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.

Friedman gives no indication that he understands the fundamentals of the global oil situation. He writes:

People change when they have to -- not when we tell them -- and falling oil prices make them have to. That is why if we are looking for a Plan B for Iraq -- a way of pressing for political reform in the Middle East without going to war again -- there is no better tool than bringing down the price of oil.

This is a fascinating statement. It's predicated on the idea that the US can achieve "energy independence," which is itself predicated on the further idea that we can accomplish this by switching out gasoline for ethanol. This is such an elementary error in thinking that it would be funny if it wasn't the lead story in the flagship of the mainstream media. As a Pennsylvania farmer put it to me in February: "It looks like we're going to burn up the last remaining six inches of Midwest topsoil in our gas-tanks." Friedman's statement also ignores the facts that running cars on ethanol would make no material difference in the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, or that ethanol is 20 percent less efficient than gasoline, meaning we would have to produce and use that much more of the stuff just to stay where we are.

Where climate change is concerned, this is a variation of the "Red Queen syndrome" (from Alice in Wonderland) in which one has to run faster and faster to stay in place. It also fails to take into account the tragic ramifications of setting up competition between food for humans and crops for motor fuels just at the point when a growing scarcity of oil-and-gas-based soil "inputs" (as well increasing climate problems in the grain belt) will drastically lower American crop yields. The symptoms of this unintended consequence have already begun to present themselves -- for instance, January's food riots in Mexico, which resulted from Mexican corn being sold to American ethanol distillers rather than Mexican cornmeal millers, who couldn't match their bids.

Friedman goes on to tout Wal-Mart's mendacious campaign to "green" up its operations by, among other things, improving the mileage of its truck fleet from 6-mpg to 12-mpg. He writes:

Take Wal-Mart. The world's biggest retailer woke up several years ago, its CEO Lee Scott told me, and realized with regard to the environment its customers "had higher expectations for us than we had for ourselves." So Scott hired a sustainability expert, Jib Ellison, to tutor his company. The first lesson Ellison preached was that going green was a whole new way for Wal-Mart to cut costs and drive its profits.

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