In a half hour interview, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman talks with old friend, Terry Gross of WHYY's Fresh Air, about the revelations in his new book, "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." Terry Gross describes the book:
"Hot" refers to global warming, "flat" to the global economy that has put the American middle class in competition with workers around the world, and "crowded" refers to rapid population growth. Friedman says hot, flat, and crowded have converged to tighten energy supplies, expand the extinction of plants and animals, deepen energy poverty, strengthen petro-dictatorships, and accelerate climate change.
This interview is being transcribed in a somewhat abbreviated form, and Terry Gross's questions are turned into subject headings.
"Drill, baby, drill!": the chant at the Republican National Convention
I started to imagine a column where the Saudi, Russian, and Venezuelan observers at the Republican convention were watching this. What would they be saying to each other? They would be up there in one of those sky boxes, high-fivin' each other. It is happy days are here again! Drill, baby, drill! Because what Giuliani was leading that crowd into saying was, "Let's stay addicted to oil!" And boy, that is the best news in the world for the Venezuelan, Russian and Saudi delegates. They couldn't have scripted a chant like that better themselves.
What is it that they want? They're looking for the US to remain focused on fossil fuels and not throw everything -- and I mean everything! -- into innovation around clean energy technologies and a clean energy system. When I think about that "drill, baby, drill" mantra, you know what I think of? It's if that Republican convention, on the eve of the personal computer, had been up chanting, "Let's stick with IBM Selectric typewriters!" "IBM Selectrics forever!" "Type, type, type!"
We're on the eve of a new technological revolution. It's as if on the eve of the PC and the internet the entire convention was standing up and and chanting for IBM Selectrics. What a wonderful bridge to the 20th century!
Where the candidates stand on energy: John McCain
I'm very disappointed in John McCain. He's someone I've respected as a leader, as a political figure, and someone who, as I thought about this campaign before it began... I thought, "Wow, this is great! For the first time we're going to have two green candidates." I don't think that anymore. There has been a bill pending before the US Senate for the past year that they've attempted to pass eight times. This gets a little technical, but it's very important. It's a bill to extend the production and investment tax credits for wind and solar energy. So if someone wants to start a company to put solar panels up, you'd get a tax credit which would be enormously beneficial to do that. Or to start a wind company, you'd get a production credit. What's happening is that on December 31st the existing tax credits are going to expire. For the last year the US Senate has been trying to pass an extension of these tax credits and it has failed, now, eight times! All eight times that bill was voted on, John McCain failed to show up. Including one time when he was actually in Washington,D.C., and wouldn't come to vote. The bill failed by one vote.
That is very disappointing to me especially since the biggest concentrated solar project in the world right now is on paper, ready to go, and outside of where? Phoenix, Arizona! It involved between 1500 and 2000 jobs, as much steel -- in this big, manufacturing, blue-collar project -- as the Golden Gate bridge. And yet John McCain did not show up one time. Obama showed up three times and voted in favor. McCain did not show up once. That's one disappointment I have.
The second disappointment? He supported a lifting of the federal gasoline tax for the summer driving season. Which such an absurd, ridiculous give-away of federal tax dollars to encourage the worst kind of behavior. Summer driving would only drive up demand for oil and make us more addicted.
Lastly, he has been really misleading the American people -- making them stupid by telling them that if we just drill, drill, drill today, your gasoline price at the pump will come down today. And therefore if Obama doesn't say drill-drill-drill too, Obama is for raising your price at the pump today. It is bloody dishonest. It is making people stupid and frankly I find it disgusting at this critical moment.
What about Barack Obama?
What I feel comes from Obama -- all the right words are there. I've read his website and his energy platform. When he speaks, he does speak in these terms of a transformative energy revolution and having it be the foundation of a new American industry with more jobs. But I don't feel it's the core of what he's about. I don't feel it's really central. I feel like it's a box he's checked along with health care and immigration. So I give him high marks for understanding the importance of the issue, but I don't give him very high marks for real passion or talking honestly about what we're really going to need to do if we're going to lead this revolution.
"It's more important to change your leaders than your light bulbs!" Friedman
We need to solve this problem. It's like the IT revolution. We need 100,000 innovators in 100,000 garages trying 100,000 things, 100 of which will be really promising, 10 will be workable, and three will be the next Google! How do you trigger that? Well, the only way you trigger that, in my view, is if you have a market. And we have a market, but that market's got to be shaped with the right price signals and the right standards, the right rules and regulations. Basically, my argument is that it's leaders who write the rules. They're the ones who pass the tax law, the carbon tax, the gasoline tax. They raise it or lower it. They're the ones who write the rules on energy standards and efficiency. Only if you get the rules right for the market, so it produced fuels from heaven -- that is clean fuels, not fuels from hell! -- you're not going to have this explosion of innovation that we need.
Individuals are not enough. Leadership is needed.
It goes back to one of the central arguments. This is a huge-scale problem. This is the biggest industrial project -- to try to move from a dirty fuel system. That's what we have now. We have a dirty-fuel system based on coal, oil, and natural gas. It's a system that works really well. Six blocks from this studio there's a gasoline station that will fill up your call for $3 a gallon or $4 a gallon or whatever it is today. That system works really well. If we want to replace that, it's a huge-scale project. If you don't shape the market to give you the kind of innovation and scale that we need, you've really just got a hobby. I have hobbies. I used to build model airplanes. I play golf. I don't see working with others to save the world as a hobby.
The gas tax as burden on the working class
That's why it should be revenue-neutral: we should tax what we don't want, such as people using fossil fuels, raising taxes on that, and lower taxes on what we do want, which is people working. Which is why whatever tax increase we impose on oil, coal, or natural gas we should then take off on the other side from people's weekly payroll deduction. To me, it should be revenue neutral for all but the wealthiest Americans.
Denmark
After the 1973 war and the first Arab oil shock, look at what America did and what Denmark did. What we did was say, "Wow! We've got to really take on this issue." So beginning with President Ford and President Carter we said we were going to double the fuel efficiency of American cars from about 13 mpg then to I think it was 27.5. We were going to do it over ten years and we did it. We were so successful doing that we helped break OPEC in the late '70's and early '80's and crater the price of oil.
That worked out so well that Ronald Reagan, when he came along, said, "That's enough of that!" He ripped off the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had put on the White House roof -- they were recently auctioned online. And he put a stop to all that regulatory efficiency. So we just kind of stopped. In fact, we have not raised our fuel efficiency standards for basically thirty-odd years until just last year. Denmark, by contrast, well, they fortunately found some oil and gas in the North Sea, but that wasn't the key. They put a tax on gasoline and for a while they said people couldn't even drive on Sunday. They imposed a CO2 tax. On an electric bill in Denmark, you can actually see a CO2 tax on there. They invested in huge amounts of energy efficiency systems to capture the heat from coal and from incinerating waste products and used it for home heating. They took a whole series of efficiency steps and taxes and incentives. The net result of which was what? Their economy must have been crushed, right?
Unemployment in Denmark today? 1.6%.
Oh, but their companies must have absolutely been hammered! The leading wind company in the world today, Vestas -- one of three wind turbines in the world today built in Denmark. Novazymes and Denesco are the two leading ethanol enzymetic companies in the world are out of Denmark. In other words, what these rules, prices and taxes did was shape the market in Denmark, stimulating all this innovation around energy efficiency, producing new Danish companies to do this, and then went global, ending up buy the American wind companies that went bust in the '80's when Reagan took the subsidies away from wind. And the US Congress, Democrats included. They were bought by Denmark and today are major Denmark companies. By the way, some of those solar companies that we spawned in the '70's and '80's -- they went bust also when we removed our subsidies and taxes. They were bought by Japan.
I can't tell you how grateful the innovators and corporate leaders of Japan and Denmark are today for all the money America invested in research in wind and solar, spawning companies here which went bust in the '80's when we removed the subsidies from them. ...One of the leading wind innovators in America, in fact, was given a medal of honor by the government of Denmark! All his technology ended up there. Have a nice day!
Political implications of US oil addiction
Look at Russia and Europe since 1989. We thought the fall of the Berlin wall was going to herald a new irreversible era in democracy and peace in Europe. And for the first 15 years it really did that. But those 15 years coincided with oil in the $20 to $50 a barrel range. As we exploded out of that range all the way up to $140, it basically has galvanized, enriched and empowered a whole group of petro-dictatorships that are now forming a counter-tide -- a petro-dictatorship tide -- to the free-market-democracy tide after the fall of the Berlin wall. You can see that in Putin's Russia today.
I coined in my book what I call the first law of what I call "petro-politics." It argues that the price of oil and the pace of freedom operate in inverse relation. What I did was to simply grab the price of oil from the late 1970's and then then 2oo5. If you do that, it looks at rough numbers like $80 and fell in the '90's down to as low as $10 and then back up to $80 in the early 2000's. It looks like a "V" if you do that. Then I went to Freedom House and got the indexes for Russia, Venezuela, Iran and Nigeria, and I overlaid the Freedom House index -- indexes of parliaments open, free and fair elections, womens' groups begun, NGO's, etc. -- and if I overlaid it on top of that, what it looks just the opposite. So you see that the price of oil and freedom have an inverse correlation.
Reagan's "downfall of the Soviet Union" was really about the price of oil
I believe that. It's not just me saying it, I'm quoting Russian economists ... I gave a talk in Moscow a couple of years ago at the US embassy about this issue. In the talk, I said that it was -- with all due respect to Ronald Reagan -- $10/barrel of oil that brought down the Soviet Union which, after all, was the world's biggest oil producer. After the talk, I was talking to the economist Vladimir Mau, and I said to him that it was $10/barrel oil that brought down the Soviet Union and he said, "No, Tom, you're wrong. It was $80/barrel oil followed by $10/barrel oil that brought down the Soviet Union." And what he meant was that what $80/barrel oil did in the '70's was to really sucker the Soviet state into thinking it was stronger than it was. It extended itself into all kinds of areas of subsidies and imports and then when $10/barrel oil came and they had to withdraw from all those areas, the whole system collapsed. By the way, Iran is ripe for the exact same phenomenon!
A couple of years ago, Iran exported $44 billion worth of oil. That was probably 80% or 90% of all Iranian exports and foreign currency earnings. The rest were probably carpets and pistachios! In the same year, Iran's government spent $25 billion on subsidies -- subsidies of fuel, gasoline in Tehran was like 30 cents a gallon; subsidies of housing, education, all kinds of building; subsidies of food, etc. Now, imagine if the price of oil were cut in half. Suddenly Iran's total amount of subsides was the same amount as the entire government budget. There's a term for that in economics. It's called "unsustainable"! So Iran, which has about 12% unemployment today at $110/barrel oil, imagine what happens to that regime -- which is basically just using this oil money to buy off its people -- imagine if that regime suddenly has to deal with $40 or $50/barrel oil!
Imagine what it does to Hezbollah! Hezbollah launched a war against Israel a couple of years ago with an attack across the border. The Israel came in and bombed all the Shiite neighborhoods in Beirut and smashed up the place. Suddenly the morning after the war, Hezbollah, and Iranian-backed militia, was out there telling its people, "No problem! We'll rebuild your homes!" They reminded me of a group of rich college students who rent a house on the beach for a weekend, smash up the place completely, then tell the landlord, they flip him the keys and say, "No problem! Dad will pay!" Well, Iran was "dad" and dad had tons of our oil money. So Hezbollah could launch a war, get their housing areas completely ravaged and then say to people, "No problem!"
Our oil addiction indirectly funds terrorism
It's absolutely doing so. It's funding just about every bad trend in the world today. If we could find a way to truly get off our addiction to oil... It isn't just win/win. It's win! win! win! win! win! Our trade deficit dramatically improves; our dollar strengthens. We weaken the worst regimes in the world. We mitigate global warming. We clean up our air. We become healthier, more secure, more economically strong, competitive, and respected in the world. And there are people out there saying "drill, baby, drill"? What planet are these people inhabiting? What am I missing here?
Who are the enablers of the addiction? Why aren't we changing?
Well, the oil companies are the enablers number one. Huge campaign contributors to all parties frankly but certainly longtime and deep contributors to the Republican party. Does it strike you as odd that here we have this bill before the Senate -- just a simple thing -- for extending the renewable energy tax credits for wind and solar. By the way, for solar it was eight years, but for wind it was one year. And in the solar and wind industries, they are completely frozen now because the tax credits haven't been extended. People are finishing projects covered by this year's tax credit and virtually no one is starting project. Unless you're T. Boone Pickens and have $4 billion.
You couldn't make that up -- that in this key time in America we are basically grinding down our wind and solar industries. Now we had a president named George Bush who told us we're addicted to oil. So don't you think that president might lift a finger -- just one little pinkie! -- to invite the people in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, after eight times trying to pass these extenders for wind and solar ... might invite them to Camp David for the weekend and say, "Guys, gals, can't we work this out?" Have you heard the president slamming the table for that? No. It's "drill, baby, drill"! It's crazy!
Bottom line: Why isn't a bill like that getting passed?
It's two things. It's the oil companies. You also have the Republicans in the Senate who have not wanted this bill to be passed because they don't want the Democrats to get a victory in this election year. So you have some really interesting things going on here. Our premier solar company, First Solar, is in Toledo, Ohio. And their own senator -- Voinivich -- voted against extending solar tax credits. So what did First Solar do? I'm watching this campaign and all this stuff and Ohio and everyone denouncing NAFTA -- but while everybody was out there denouncing NAFTA, talking about working class jobs being lost in Ohio, First Solar was opening its first factory in East Germany because the East Germans were providing the tax credits and the market for a solar industry. So 300 great engineering jobs went from Ohio to East Germany and their own senator voted against them.
[Senator] Sununu from New Hampshire voted to defeat the solar energy tax credit when the best solar equipment company maybe in the world -- GT Solar -- is in New Hampshire, his own state. How many times do you think oil senators vote against oil companies in America? Never! When it comes to solar or wind? No problem. They don't give campaign contributions. They can't twist your arm. They can't fly you on their airplane. They're not big enough yet.
How do you shatter the boring, "granola" image of the green energy industry?
That's what the book is about. The problem is the term "green" was really owned by its opponents. To name something is to own it. The people who named it "green" named it a "liberal, tree-hugging, girlie-man, sissy, unpatriotic, vaguely French!
What I'm out to do in this book is to rename green. Geo-political. Geo-strategic. Geo-economic. Innovative. Competitive. Patriotic. "Green" is the new red, white and blue. Because this is all of those things. To conservatives, I say, "Look, this book is a plan to make America stronger, more energy and nationally secure, more competitive and entrepreneurial, more economically healthy and more respected in the world. (Oh, and by the way, all that stuff Al Gore talks about? We'll take care of that as a by-product!) To liberals and "greens" I say it's a plan to make America greener. (Oh, and by the way, all that stuff Dick Cheney talks about? We'll take care of that as a by-product.)
I'm doing it because I honestly believe this is an issue joining both of those things. It not only does it intellectually, but it must. Because if you don't -- if "green" is owned as a kind of Birkenstock-wearing hippie wine-and-cheese-eating issue and isn't seen as an issue about national security and growth and making American stronger, healthier, more competitive ... then we'll never have scale. Until you have scale on this issue, you really have nothing.
What can we do as individuals?
What I argue in the book for is a clean energy system. Because only a system will allow ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Ordinary people are struggling with a mortgage and just get through their day. They can't think of the 205 easy ways to go green! We need a system that turns off the lights when you leave the room. We need a system that will create all this energy efficiency for you automatically. That's why a system is so important.
What can individuals do? There are things you want to do personally and things you want to do politically. Be a work in progress. Nobody's perfect. I've got plenty of energy hoggery in my life. But we're trying to be a work in progress. When I can afford to buy a hybrid car, I buy a hybrid car. When I can afford to install a solar system, I do that. Everyone can find something. Maybe they'll take the subway once a week. Maybe they'll ride to work when they can. Maybe their kids will (god!) walk to school or maybe not have mom or dad drive them in an SUV and sit in the parking lot idling for thirty minutes waiting for them to get out. I once asked Amory Lovins, "How do you be environmentally energy conscious?" He just said, "Pay attention."
So that's on the personal level. On the political level, what you want to hear from a politician is, "Are you ready to impose a tax on carbon and gasoline and offset it with a reduction of payroll taxes, so we're incentivizing people to work more and consume few dirty fuels. Are you ready to do that? Are you ready to support these production and tax credits and make it a no-brainer to invest in alternative energy? And are you ready to support what are called "renewable portfolio standards"? Those are the standards that say to your utility in your state that by the year 2025 you have to have produced 30% of your energy from renewable power. Why is that important? Because it creates a huge market. The EU today -- the European Union -- already has a renewable portfolio standard for all of Europe. That's why all the renewable energy companies are going over there to try to do business and start companies.
What do we have? We have 26 states that have renewable portfolio standards and another 24 that don't. So we have a completely balkanized market which doesn't then attract the companies. The next thing you have to do is change the bargain between you and your utility. For 100 years, our electric companies have gotten rich by getting you to consume more energy. Remember when your mom and dad, when you left the lights on, came into your room and said, "Excuse me! Do you own stock in the electric company?" There was a reason. If the lights were on, the electric company's stock went up. We need to change that bargain. It's already begun in California and Idaho: your electric company gets rich doing the right thing. It gets rich in terms of how much energy its customers save years after year, rather than how much electricity it gets them to consume. We need to change that bargain for every utility in the country. So those are the things I focus on in terms of legislation.
In your personal life? Do what ever you can. Whatever you do -- when you buy different light bulbs, when you buy a different car, when you demand different insulation, when you look for energy-efficient products -- you're creating another little opening and widening of the market for those goods. That's a really good thing.
What went through your mind when you heard that Sarah Palin, a vice-presidential nominee, doesn't believe in the connection between human activity and climate change?
The northern edge of Alaska is melting off into the ocean and she doesn't believe mankind has anything to do with climate change. I'd just have to ask her a very simple question: "Have you studied this issue? Have you read the literature? Have you talked to a climatologist in your own state about it? Or is this simply a political mantra that you've gotten because it's convenient and fits with your expedient political needs of the moment? On what basis are you making that claim? We have the intergovernment panel on climate, the world's 2500 top climatologists who have concluded that mankind is indeed interfering with the climate. Do you have science to the contrary?"
The point is not global warming. The chapter in the book on climate is called "global weirding," which is a term coined by Lovins, because I think that's a much better description of what's going to go on. The weather is going to get weird! It isn't just going to get warm. What happens with climate change is that you get extremes: hotter hots, longer droughts, wetter wets, more frequent and forceful hurricanes, tornadoes showing up in cities where they've never shown up before... That's what's going to happen. To this it's this gentle, little global warming -- that's not what's going to go on. The weather's going to get weird and, in case you haven't noticed, the weather's getting weird! To me the really unnerving thing about this moment -- and I relate this discussion I have in the book with Nate Lewis' energy chemist at CalTech ... I came to Nate one day and said, "Nate, what is it about Katrina that bothered us so much?" He rolled that idea around in his head for a moment and said, "Who made it hot?" And I said, "What?" And he said, "What's going on now is we've introduced so much CO2 into Mother Nature's operating system, we don't know anymore the difference between an act of god and an act of man."
Who made it hot? We don't know anymore.
