The Energy Wall

December 1, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Energy Wall
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The problem of Iraq looks like such a mess that it’s hard to figure out not only where we are but what to do next — if we decide to just leave. Whenever I find myself trying to think through a big problem in the Middle East like this, I start small and refer back to the core Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It can tell you a lot.

I believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to the big “clash of civilizations” now under way between the Muslim world and the West what the Spanish Civil War was to World War II. It’s Off Broadway to Broadway.

The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, was the theater where Great European powers tested out many weapons and tactics that were later deployed on a larger scale in World War II. Similarly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the small theater where many weapons and tactics get tested out first and then go global. So if you study the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Off Broadway, you can learn a lot about how the larger war now playing out on Broadway, in Iraq and Afghanistan, might proceed.

For instance, airplane hijacking was perfected in the Israeli-Palestinian context, as a weapon of terrorism, and then was globalized. Suicide bombing was perfected there, and then was globalized. The Oslo peace process, which David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, calls an “attempt by Israel to empower a Palestinian partner with whom to negotiate,” was first tried there and then, in a different way, moved to the big stage with the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. These were a U.S. effort to create Arab and Afghan partners to push a progressive, democratic agenda in the Muslim world.

Unfortunately, Oslo failed Off Broadway, and now Iraq and even Afghanistan seem to be failing on Broadway. So what do we do next? Again, start by looking at what happened in the Israeli-Palestinian theater.

Israel decided to just build a wall.

As a result of the Palestinian intifada of 2000-2004. Israel concluded that partnership at that time was impossible with the Palestinians, whose leaders were too divided and dysfunctional to prevent suicide bombing. So Israel erected a wall, unilaterally pulled out of Gaza and basically said to the Palestinians, “We’ll continue to engage you, but only from a position of strength, only after we’re insulated from the daily threat of suicide bombings or the burden of occupying Gaza.”

What would be the equivalent for the West and the Muslim world? Also build a wall? Some people want to do that by vetoing Turkey’s entry into the European Union, which would be a huge, huge mistake. But how do we insulate ourselves from the madness of the Middle East — if Iraq and Afghanistan can’t be made to work — without giving up on reform there, which is still badly needed?

Build a virtual wall. End our oil addiction.

We need to end our dependence on this part of the world for energy, because it is debilitating for us and for them. It is terrible for us, because addicts never tell the truth to their pushers. We are the oil addicts and they are the oil pushers. The only way we can be brutally honest with them is if we undertake the necessary conservation measures, investments in renewable fuels and a gasoline tax hike that could make us energy independent.

I do not want my girls to live a world where the difference between a good day and bad day is whether Moktada al-Sadr lets Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, meet with the U.S. president or whether certain Arab regimes alter what their textbooks say about non-Muslims. I wish them all well, but I don’t want them impacting my life and I don’t want to be roiling theirs, and the only reason we are so intertwined now is O-I-L.

Not only would ending our oil addiction protect us from the worst in the Arab-Muslim world, it would help us support the best. These regimes will never reform as long as they enjoy windfall oil profits, which allow them to maintain closed societies with archaic education systems and protected industries that can’t compete globally. The small Persian Gulf state of Bahrain just held its second free election, in which women could vote and run. Bahrain is also the first Arab gulf state to start running out of oil. No accident.

Everyone asks what is our “Plan B” for Iraq. Answer: It’s get out as soon as we can, with the least damage possible, just as Israel got out of Gaza. And then build a wall — not a physical wall, but a wall of energy independence that will enable us to continue to engage honestly with the most progressive Arabs and Muslims on a reform agenda, but without being hostage to the most malevolent.

Ten Months or Ten Years

November 29, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Ten Months or Ten Years
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Here is the central truth about Iraq today: This country is so broken it can’t even have a proper civil war.

There are so many people killing so many other people for so many different reasons — religion, crime, politics — that all the proposals for how to settle this problem seem laughable. It was possible to settle Bosnia’s civil war by turning the country into a loose federation, because the main parties to that conflict were reasonably coherent, with leaders who could cut a deal and deliver their faction.

But Iraq is in so many little pieces now, divided among warlords, foreign terrorists, gangs, militias, parties, the police and the army, that nobody seems able to deliver anybody. Iraq has entered a stage beyond civil war — it’s gone from breaking apart to breaking down. This is not the Arab Yugoslavia anymore. It’s Hobbes’s jungle.

Given this, we need to face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years. This would require reinvading Iraq, with at least 150,000 more troops, crushing the Sunni and Shiite militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq’s institutions and political culture from scratch.

Anyone who tells you that we can just train a few more Iraqi troops and police officers and then slip out in two or three years is either lying or a fool. The minute we would leave, Iraq would collapse. There is nothing we can do by the end of the Bush presidency that would produce a self-sustaining stable Iraq — and “self-sustaining” is the key metric.

In his must-read new book about the impact of culture on politics and economic development, “The Central Liberal Truth,” Lawrence Harrison notes that some cultures are “progress-prone” and others are “progress- resistant.” In the Arab-Muslim world today the progress-resistant cultural forces seem to be just too strong, especially in Iraq, which is why it is so hard to establish durable democratic institutions in that soil, he says.

“Some may hark back to our successful imposition of democracy on West Germany and Japan after World War II,” adds Mr. Harrison. “But the people on whom democracy was imposed in those two countries were highly literate and entrepreneurial members of unified, institutionalized societies with strong traditions of association — what we refer to today as ‘social capital.’ Iraq was social capital-poor to start with and it now verges on bankruptcy.”

On Feb. 12, 2003, before the war, I wrote a column offering what I called my “pottery store” rule for Iraq: “You break it, you own it.” It was not an argument against the war, but rather a cautionary note about the need to do it with allies, because transforming Iraq would be such a huge undertaking. (Colin Powell later picked up on this and used the phrase to try to get President Bush to act with more caution, but Mr. Bush did not heed Mr. Powell’s advice.)

But my Pottery Barn rule was wrong, because Iraq was already pretty broken before we got there — broken, it seems, by 1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions. It was held together only by Saddam’s iron fist. Had we properly occupied the country, and begun political therapy, it is possible an American iron fist could have held Iraq together long enough to put it on a new course. But instead we created a vacuum by not deploying enough troops.

That vacuum was filled by murderous Sunni Baathists and Al Qaeda types, who butchered Iraqi Shiites until they finally wouldn’t take it any longer and started butchering back, which brought us to where we are today. The Sunni Muslim world should hang its head in shame for the barbarism it has tolerated and tacitly supported by the Sunnis of Iraq, whose violence, from the start, has had only one goal: America must fail in its effort to bring progressive politics or democracy to this region. America must fail — no matter how many Iraqis have to be killed, America must fail.

This has left us with two impossible choices. If we’re not ready to do what is necessary to crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it, then we need to leave — because to just keep stumbling along as we have been makes no sense. It will only mean throwing more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper hole filled with more and more broken pieces.

A Partner for Mr. Hu

November 22, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
A Partner for Mr. Hu
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Memo From: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

To: President Hu Jintao of China.

Dear President Hu: I am sure you thought that your first letter from me would be about trade and human rights. Those issues still animate my party. But I’m convinced that we have a better chance of making progress on them if we can first build a partnership to address the urgent issues of energy and climate change, which affect us both.

President Hu, President Bush promised the world when he spurned the Kyoto Protocols that he would offer an alternative. He never did. So I will. I want to propose a “New Shanghai Communiqué.” The 1972 Shanghai Communiqué forged an understanding between China and the U.S. to defuse the most destabilizing issue of that day: the struggle over Taiwan. The New Shanghai Communiqué would defuse the most destabilizing issue of our day: the world’s unsustainable appetite for energy.

What should a New Shanghai Communiqué include? First, China has committed to a 20 percent reduction in energy consumption for every 1 percent of G.D.P. growth by 2010 — a courageous commitment that Mr. Bush has also failed to make. I will see you and raise you. I am going to propose that the U.S. as a whole match the 4 percent annual improvement in energy efficiency already undertaken by California. That would mean at least a 25 percent improvement by 2012.

China has also just imposed a national renewable energy requirement, setting a target of generating 10 percent of its energy from renewables — wind, hydro, solar power and biofuels — by 2020. I will see you and raise you again. I want to require our power grid operators to purchase 20 percent of their energy from environmentally sound renewables by 2020.

President Hu, if we can hit these targets we would put our countries — the two largest emitters of carbon dioxide — on a much more sustainable growth path and set an example that would change the world. We would create less dependence on despotic oil states, encourage everyone to be energy efficient and climate friendly, and create more room in the energy market for big emerging economies, like China, to grow without competing head-on with America for oil and gas. Instead of fighting over a shrinking pie of fossil fuels, let’s create a huge new energy pie — from renewables and efficiency savings.

Second, I want to lead an effort to help China invest in factories devoted to clean power technologies — green cars, solar panels, wind turbines — in some of our states, like Ohio, most hurt by globalization. Green energy is going to be the growth industry of the 21st century. We have some great technologies. You have $1 trillion in reserves because of your trade surplus with us. Nothing would improve China’s standing in America more than using its reserves, as Japan did, to create good U.S. jobs and profits for Chinese companies — all while advancing the clean power industry.

Third, I propose we send over a “Green Corps” of U.S. engineers to travel across China and demonstrate something many Chinese officials do not understand: being green is profitable. Too many of your local officials think green is a luxury you can’t afford. You will never break out of your cycle of environmental degradation until those officials understand that pollution is wasted energy and wasted money. Our best companies, like G.E. and DuPont, consistently find that operating “green” costs much less than they anticipate and saves much more.

President Hu, we both know that the millions of cars now choking your streets are only the beginning. Your biggest concern is the 800 million Chinese living in the countryside, who need transportation to better their lives but who can’t afford even the cheapest car. Every year they buy more than 30 million motorcycles and farm vehicles, which have the advantage of being cheap but which use the most rudimentary, polluting motors — blackening your skies.

We need to bring our U.S. engineers, who know how to clean up small engines, together with your manufacturers, who know how to mass produce them cheaply, to forge companies that will not only clean up the air in developing countries but make money for both of us. If that happens, President Hu, China has the potential not just to have a “Green Olympics” in 2008, but to offer the developing world a whole new model of sustainable growth.

President Hu, over 40 years ago your country tried to make a Great Leap Forward alone — to change China. This time, let us make a Great Green Leap Forward together — and change the world.

Best wishes, Nancy.

Not Since Nixon—Friedman in China, Sells Tom’s World

Not Since Nixon—Friedman in China,
Sells Tom’s World
Times Columnist Exports Adage, Aphorism, Metaphor: Opening Big Book Market. Mr. Ham—Hold the Mao! Explains Much to Beijing: ‘The World. Is. Flat.’

The New York Observer
By: Tom Scocca
Date: 11/20/2006
Page: 1


BEIJING—I had just begun haggling for a silk comforter at the Yuexiu Market on Chaoyangmen Street when I got a phone call saying that New York Times Op-Ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman was on his way to a bookstore nearby. I wrapped up the deal, disadvantageously, and grabbed a cab.

You can learn a lot wandering around a foreign country in the first person. Mr. Friedman does it all the time. He looks around and talks to somebody and learns something important. Now I was the one in a cab in a foreign country. Conversations with cab drivers are the sort of things that lead Mr. Friedman to larger truths about globalization and the world we live in today.

This was Nov. 12. I had asked the driver to go to Yuexiu Market, and he had gone to Yaxiu Market. I’d even writaten out “Yuexiu” in Chinese characters. So I told the cabbie, “No, this is Yaxiu; I want to go to Yuexiu, on Chaoyangmen.” For me, this was a fairly in-depth cabbie exchange.

The bookstore was the Bookworm, a foreigner-run place that offers Wi-Fi and crostini, on the upper floor of a building near Workers’ Stadium. The side room had been set up for a lecture, with rows of chairs, and every chair was taken—either by a person or by a bag or coat in lieu of a person. There was a television in the main room and another in the back room, for overflow spectators.

Mr. Friedman was not there. It was 10 minutes after 5 p.m. A Bookworm staffer, looking slightly dazed, explained that the talk was not scheduled till 7:30. The roomful of people had showed up more than two hours early.

Two hours was enough time to go get dinner. Outside, murk had fallen on the city. It has been a strangely clear and bright fall in Beijing, which is usually choked with thick, impenetrable pollution, like Industrial Revolution–era London. The normal tailpipe smell of the air had been replaced by crisp breezes. But there had been a golden tinge in the air all afternoon, and toward sundown, the gold had deepened to the old familiar mud-and-cement color.

What to eat, while waiting for a globalization lecture? There was a Pakistani-Xinjiang restaurant up the street, on the top floor of yet another multi-level market. A subcontinental dance-music cover of “Eye of the Tiger” played on the sound system.

By the time I got back to the Bookworm, there were two or three dozen people lined up outside at the foot of the stairs, and employees were announcing that no one else could come up. “I feel like this is a rock concert,” one of them said. “I want it to be a rock concert, actually.”

The crowd did not disperse. Some were carrying copies of Thomas Friedman books. The staffers guarding the stairs asked for a look at a book. “Does it have a picture, so we know who not to bar?” one asked.

The lack of a Thomas Friedman lecture seemed possibly more informative than the lecture itself would be. But I got in, because I write for a newspaper. Writing for a newspaper means you get a somewhat different set of experiences than other people get.

The bookstore was packed and steaming. All the rooms, the lecture room and the TV rooms, were full of people. It was so crowded that most people didn’t see Mr. Friedman come in—a small, roundish figure escorted by the Bookworm’s owner, a woman much taller than him. He wore black trousers and a dark sweater with a zipper at the neck.

With a smile, Mr. Friedman perched on a tall stool. He had the genial assurance of a children’s television host. “If you get a small enough room, you can feel really important,” he told the audience.

His talk, he said, would be an update on his thinking about his latest book, The World Is Flat, which he said is now out in its 2.0 version. His new thoughts will be incorporated into a 3.0 version. “The whole subject is alive,” he said.

Mr. Friedman explained how he had come to write the book. It had begun in 2004, he said, with a planned documentary project, part of The Times’ involvement with the Discovery Channel, in which he was going to go to call centers around the world and report on the people who “spend their days imitating Americans.” Then outsourcing became an issue in the American Presidential campaign, and he decided to focus on Bangalore, India, and report on the “other side of outsourcing.” After 11 days of interviews, he ended up being told that the global economic playing field was being leveled—which, in a much-recounted eureka moment, he concluded meant that he should write a book called The World Is Flat.

Losing the call-centers story seemed like a shame. But Mr. Friedman’s mind moves forcefully from the specific to the general; the general makes for best-sellers. Perhaps someone else can still do the call centers.

Mr. Friedman moved on to the subject of what he called “Ten Days That Flattened the World.” He was speaking without notes, playing on names and numbers, repeating his points. The first world-flattening day was 11/9, he said. Not 9/11. No, 11/9 was, by “Kabbalistic accident,” the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Someone moved around, breaking his train of thought. He went back to 11/9 and 9/11. A young woman came in, carrying shopping bags, distracting him again. “Everybody settled?” Mr. Friedman asked. “Anybody want to stand up and say something?” 11/9. A cell phone rang.

The awkwardness passed, and Mr. Friedman settled back into his timeline of global techno-unification and leveling: Microsoft Windows, the Netscape I.P.O., the fiber-optic infrastructure buildout. The “workflow revolution.” Mr. Friedman speaks with his hands and arms, sometimes his whole body. He pantomimed an old-fashioned worker hand-carrying a piece of paper from one place to another. He pulled and stretched imaginary objects in the air, as if he were in one of those notebook-computer commercials like Jay-Z or Shaun “The Flying Tomato” Wright. He typed on an invisible keyboard. He extended his index fingers, then brought the tips together, touching: interoperability.

The language was flourishy to match: “Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda” … “from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China.” Metaphors flourished themselves into trouble. “What these steroids do is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration,” Mr. Friedman said. Also: “Mother Nature always bats last.”

“Whatever can be done will be done,” Mr. Friedman said. “Will it be done by you or to you?” He repeated the question. By you or to you?

He told a story about going to Hungary and being driven around. His driver had asked him—“Mister Tom, Mister Tom”—to refer friends to him, if they visited Hungary. The driver, Mr. Friedman said, had given him the U.R.L. of his Web site: a hired Hungarian driver with his own Internet presence. Imagine!

More metaphor: Mr. Friedman compared the C.E.O.’s who understand the scope of the ongoing transformation to the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They know the secret. “None of our political leaders were talkin’ about it,” Mr. Friedman said. Mr. Friedman was with the pods.

“The world. Is. Flat,” he said.

In the question-and-answer period, he was asked about the midterm elections. The 2008 election, he said, is “going to be about China.” What about Hillary vs. Obama? “I think Obama is a really, really serious candidate, and if you asked me to bet today, I’d bet he’d be the Democratic nominee.” Mr. Friedman talked about the liabilities that Al Gore and John Kerry had brought, and the baggage that Hillary Clinton has. “We’re looking for a uniter, not a divider,” he said.

“But I don’t do domestic politics,” he said.

A tall young man in a Brandeis T-shirt raised the issue of Mr. Friedman’s personal wealth, and whether that might shape his views of globalization. “If George Soros were here, giving a speech from the far left, would you have asked him that question?” Mr. Friedman asked.

“Um, sure,” the questioner said.

But Mr. Friedman had set off, defending himself from his unseen enemies. He stands accused, he said, of being “a prophet of globalization” or “the Panglossian avatar of globalization.” Not so. “I didn’t do this,” Mr. Friedman said. “I didn’t start this. I just wrote about it.”

On it went, prosecution and defense, in one man. He has been called a “spokesman for global capitalism.” A “shill.”

“It’s stupid,” Mr. Friedman said.

His foes have their facts and figures, criticizing him for not weighing the costs of globalization. “Thank you very much for those statistics,” Mr. Friedman said, apostrophically. “They’re all from my book.”

There is, in fact, a Friedmanian dialectic. It only appears to go: thesis—antithesis—thesis! Thomas Friedman appreciates the dark side.

Earlier, for instance, the subject of the environment had come up. Mr. Friedman had said that he thought he knew how his next column, the Nov. 15 column, would begin. He would talk about being in Beijing, he said. Every time he comes here, he said, “people here speak with greater ease, and breathe with greater difficulty.” He described landing that day at the Beijing airport and hearing the stewardess announce that the weather outside was “clear.”

“And you could not see the terminal,” Mr. Friedman said. The crowd laughed knowingly. Old Beijing joke. But couldn’t you?

And the next day dawned crystalline and brilliant, without a trace of smog. That night, the sky over Beijing was strewn with stars.

Bring in the Green Cat

November 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Bring in the Green Cat
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Chongming, China

I’ve been a regular visitor to China since 1990, and here’s what strikes me most: Each year that I’ve come here, China’s people seem to speak with greater ease and breathe with greater difficulty.

Yes, you can now have amazingly frank talks with officials and journalists here. But when I walked out of my room the morning after I arrived in Shanghai, the air was so smoky — from the burning of farm fields after the harvest — that for a moment I honestly thought my hotel was on fire.

And that’s why, for the first time, it’s starting to feel to me like China is reaching its environmental limits. If it doesn’t radically change to greener, more sustainable modes of design, transport, production and power generation, the Chinese miracle is going to turn into an eco-nightmare.

For some three decades now, China’s economy has grown at around 10 percent per year, based on low-cost labor and little regard for the waste it pumps into its rivers and the air. When a country grows that fast, year after year, it can start to think that the laws of nature don’t apply to it.

Guess again. China has been doing the environmental equivalent of jumping from an airplane and thinking that it’s flying, argued Rob Watson, an expert on China’s environment who heads the green building services firm EcoTech International. “After you jump out of a plane, for about five miles you can actually feel like you’re flying,” he added. But then reality hits. “It’s not the fall that kills you — it’s the sudden stop at the end, and China may be approaching that sudden stop. ... When you stress a system to a certain point, it just stops working.”

China’s top leaders understand the crisis. But their response is complicated by so many Chinese flooding from the countryside to cities. In their view, political stability depends on finding those people jobs, and jobs depend on growth, and growth depends on China continuing to be the low-cost producer of everything — environment be damned.

But China can’t do what the West did: grow now, clean up later. Because the unprecedented pace and scale of its growth are going to make later too late. The China Daily reported this week that at least 24 million acres of cultivated land in China — one-tenth of the country’s total arable land — is now polluted, posing a “grave threat” to China’s food safety. More than half its rivers are also polluted, which is why less than 9 percent of “drinkable water” met government standards for bacteria in 243 rural supply stations recently tested. Many wells have excessive nitrates that can cause diabetes or kidney damage. No wonder some high-tech workers are starting to avoid China, because they don’t want to live in a dirty cloud.

Chinese officials fear that if they move to U.S.-level green production and environmental cleanup, “China will not be such a low-cost producer anymore, and that will affect jobs,” noted Dan Rosen, an expert on China’s economy and head of China Strategic Advisory. But what they are missing is that going green is not just a problem, but an opportunity. Pollution represents waste and inefficiency. Green companies are always more efficient, adds Mr. Watson, and China has a chance to become a major innovator of low-cost green solutions. When U.S. companies went green, they consistently overestimated the costs and underestimated the savings.

The other day, I sailed with Mr. Rosen from Shanghai up the Yangtze Delta to Chongming Island, the world’s largest alluvial island. There, Shanghai is trying to expand, by building the first eco-metropolis in China, based on eco-tourism, farming, wind and solar power. When you see the parklands created there, or when you stand in the protected wetlands and watch the water buffalo lounging in the mud, while peasants collect crabs, you can almost believe that China can change course.

But then, off in the distance, you see this massive bridge that is about to connect Chongming to central Shanghai, and you wonder what will happen to all the green plans here when all the overloaded trucks and consumers start rushing in. If Chongming is just a green ornament attached to Shanghai, it will never survive. If it is a model for a whole new kind of development, it, and China, have a chance.

Deng Xiaoping once famously said of China’s economy: “Black cat, white cat, all that matters is that it catches mice” — i.e., forget about communist ideology, all that matters is that China grows. Not anymore, said Mr. Rosen. “Now the cat better be green, otherwise it is going to die before it catches the mouse.”