Tom Friedman: apologist for the faux enviros

This commentary by James Howard Kunstler on Tom Friedman's "green" essay in last Sunday's NYT magazine gets right at the heart of a major disconnect on the way environmental issues are widely written about today -- that we can live the way that we do today, and need only find a way to do it sustainably. It's just not possible.

From Kunstler.com:

Tom Friedman, celebrated New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat, riffed on (or around) the issues of climate change and energy in that newspaper's Sunday Magazine this week (>"The Power of Green"), and managed, in the process, to misunderstand just about every implication these conjoined problems present. Friedman's specious thinking is symptomatic of exactly what is wrong with our public discussion of these matters generally, and their presentation in mainstream media in particular.

I'm fond of saying that if America could harness the power it wastes blowing smoke up its own ass, we could magically escape our energy-and-climate-change predicament. I say this repeatedly to counter the increasing volume of lies we tell ourselves in order to maintain the illusion that we can continue living the way we do. Like so many other commentators suffering from cranial-rectosis, Friedman believes that we can keep on running our Happy Motoring utopia if we just switch fuels.