not green" principles and attempts to blend them into a realistic energy policy is what we need.

Attack Friedman for being myopic, or short sited. But not because his version of myopia is different

[argeec]

Friedman is not an economist. He used to be a self-styled "expert" on the middle east - until it became obvious to informed people that he had no clue( see his promotion of war with Iraq).
He is just another windbag out to make a buck on whatever topic of the moment he can sell. He is apparently well-connected enough to get his stuff published. But then being well-connected is key, isn't it?

[marinara]

Way to Go Jeff!