It Won't Be Pretty ...

As I said in Code Green for America, America needs a new sense of national purpose. Thomas L. Friedman writes about it in his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America: We need to dedicate ourselves to cleaning up our energy act. Instead of continuing to use as much of the Energy from Hell as we do — CO2-emitting coal, oil, and natural gas — we need to switch to renewables: solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, biomass, and so forth. Even nuclear. Renewables are the Energy from Heaven.

If we clean up our energy act, we can sell the technology to the Chinese and other countries whose people are going capitalistic, entrepreneurial, and middle-class by the billions.

If we clean up our energy act, we can put petrodictators in the Muslim/Arab world out of business. That will promote their populations' going capitalistic, entrepreneurial, and middle-class — instead of breeding human cannon fodder for the Osama bin Ladens who'd like to tear down the polyglot modern world and replace it with repressive Islamist sharia.

If we clean up our energy act and get the rest of the world to follow suit, we can head off the worst that global warming bodes to inundate us with by the middle of this century, and manage the damage that it is already too late to avert.

If we and the world clean up our energy act, we can save species beyond number that would otherwise disappear — forever — after eons on this earth. Most of them are species we haven't even discovered yet. We need species diversity to provide new sources of lifesaving medicines, to keep the global ecosystem afloat, healthy, and resilient, and simply because for us to allow countless living species to perish just so we can keep our Hummers gassed up would be, frankly, beneath contempt. For us to let that happen to millions of species we have yet to discover and catalog would diminish us in our own eyes irretrievably.


Friedman makes all that abundantly clear in the first half of his book. In the second half, he gets down to brass tacks and tells us exactly what we need to do.

It's not pretty, folks.

Because it isn't going to come cheap.

Code Green, as Friedman dubs the green revolution we need to bring about, faces a steep uphill battle. Coal-oil-gas are so entrenched that we will need to systematically make big sacrifices in order to supplant them with solar-photovoltaic-wind-hydro-geothermal-biomass-(and yes even) nuclear.

Many of the sacrifices will hit us in the form of new or increased taxes: "a carbon tax [directly on carbon emitters], a gasoline tax increase ... a cap-and-trade system that indirectly taxes carbon emitters" (p. 251).

Some of the sacrifices will hit us in more subtle ways. For instance, Friedman talks of a "renewable energy mandate." In Thomas Friedman Column: "Bailout (and Buildup)" I mentioned his calling for a U.S. government mandate that "every utility in the country ... produce 20 percent of its power from clean, non-CO2-emitting, energy sources — wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, biomass — by 2025."

Sounds good on paper, right? Well, until the alternative, renewable energy sources are "taken to scale" and head "down the cost-volume learning curve," they'll come at a premium price. Who is going to pay that price? It will ultimately be the consumers of the "clean electrons" these energy sources will provide — you and me.

Unless, of course, Uncle Sam subsidizes the clean electrons. Then it will be the taxpayers who'll bear the cost burdens — again, you and me.