Tom Friedman:
“We had a space race with the Soviet Union to see who could be the first to put a man on the moon. What I want to see is an Earth race, with Japan, with China, with India, with Europe, to see who can invent the clean technologies to allow mankind to continue living here on Earth in a sustainable way. This is for engineers. We’re only going to innovate our way out of this problem, we’re not going to regulate our way out of it.”
Via soupsoup & jayparkinsonmd, who writes
I think we’re at an important point in history. As our world gets more and more complex, a few white dudes in Washington won’t be able to solve the world’s problems with the words in a 2,000 page regulation. The processes of making money will always outsmart and outpace the speed at which regulations are written
Point taken, but as someone who works in the field and whose boyfriend’s firm finances clean tech and green energy innovation, I’m certain that without “a few white dudes in Washington” (and women, and minorities) passing revolutionary legislation, the market will not develop, test, produce, and implement solutions at the speed and scale that is needed.
Until carbon is taxed and taxed heavily there is no great incentive to reduce its emission (Friedman suggests a “$1-a-gallon ‘Patriot Tax’ on gasoline.”) Financing in the clean tech sector (or the lack thereof) reflects this. But a tax on carbon alone won’t cut it. We need an aggressive national strategy backed up with coordination and cooperation between government agencies and the private sector never before seen in these United Sates, and lots of incentives. We got a man on the moon, but, as Friedman notes, it took an Apollo program to do so.
As I’ve seen time and again in my work, the engineers have the ideas, they have the drive — they’re waiting on the money and, more important, the leadership.
Come empty, you leave empty. Come with a point of view, and you could come back with something original.
Come empty, you leave empty. Come with a point of view, and you could come back with something original.Thomas Friedman on his reportorial style, in The New Yorker.
Related(?): he is five foot seven.
Somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.
Somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.
I’ve had a steady, simmering crush on this man since I was 14 years old.
Excerpted from his interview with Mother Jones about his new movie War, Inc.:
I don’t think people knew that the Bush agenda was going to be as radical as it was in implementing the Milton Friedman playbook of radical privatization—what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” As Iraq was still on fire, literally, Paul Bremer rode in, dressed like my character in his Brooks Brothers suit with his military boots, the uniform of the disaster capitalist. It was a messianic fantasy where Iraq was going to be a free-market utopia. Now, when it’s the clusterfuck that it is, they say this is just a failure of management. The lies and the hypocrisy are so savage that your eyes start to water.
The Great American Cooking Project