Thomas Friedman on "Petropolitics"
Amy Goodman Democracy Now
We speak with Thomas Friedman, the Foreign Affairs columnist for the New York Times. A three-time Pulitzer prize winner, Thomas Friedman is one of this country's most-widely read political commentators. His books include the award-winning "From Beirut to Jerusalem" and "The Lexus and the Olive Tree." His latest book is "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century." Later this month, he will host "Addicted To Oil: Thomas Friedman Reporting", a television special on the politics of this country's reliance on oil, or what he calls "petropolitics." "Addicted To Oil" airs on the Discovery Channel on June 24.
* Thomas Friedman. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist. His latest book is "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century." His television news special, "Addicted To Oil: Thomas Friedman Reporting", airs on the Discovery Channel on June 24.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the film, Thomas Friedman?
THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Thanks for having me. The basic thrust of the film is that this is not your parents' energy crisis. Now we’re in a totally new world, for four basic reasons. The first is that we're in a War on Terrorism today in which we're funding both sides in the war with our energy purchases. We fund the U.S. Army, Navy and Marine Corps with our tax dollars, we fund Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, the regimes that support them, and the charities that support them indirectly, with our energy purchases. So we're funding both sides in the War on Terrorism, and that’s flat out nuts.
Second, the world is flat, I believe, and three billion new consumers just walked on to the playing field from India, China, Brazil, the Soviet Union, all with their own version of the American dream: a house, a car, a toaster, a microwave and a refrigerator. If we don't find an alternative way to satisfy their energy needs and demands, we're going to see this planet burned up, choked up, and smoked up so much faster than people realize. And that leads to the third reason this is not your parents’ energy crisis, which is green technology, clean power. This is going to be the growth industry of the 21st century to satisfy all of these new consumers. And we want America to be a dominant player in that industry. The way we get America to be a dominant player in that clean power industry is not by telling our automakers, our industrialists, “Oh, don't toughen up your standards on energy and fuel efficiency, we don't want you to do anything hard.” That's precisely what will lead to China, Japan and Europe taking the lead in that industry.
Number four of the reasons this is not your parents energy crisis is that we thought the fall of the Berlin Wall was going to be unleashing an unstoppable tide of free markets and free people, and for about 10 years it did just that. But basically, that 10 years was coincident with oil at $20 to $40 a barrel. As oil moved to $40 to $70 a barrel of oil, we've seen the tide of free markets and free people unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall, meeting a counter-tide of what I would call petro-authoritarianism. These are authoritarian regimes, some of them elected authoritarians, like in Venezuela, who are using their huge oil windfalls to ensconce their authoritarianism and power. So what are we seeing in the world today? The wave of free markets and free people that was unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall is now meeting a counter-wave of petro-authoritarianism, by petrol estates called Russia, Iran, Sudan, Venezuela, Kazakhstan, Equatorial Guinea, you can do gown the list. And they're creating a very poisonous geo-politics.
(7 June 2006)
The rest of the interview is about the Middle East. It was rather brave of Thomas Friedman to venture onto Democracy Now, and face a grilling from Amy Goodman. Goodman continues with her tough, serious-minded broadcast journalism that's largely missing from the U.S. airwaves. -BA
Not Your Parents' Energy Crisis'
Thomas L. Friedman on his new movie, Big Oil, Zarqawi's death and comparing General Motors to a crack dealer.
Brian Braiker, Newsweek
Thomas L. Friedman is known to most as a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter-turned-columnist and author of several best-selling books. But he’s also got a side gig hosting occasional documentaries for the Discovery Channel that explore topics ranging from the Israeli West Bank barrier, the roots of 9/11 and outsourcing. His latest, “Addicted to Oil,” will premier at the Silverdocs Film Festival in Silver Spring, Md., next week before airing on the cable channel later this summer.
“This is not your parents’ energy crisis,” Friedman says at the outset of the hourlong film
[Friedman repeats many of the points he made in the interview on Democracy Now, above]
NEWSWEEK: What do you hope to accomplish with this movie?
Thomas L. Friedman: Traditionally, what has happened around the issue of green is that very subtly its opponents named it—“liberal, tree-hugging, sissy, girlyman, unpatriotic, vaguely French.” Really what we’re trying to do in this film, and really with everything that I’ve been writing in my column, is to rename green as “geostrategic, geopolitical, capitalistic, patriotic.” Green is the new red, white and blue....Bringing it back home, though, how can being green save jobs in America?
...Q: Bringing it back home, though, how can being green save jobs in America?
First of all, being green is going to be a source of so much industry in the 21st century, whether it’s green appliances, green design, green manufacturing, green consulting. The example we try to give is with the Texas Instruments factory. By thinking green and green design—taking massive energy out of a building before you even build it—you’re able to potentially save so much money that you can keep a factory here rather than move it to China or Taiwan or Singapore.
Q: Speaking of China, you point out that they are doing quite a bit in terms of sustainable development.
My point on that is that China is going to have to go green. Not because they’ve been listening to Rachel Carson—it’s because they can’t breathe. What happened in China with telephones is that China went from no phones to cell phones. They skipped the whole landline phase in a lot of areas. I was just interviewing today Jeff Immelt, the head of GE. The point Jeff was making is that he thinks they’ll do the same on energy. The good news is that if China leaps ahead, they may provide the breakthrough for really cheap solar power, really cheap coal-gasification. The bad news is if we don’t keep up innovating, they’re going to dominate that industry in the 21st century.
(9 June 2006)
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