Midway through his classic novel The Dean's December, Saul Bellow introduces a newspaper columnist called Dewey Spangler. A "prodigy and hotshot", Spangler writes for a big American paper and is syndicated in 30 countries. He commands more worldly influence than an entire Swiss bank:
He was on first-name terms with Kissinger and Helmut Schmidt. Millions read him. In his recent swing through Europe and Asia, he had interviewed Sadat, Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi … [He] was a sizable node in the relaying of the tensions that pulsated through the civilised world, made it tremble, saturated it with equivocation, covered its structural outlines with flourishes, filled it with anxieties …
No wonder the novel's protagonist doesn't like him. But Bellow's character has equivalents in real life, too. Indeed, in some ways the New York Times world affairs columnist Thomas Friedman trumps Spangler: Pulitzered three times over, he is published in some 70 newspapers, and has huge authority among those with power. As philosopher for the club-class lounge, it was Friedman who came up with the theory that no two nations that both have branches of McDonald's ever went to war with each other (the implication being that there should be more McDonald's, and all the other accoutrements of globalisation, everywhere). In an era of blogging and tumbling newspaper circulation, this deadwood journalist has remarkable stature.
That's one reason why a sold-out crowd was at the British Museum last
night to hear Friedman speak (including private equity baron, Ronnie Cohen, the new chairman of the Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, and more journalists and businesspeople than you could shake a rolled-up Economist at). The other draw must have been the timeliness of his subject: the politics of tackling climate change. What the journalist is going to propose tonight is that the US must lead the rest of the world in combating global warming.
It's also the topic of his new book, and he begins by reading the opening passage. It is often said that Friedman is not the most elegant writer and here it really shows: questions aren't merely asked, they're asked "with great curiosity"; moments are, inevitably, "risen to"; a business district isn't a business district unless it's "bustling". And on it goes, with sentences not so much crafted as ready assembled. None of Spangler's "high-grade intellectual plush" here, sadly.
Not that this gets in the way of Friedman's enviable ability to boil down a complex phenomenon into one pithy phrase. With globalisation, it was "the world is flat". When it comes to climate change, the new line is that the world is "hot, flat and crowded". Hot thanks to global warming; flat because of the new middle classes in China, India and elsewhere who aspire after better lifestyles that inevitably consume more of the Earth's resources, and crowded due to immense population growth. When Friedman was born in 1953, there was a worldwide population of 2.7bn people; by 2053, according to the UN, that could have risen to 9.2bn. In the course of what could conceivably be one American journalist's lifetime, the planet's population could have more than tripled.
What to do about it? First, get over the idea that we are already in
the middle of a green revolution. When, he asks, did you ever see a
revolution in which no one got hurt? In the IT revolution, companies
went bust. By comparison, "this isn't a revolution, it's a party". Some quickfire tapping on Google will deliver 10 easy tips for going green, 20 simple steps to save the planet, or a dozen painless ways, and save money – and even measures to "green up your sex life", complete with vegan condoms.
What the world needs, then, is a real, disruptive green revolution – and Friedman wants America to lead it. Yes that's right, America: Kyoto refusenik and world's number-one oil consumer. But the New York Times columnist believes that it could happen, if presented to Americans both as an unprecedented business opportunity (get in on clean power before the Chinese), and as a way to show global leadership, to "get its groove back" after the Bush years.
Delivered the week that Barack Obama finally became the Democrats'
nominated candidate for president, this vision may be beguiling to some here. But it is also exceedingly optimistic, and not just because of America's own record on global warming. Friedman claims that "six billion minds in the world are concentrated" on climate change, as a way of showing the possible benefits to Washington if it took up the green agenda. But that sounds way over the top: many poor countries are understandably more bothered about growth than greenness. And within the rich world, there are plenty of people who would not rank climate change above paying the bills. The petrol protests in Britain and elsewhere are surely proof of that.
Revolutions can be fun. The IT revolution for instance has been great fun for consumers, delivering up great gadgets that have enhanced our lives. Mobile phones, for instance, are not just popular with texting teens; they help farmers in Africa find out the price for their produce in the local markets.
The problem with any green revolution is that it will not be half so much fun. It will not, for instance, involve buying a gadget that delivers some whizzy new function so much as a gadget that does the same old function, but more efficiently. This revolution is likely to involve quite a bit of sacrifice, which is why it has yet to take off. But Friedman says that a strong enough price signal could force changes in corporate and individual behaviour. And what he wants is for the White House to send that signal by, for instance, setting a floor below which the price of petrol cannot fall. Now $4 a gallon in the US, it should never go lower than that. GE and other big energy companies will never go all-in on clean power unless they are certain that this spike in oil and petrol prices is not merely temporary.
All this is a hard sell, and it's no surprise that in his bid to present a winnable case to Americans, Friedman appears to have toned down parts of his argument. And it's the submerged bits that may be less palatable to voters and policymakers. He may fizz about the new, greener technology that will reduce our carbon emissions, but some pushing reveals that he also wants greater conserving of energy. He suggests that prices and markets will turn us all greener, but then acknowledges that he wants greater government intervention in those markets to help them on their way. Subsidies for clean power; a tax on carbon; a properly functioning cap-and-trade scheme. Excellent policies, but many of them are still some way off the European agenda.
Which doesn't inevitably mean they won't happen. Friedman argues that unless America or Europe embraces green economics China will get there first. What, dirty old China with its coal-powered stations opened every week? Apparently so. Over the last few years, Beijing has moved from blaiming pollution as its due and that climate change was all western propaganda to taking it a lot more seriously. "Now it is watching us to see what we do about it."
He recalls being invited to Tianjin to a clean power conference ("a
clean power conference: I never got asked to one of those in America!") where the delegates were from Chinese industry and all heavily sceptical about even the palest-green agenda. None of them spoke English and so they clamped on headphones to listen to Friedman's keynote speech. He began by stating the typical Chinese position: "You don't need to do a thing about green power. Not a thing. Just wait five years and we in America will have developed the entire thing – and we will be selling it to you. You can pay us for it."
It took 30 seconds, he thinks, before the translation hit the delegates' headphones and consternation began to ripple around the room. "It was at that point that they got it."
