Tom Friedman actually says something worthwhile

[Agathon]

I'm not a fan of his, but he's right on the money here. If only journalists had had the balls to tell the truth in such an appropriate tone as soon as chimpy entered the White House.

Favourite quotes are bolded

Addicted to oil

By Thomas L. Friedman

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Two years ago, President George W. Bush declared that America was "addicted to oil," and, by gosh, he was going to do something about it. Well, now he has. Now we have the new Bush energy plan: "Get more addicted to oil."

Actually, it's more sophisticated than that: Get Saudi Arabia, our chief oil pusher, to up our dosage for a little while and bring down the oil price just enough so the renewable energy alternatives can't totally take off. Then try to strong-arm Congress into lifting the ban on drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

It's as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: "C'mon guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe.

"I promise, next year, we'll all go straight. I'll even put a wind turbine on my presidential library. But for now, give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude."

It is hard for me to find the words to express what a massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy this is. But it gets better. The president actually had the gall to set a deadline for this drug deal:

"I know the Democratic leaders have opposed some of these policies in the past," Bush said. "Now that their opposition has helped drive gas prices to record levels, I ask them to reconsider their positions.

If congressional leaders leave for the Fourth of July recess without taking action, they will need to explain why $4-a-gallon gasoline is not enough incentive for them to act."

This from a president who for six years resisted any pressure on Detroit to seriously improve mileage standards on its gas guzzlers; this from a president who's done nothing to encourage conservation; this from a president who has so neutered the Environmental Protection Agency that the head of the EPA today seems to be in a witness-protection program. I bet there aren't 12 readers of this newspaper who could tell you his name or identify him in a police lineup.

But, most of all, this deadline is from a president who hasn't lifted a finger to broker passage of legislation that has been stuck in Congress for a year, which could actually impact America's energy profile right now - unlike offshore oil that would take years to flow - and create good tech jobs to boot.

That bill is HR 6049 - "The Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008," which extends for another eight years the investment tax credit for installing solar energy and extends for one year the production tax credit for producing wind power and for three years the credits for geothermal, wave energy and other renewables.

These critical tax credits for renewables are set to expire at the end of this fiscal year and, if they do, it will mean thousands of jobs lost and billions of dollars of investments not made. "Already clean energy projects in the U.S. are being put on hold," said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

People forget, wind and solar power are here, they work, they can go on your roof tomorrow. What they need now is a big U.S. market where lots of manufacturers have an incentive to install solar panels and wind turbines - because the more they do, the more these technologies would move down the learning curve, become cheaper and be able to compete directly with coal, oil and nuclear, without subsidies.

That seems to be exactly what the Republican Party is trying to block, since the Senate Republicans - sorry to say, with the help of John McCain - have now managed to defeat the renewal of these tax credits six different times.

Of course, we're going to need oil for years to come. That being the case, I'd prefer - for geopolitical reasons - that we get as much as possible from domestic wells. But our future is not in oil, and a real president wouldn't be hectoring Congress about offshore drilling today. He'd be telling the country a much larger truth:

"Oil is poisoning our climate and our geopolitics, and here is how we're going to break our addiction: We're going to set a floor price of $4.50 a gallon for gasoline and $100 a barrel for oil. And that floor price is going to trigger massive investments in renewable energy - particularly wind, solar panels and solar thermal. And we're also going to go on a crash program to dramatically increase energy efficiency, to drive conservation to a whole new level and to build more nuclear power. And I want every Democrat and every Republican to join me in this endeavor."

That's what a real president would do. He'd give us a big strategic plan to end our addiction to oil and build a bipartisan coalition to deliver it. He certainly wouldn't be using his last days in office to threaten congressional Democrats that if they don't approve offshore drilling by the Fourth of July recess, they will be blamed for $4-a-gallon gas. That is so lame. That is an energy policy so unworthy of our Independence Day.

http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=13881710

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Yep, Friedman's much better when he's pissed off about the present; it's when he's buoyantly optimistic about the future that his writing is crap.

[DRoseDARs]

And the future he envisions is always 6 months away, starting 3 years ago.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
And the future he envisions is always 6 months away, starting 3 years ago.

QFT

[Kuciwalker]

I had to read The Lexus and the Olive Tree in HS. My classmates mostly thought his writing was good

[Rufus T. Firefly]

I know I post this every time we have a Friedman thread, but it's just so goddamn funny:

http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm

Too long to quote, so don't start in on that; just read it and weep!

[Kuciwalker]

[DRoseDARs]

Yesh, that was painful. And those were just the excerpts...

[DRoseDARs]

I was eating a Cinnabon on a dark and stormy Lufthansa flight to the Pizza Hut next to a golf course on an old Kansas road. Seeing a billboard for some wireless carrier, I knew I was not in Bangalore anymore. The window was closing to find an open overhead bin in which to store my digitized ubersteroids...

*And somewhere, a kitten dies*

[Bosh]

Nah the only thing more annoying than reading Friedman spouting BS is having him say things that are blindingly obvious while pretending he is having some original and intelligent insight.

[Victor Galis]

I had to read that book for a class

[Victor Galis]

Wow, the Poly server hates me

[CrONoS]

Originally posted by Victor Galis
I had to read that book

you fixed it!

[Straybow]

Agtopia to be delayed by Bush eeevilness...

[Whoha]

Winners don't need food:

Exclusive: The Cure for Shortages is Growth

William R. Hawkins


UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, addressing the High-Level Conference on World Food Security held in Rome on June 3rd, set a target for increasing world food production 50% by 2030. This is the proper response when faced with a shortage. People need more food, so they should have it. if someone were to tell those facing starvation or malnutrition that they should just tighten their belts and do without, maybe rest more to reduce their need for calories, they would be laughed at as fools, if not denounced as heartless monsters.

Price increases mean that supply has not kept up with demand. Yet, when we are confronted with a shortage of oil or other forms of energy, we are often told to do without rather than increase supplies. But the higher demand for food and energy has the same roots, the desire of people the world over to improve their standards of living. Unfortunately, in certain Left-wing intellectual and policy circles, there are those who do not feel the average person deserves to be better off.

Rising incomes enable more people to eat better. The World Bank estimates that by 2030 more than a billion consumers in the developing world will have sufficient income to eat a middle-class diet. China, for example, increased per capita meat consumption by 140% between 1990 and 2006, and individual milk consumption by 300%. To produce one pound of meat takes up to seven pounds of grain used as animal feed. So with developing countries' meat consumption expected to double in a generation, demand for grain will grow much faster than population. For African, Asian, and Latin American consumers, eating richer diets is one of the long-sought benefits of development. But so is having better housing, medical care, clothing, jobs, schools and cars - all of which will take more energy. Indeed, the higher price of oil is being driven largely by rapid economic growth in India and China. It is economic growth that provides the higher incomes to buy food and the other attributes of middle class life.

Higher fuel prices do complicate the ability to meet food needs. It requires about 42 gallons of oil to produce one ton of corn in the United States, where productivity is the highest. For farmers everywhere, higher energy prices have driven up the price of fertilizer, electricity for irrigation pumps, the running of farm equipment, and transporting products to market. Improving agricultural productivity, which is the key to increasing food production, depends on access to an abundant flow of energy.

Yet, opponents of growth abound. UCLA geography professor Jared Diamond wrote in a New York Times column last January, "We could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels. Americans might object: there is no way we would sacrifice our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable." After all, he argued, "Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life." Having been a professor myself (of economics), I can say that the soft, decadent college life can only be enjoyed in a rich country like ours. I knew a number of faculty members like Diamond who always thought how other people spent their time and money was "wasteful" because it did not match their own lifestyle choices. But then I also know many NASCAR fans who think PBS television and opera houses are a waste of resources. The advantage of a well-developed society is that people are free to determine their own quality of life.

The anti-growth lobby has been disturbingly successful in blocking the development of new energy sources in the United States, whether it is drilling for oil or building nuclear power plants. The result has been to make Americans ever more dependent on oil imports subject to rapid changes in world market conditions.

Many of those countries suffering food crises are in a similar situation. Food production in many countries is stagnating. Developed nations have pushed developing countries to liberalize trade in agriculture, dismantle state-run institutions like marketing boards and specialize in exportable cash crops at the expense of staple foods. Developing countries were told they would always be able to buy their food from other countries that could produce more cheaply. This is the textbook global division of labor with which academic economists are so enthralled, as they build fanciful models of imaginary worlds.

There is an interesting irony here, in that the first major move towards "free trade" involved the same decision to forsake home production in favor of cheaper food imports. Richard Cobden led the successful Anti-Corn Law campaign that ended tariff protection for British farmers in 1846, only to find that a world based on international economic integration and interdependence increased the country's vulnerability. Cobden had to imagine a world at peace to make his theory work. He claimed commerce was "the grand panacea" and that under its influence "the motive for large and mighty empires, for gigantic armies and great fleets would die away" as countries became trade partners rather than rivals. But as historian Anthony Pagden noted in his insight book Peoples and Empires, "Like the not dissimilar modern belief that democracies never go to war with one another, this, in time, proved to be an illusion, since commerce could, and generally did, become as much a source for conflict as for peace." Rather than eliminating the motive for a "great fleet," interdependence required naval supremacy. As First Lord of the Admiralty George Goshen said in 1898, "we must have many more [battleships and cruisers] than our enemies if our trade routes and food supplies are to be protected." When a vital resource falls outside national control, power must be projected to regain control.

The idea in 19th century England, and also in many developing countries today, is that workers "released" from agriculture by the substitution of imports for domestic harvests could go to work in manufacturing or other more advanced sectors of the economy. The United States took a different approach. There was a major shift of labor from farms to factories in America, but that was due to the increase in farm productivity. The country did not have to give up its food security to enjoy industrial growth. Indeed, the U.S. became the world leader in both.

Soon after entering office, President George W. Bush made the argument for food security. He told the Future Farmers of America on July 27, 2001, "How do we make sure American agriculture thrives as we head into the 21st century? I mean, after all, we're talking about national security. It's important for our nation to grow foodstuffs, to feed our people. Can you imagine a country that was unable to grow enough food to feed the people? It would be a nation that would be subject to international pressure. It would be a nation at risk."

China has set "self-sufficiency" at the center of its agricultural policy. American farmers, who have longed for access to 1.3 billion Chinese consumers, have been disappointed as Beijing has not allowed imports to displace home grown supplies. India, the second most populous nation, is actually a net food exporter - though it has recently placed restrictions on exports to keep supplies at home and prices stable in its domestic markets.

For years the World Bank discouraged investment in agricultural development in the Third World. Then suddenly last year, it published the study "Down to Earth" by economists Luc Christiaensen and Lionel Demery that argued growth in the agriculture sector is at least twice as effective at reducing poverty as growth in any other sector. The United Nations has estimated that to create a Green Revolution in Africa $8 billion to $10 billion annually will need to be invested to boost productivity. This suggests that the overall price tag for national governments and international donors could exceed $15 billion to $20 billion a year, because of the need to expand supporting elements, such as roads, irrigation systems, education and research.

Yet, again, the anti-growth lobby is opposed to using modern science to boost food production. The "back to nature" environmentalists only want organic farming or other alternative approaches to agriculture that use minimal external inputs, especially fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation systems, road building and genetically modified seeds. It is the primitive state of African agriculture, however, that has kept it at one-tenth the productivity of American farms, which have pioneered scientific advances in high-yield crops.

One of the anti-growth movement's heroes is Tewolde Berhan, head of Ethiopia's Environment Protection Authority. In a June 28, 2005 profile on the Left-wing website CommonDreams.org, he was hailed as one who "speaks for a growing number who believe that Africa should return to natural, sustainable methods of agriculture better suited to its people and environment." Berhan is quoted as saying ""Organic farming disturbs nature as little as possible." Today, Ethiopia is in the midst of famine, with 6 million lives reported at risk from starvation.

It is by the disturbance of nature that civilization is created and people move beyond old limits. We should not return to the "malaise" of the 1970s when during the last great energy crisis, President Jimmy Carter told Americans to just put on a sweater if their homes got cold in the winter, and accept national decline. But if the effects of anti-growth policies in the U.S. are only "inconvenient" as Al Gore would say, for the rest of the world, failure to move forward is a leading cause of death.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.341/pub_detail.asp