He’ll have to forgive me from stealing his punchline, but I can’t help it: Thomas Friedman’s The Power Of Green story from the Sunday Times is really too inspiring to not trumpet.

What it posits, in his usual three examples and a punchline style and obligatory mention of how things are flatter than they used to be, is that by rebranding the idea of ‘green,’ and with good old american know-how, we can beat this pesky global warming gang!

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.
Doesn’t that sound good?

“It’s about getting our best brains out of hedge funds and into innovations that will not only give us the clean-power industrial assets to preserve our American dream but also give us the technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams without destroying the planet. It’s about making America safer by breaking our addiction to a fuel that is powering regimes deeply hostile to our values. And, finally, it’s about making America the global environmental leader, instead of laggard, “

Hell’s yea! I’ll admit, it sounds pretty good to me, especially the part about America being a leader. The thought of going through the mental gear thrashing required to move from the idea of self as American (read=member in good standing of world-striding collossus ) to american ( read=some guy in a place that used to matter and how is home to old people and hollywood, plus some cowboys, nei how, Shanghai boss!) is extremely unpleasant, to say the least.

One final, somewhat related thought: it came to be in a blinding flash the other day, the absolute venality of the corporate titans and their shills who denied climate change for so long. They did the math and played the odds, and will win either way. Consider: either (a) they’re right, in which case spending all that money capping their industry would be unfair and wasteful or (b) we’re right, but they denied it to save money, drove the price of a more and more limited resource through the roof and made a fortune.  So now they’ve made their pile of cash, and continue to ( Etrade’s energy sector is up 32% in six months ), and will now have enough money to get early and deep into any emerging solutions that the rest of us will soon be SCREAMING for, regardless of who they come from.  Gotta give the fuckers credit, they play to win.

Entry Keywords:, , , , ,