Do you agree with this authors statement about America?

Question

Friedman: I have no doubt about it, which is why I say in the book: I'm not against Kyoto; if you can get 190 countries all to agree on verifiable limits on their carbon, God bless you. But at the end of the day, I really still believe--and I know you do too--in America as a model. Your book stresses this--that even in a post-American world we still are looked at by others around the world as a role model. I firmly believe that if we go green--if we prove that we can become healthy, secure, respected, entrepreneurial, richer and more innovative by greening our economy, many more people will follow us voluntarily than would do so by compulsion of a treaty. Does that mean Russia and Iran will? No. Geopolitics won't disappear. But I think it will, speaking broadly, definitely reposition us in the world with more people in more places. I look at making America the greenest country in the world like running the Olympic triathlon: if you make it to the Olympics and you run the race, maybe you win--but even if you don't win, you're fitter, healthier, more secure, more respected, more competitive and entrepreneurial, because you have given birth to a whole new clean power industry--which has to be the next great global industry--and put your economy on a much more sustainable footing. So to me, this is a win-win-win-win race, and that's why I believe we, America, need to take the lead in it. In the Cold War we had the space race with Russia to see who could be the first to put a man on the moon. Today we need an earth race with Japan, Europe, China and India--to see who can be the first to invent the clean power technologies that will allow man to live safely and sustainably on earth.

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Very true about how we need to go green, but we certainly are NOT a role model.

Look at Scandanaia, they are a much better example of "clean" countries.

Bob S · Answer

The Kyoto protocol is a profiteering scheme based on junk science, but this author is very correct otherwise.
Carbon credits are nothing but an arbitrarily and favoritistically assigned vehicle for making money for doing nothing.  They are a bizarre new form of tax based upon something that cannot truly be measured and is not truly the source of the problem. More than that, Carbon Credits are designed to bankrupt the free industrialized world and empower the emerging communist superpower wannabes. That's why Kerry, Gore and Obama are so squarely behind them.
While we should strive to reduce the true pollutants in the atmosphere and make the means of production more efficient and less pollutant, it is solar flares and not "greenhouse gases (water vapor being the most prominent of these)," --- and even these so-called greenhouse gases occur more as a result of natural process than all of human industry could ever put out --- which cause the greatest degree of climate change. CO2 and Methane are just noise in the equation, and that which is man made barely amounts to a hill of beans in the bigger picture. Also, it is global cooling, and not global warming, that we should concern ourselves about. Global warming produces more plants, more animals, and thus more co2 for plants to breathe and more plants for the animals to eat, etc, etc. Global cooling kills crops, animals, and societies.

We should be happy the earth is warming up, though it will probably not warm up to the degree it did in the middle ages, when Greenland was indeed green and supported farms from end to end..

Sustainability is a dangerous misnomer derived from gaia religions. Their idea of a sustainable human population is 500 million globally, and they ould kill the rest off if they could.

Sam B · Answer

It's a fairly conceited and self-centric statement on America, but the ecological ideas behind it are theoretically solid.  Obviously if a large, well-recognized developed nation successfully "goes green", it will set a precedent.

Unfortunately, until an impressive amount of human lives are at stake in developed nations, a "green race" is unrealistic.  This isn't the Olympics, and nations aren't going to shell out billions of dollars on research and new technology just to "beat" another nation.

Bob · Answer

I agree. 
The American people have to want it also. It's got to be sold as a bottom up initiative that is good for all in the long run.
I like his books.

Phil M · Answer

For the most part I do.

Anonymous · Answer

Freedman, and You and I are good eggs,

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Do you agree with this authors statement about America?

6 Answers