Articles by Joseph Romm

Spotlight on Thomas Friedman

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:

Scary stuff

More and more experts are saying global warming is as grave a threat to our national security (PDF) as terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Some in the media are coming to the same view.

The Financial Times set up their coverage with the following scenario, pulled from a Pentagon memo:

A new report

The Center for American Progress has a terrific new report on "Global Warming and the Future of Coal" by Ken Berlin and Robert Sussman.

The report explores what to do about the explosive growth in coal plant construction projected for the coming quarter century -- 1,400 gigawatts of electricity by 2030, with more than 10 percent in the U.S. alone.

In the absence of emission controls, these new plants will increase worldwide annual emissions of carbon dioxide by approximately 7.6 billion metric tons by 2030. These emissions would equal roughly 50 percent of all fossil fuel emissions over the past 250 years.

So we must have emissions controls on the vast majority of those plants. The report looks at a variety of policy measures that might achieve that goal and recommends:

Pollution hasn’t gone down of its own accord

It was only a matter of time before Planet Gore got around to the most famous bit of disinformation.

The big lie is to tout the fact that the air has gotten cleaner in recent decades while conveniently ignoring the fact that the reason for this achievement is environmental activism leading to tough air pollution standards. Progressives must push back hard on this big lie (something John Kerry failed to do with George Bush in the second Presidential debate).

Planet Gore proclaims proudly today: