And third, we need a national renewable portfolio standard that says to every utility, “By 2025, you need to produce 30 percent of your electricity by renewable power: wind, solar, biomass, hydro, you name it.”

FP: In your book, you paint a picture of what it’s like to live in “20 ECE”—year 20 of the energy climate era. Everyone has what you call an “SBB,” a smart black box hooked to their electric utility and, of course, to their iPod. And they drive a “RESU”—a rolling energy storage unit, which is another name for their car. What are you trying to do with that vignette?

TF: To give people a sense of how all this would work as a system, because if you don’t have a system, you don’t have a solution. What you end up with is corn ethanol in Iowa.

Only a system will allow ordinary people to do extraordinary things. And if ordinary people can’t do extraordinary things, we have no chance to achieve the scale we need to address this problem. If I have to depend on educating you about the 20 green things you need to do every day, you can forget about that. We need a system in place so that when you walk into a room, the lights automatically turn on, and when you walk out of the room, they automatically turn off. That’s a system: you don’t have to think about it.

Every technology I describe in that chapter of the book—everything—already exists. It just doesn’t exist at speed, scope, scale, and price. Jeff Wacker from EDS Systems, a futurist, says it best: “The future’s already here, folks. It’s just not widely distributed.”

FP: You went to China for the Olympic Games, and I know you’ve been there many times in the past. Do you think China is serious about going green? Is China going to have a green revolution before the United States does?

TF: Every time I go to China, as I say in the book, it always strikes me that people speak with greater ease and breathe with greater difficulty. As the country grows, it gets more integrated with the world, standards of living rise, and people are able to move more and have more personal freedom. I don’t want to exaggerate it, but clearly it’s a more open place.

So, they speak with greater ease but they breathe with greater difficulty. And that’s a real tension. Right now, if you said, “Tom, snapshot today: Where’s China at? OK, choice: More growth or less pollution?” They’re going to go for more growth. Look what happened after the Olympics. They cleaned up Beijing for two weeks by shutting down factories and limiting driving. But as soon as the Olympics were over, they went back to the old system.

But you’re also getting a transition. You’re getting the birth of wind power and solar companies in China, so they’re seeing the market potential. And you’re seeing the rise of an environmental consciousness. The inertia and the momentum of the old, pure GDP system is much stronger than the green GDP system, but there is now a competition between the two.

China is hiding behind the United States, saying, “If the Americans aren’t going to do it, why should we?” When we move they will move, because we define modernity for them. They’ve copied us: our highways, our cars—the whole thing. And when we change, they will change.

FP: With the timing of this book, which comes out on September 8, you’re obviously hoping to inject your ideas into the political debate. What do you hope that “low-information voters”—apolitical people who may not necessarily read your book—will be able to take away from the discussion? What do you think will trickle down to those folks?

TF: It’s the incredible sense of opportunity here. It’s not just about saving the polar bears. It’s not just about saving three generations from climate change. It’s also about rising to the greatest economic opportunity that’s come along in a long, long, time.

It’s like training for the Olympic triathlon. If you make the Olympics and you run the race and do the whole triathlon, you may win. But if you don’t, even if you come in second or third, you’ll still be so much fitter, so much stronger, so much healthier, so much more respected, so much more secure. Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? Why would we not want to run this race?

Thomas Friedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a columnist for the New York Times, and the author of Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).