Foreign Policy:In
his speech to the Democratic National Convention last Thursday, U.S.
Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama promised, “In 10 years, we will
finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.” Is that even feasible?
Does anyone you talk to believe that’s doable?
Thomas Friedman: Well,
if you just talked about oil imports from the Middle
East, I think it is feasible. I don’t know exactly how he would
want to get there, but I think that it is a feasible goal if you’re just
talking about the percentage of our oil that comes from the Middle East.
FP: And what
about drilling? Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, his running
mate Gov. Sarah Palin, and President George W. Bush are implying that lifting
environmental restrictions on drilling is the way to promote energy
independence.
TF: Well, I think
it’s patent nonsense. No one believes that somehow offshore, there’s enough oil
in any near term and even the long term to provide us oil independence. It’s
the wrong approach because in a world that’s hot, flat, and crowded, fossil
fuels—and particularly crude oil—are going to be expensive and exhausting. Therefore
the focus should be on the next great global industry: clean energy technology.
When I hear McCain pounding the table for “drill, drill, drill,” it reminds me
of someone pounding the table for IBM Selectric typewriters on the eve of the
IT revolution.
I’m not against offshore drilling, by the way, because I
believe the technology and the safety has improved far beyond where it was back
in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, even. What I’m against is making it the centerpiece
of our energy policy. If all McCain said was, “Let’s drill, but let’s also
throw everything into innovating the next generation of clean-energy
technologies,” I’d say, “You’ve got it exactly right, pal.”
FP: Your new book
is called Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We
Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America. What do you mean by
a “green revolution” and how do we get there from here?
TF: The green
revolution is about how we produce abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons,
which are the answer to the big problems we face in the world today. I would
point to five problems, and they’re all related: Energy and resource supply and
demand, petrodictatorship, climate change, biodiversity loss, and energy
poverty. They all have one solution: abundant, cheap, clean, reliable
electrons. The search for and the discovery of a source of those electrons is
going to be the next great global industry. And I think the country that mounts
a revolution to be the leader of that industry is going to be a country whose
standard of living is going to improve, whose respect in the world is going to
improve, whose air is going to improve, whose innovation is going to improve,
and whose national security is going to improve. That’s what this book is
about.
I want a green-energy bubble. I want so many people throwing
crazy dollars at every idea, in every garage, that we have 100,000 people trying
100,000 things, five of which might work, and two might be the next green
Google. But I don’t want a Manhattan Project of 12 people in Los
Alamos. I want it to be like the IT revolution: everyone becoming
a programmer. Only in this case, it’s everyone becoming a green innovator. What
IT was to the 80s and 90s, ET, energy technology, will be to the early 21st century.
FP: What
conditions don’t exist right now that could create this bubble?
TF: Three things.
One is a price on carbon, a fixed, durable price signal that says, “Carbon is
always going to be this price.” Let’s just use a simple example: We put a floor
under the price of crude oil that says, “Oil simply will not fall below $110 a
barrel. If it does, we’ll tax it up.”
Second, we need to change the bargain we have with our
electric and natural gas power utilities. Your dad was right when he came into
your room and you’d left the lights on and he said, “What, do you own stock in
the utility company?” He was right, because the more you left your lights on,
the more money the utility made. And we need to change that bargain—this is
already going on in California—so that utilities are paid by how much energy
they help you save, not by how much energy they help you consume.
