Thomas Friedman of The New York Times has been rolling in green editorials.
In mid-April he wrote a major piece called “The Power of Green,” in which he made the case for his generation to follow the footsteps of the Greatest Generation to become the Greenest Generation. He writes:
We in America talk like we’re already “the greenest generation,” as the business writer Dan Pink once called it. But here’s the really inconvenient truth: We have not even begun to be serious about the costs, the effort and the scale of change that will be required to shift our country, and eventually the world, to a largely emissions-free energy infrastructure over the next 50 years.
More recently, Friedman has weighed in on how to begin to change the environmental decisions our political leaders make — it starts with the upcoming election. In “Turning the Election Green” Friedman proposes a presidential debate on the environment and energy. According to a poll Friedman cites, done for the Center for American Progress, a substantial percentage of Americans want policies to address global warming and redirect our energy policy.
Yesterday, Friedman had another piece, “Our Green Bubble.” He writes:
Here are the facts: Our worst enemies, like Iran, have been emboldened by all their petrodollars. The vast majority of scientists tell us that global warming caused by our burning of fossil fuels is a real danger. And with three billion new consumers from India, Russia and China joining the world economy, it is inevitable that manufacturing clean, green power systems, appliances, homes and cars will be the next great global industry. It has to be, or we will not survive as a species.
And yet … and yet our president and our Congress still won’t give us an energy bill that would create the legal and economic framework to address these issues at the speed and scale required.
I might give the new Congress a few more months to show their stuff, but the central point is unassailable: It’s about time clean energy and climate change took center stage.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
