Post by TDCHola
Hombre de negocios..................... donde estan los billetes......
ahhhhhhhhhh USA
ME ESCOCOTO DE LA RISA..........
Son colonialistas populetes......... jajajajajjajajajjaja
Saludos
TDC
Los billetes hoy estan en China, hasta el ajo viene de China, alabado
sea dios, hasta el ajo!!!!
Leete la columna de Friedman . . .
April 15, 2007
The Power of Green
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I.
One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush
years will all be behind us — and America will need, and want, to get
its groove back. We will need to find a way to reknit America at home,
reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in the
global order — as the beacon of progress, hope and inspiration. I have
an idea how. It’s called “green.”
In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name
an issue, you can own the issue. One thing that always struck me about
the term “green” was the degree to which, for so many years, it was
defined by its opponents — by the people who wanted to disparage it. And
they defined it as “liberal,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” “girlie-man,”
“unpatriotic,” “vaguely French.”
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.
How do our kids compete in a flatter world? How do they thrive in a
warmer world? How do they survive in a more dangerous world? Those are,
in a nutshell, the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st
century. But these problems are so large in scale that they can only be
effectively addressed by an America with 50 green states — not an
America divided between red and blue states.
Because a new green ideology, properly defined, has the power to
mobilize liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and atheists, big
business and environmentalists around an agenda that can both pull us
together and propel us forward. That’s why I say: We don’t just need the
first black president. We need the first green president. We don’t just
need the first woman president. We need the first environmental
president. We don’t just need a president who has been toughened by
years as a prisoner of war but a president who is tough enough to level
with the American people about the profound economic, geopolitical and
climate threats posed by our addiction to oil — and to offer a real plan
to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
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After World War II, President Eisenhower responded to the threat of
Communism and the “red menace” with massive spending on an interstate
highway system to tie America together, in large part so that we could
better move weapons in the event of a war with the Soviets. That highway
system, though, helped to enshrine America’s car culture (atrophying our
railroads) and to lock in suburban sprawl and low-density housing, which
all combined to get America addicted to cheap fossil fuels, particularly
oil. Many in the world followed our model.
Today, we are paying the accumulated economic, geopolitical and climate
prices for that kind of America. I am not proposing that we radically
alter our lifestyles. We are who we are — including a car culture. But
if we want to continue to be who we are, enjoy the benefits and be able
to pass them on to our children, we do need to fuel our future in a
cleaner, greener way. Eisenhower rallied us with the red menace. The
next president will have to rally us with a green patriotism. Hence my
motto: “Green is the new red, white and blue.”
The good news is that after traveling around America this past year,
looking at how we use energy and the emerging alternatives, I can report
that green really has gone Main Street — thanks to the perfect storm
created by 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Internet revolution. The
first flattened the twin towers, the second flattened New Orleans and
the third flattened the global economic playing field. The convergence
of all three has turned many of our previous assumptions about “green”
upside down in a very short period of time, making it much more
compelling to many more Americans.
But here’s the bad news: While green has hit Main Street — more
Americans than ever now identify themselves as greens, or what I call
“Geo-Greens” to differentiate their more muscular and strategic green
ideology — green has not gone very far down Main Street. It certainly
has not gone anywhere near the distance required to preserve our
lifestyle. The dirty little secret is that we’re fooling ourselves. We
in America talk like we’re already “the greenest generation,” as the
business writer Dan Pink once called it. But here’s the really
inconvenient truth: We have not even begun to be serious about the
costs, the effort and the scale of change that will be required to shift
our country, and eventually the world, to a largely emissions-free
energy infrastructure over the next 50 years.
II.
A few weeks after American forces invaded Afghanistan, I visited the
Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar, a hotbed of Islamic radicalism. On
the way, I stopped at the famous Darul Uloom Haqqania, the biggest
madrasa, or Islamic school, in Pakistan, with 2,800 live-in students.
The Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar attended this madrasa as a
younger man. My Pakistani friend and I were allowed to observe a class
of young boys who sat on the floor, practicing their rote learning of
the Koran from texts perched on wooden holders. The air in the Koran
class was so thick and stale it felt as if you could have cut it into
blocks. The teacher asked an 8-year-old boy to chant a Koranic verse for
us, which he did with the elegance of an experienced muezzin. I asked
another student, an Afghan refugee, Rahim Kunduz, age 12, what his
reaction was to the Sept. 11 attacks, and he said: “Most likely the
attack came from Americans inside America. I am pleased that America has
had to face pain, because the rest of the world has tasted its pain.” A
framed sign on the wall said this room was “A gift of the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia.”
Sometime after 9/11 — an unprovoked mass murder perpetrated by 19 men,
15 of whom were Saudis — green went geostrategic, as Americans started
to realize we were financing both sides in the war on terrorism. We were
financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars; and we were financing
a transformation of Islam, in favor of its most intolerant strand, with
our gasoline purchases. How stupid is that?
Islam has always been practiced in different forms. Some are more
embracing of modernity, reinterpretation of the Koran and tolerance of
other faiths, like Sufi Islam or the populist Islam of Egypt, Ottoman
Turkey and Indonesia. Some strands, like Salafi Islam — followed by the
Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and by Al Qaeda — believe Islam should be
returned to an austere form practiced in the time of the Prophet
Muhammad, a form hostile to modernity, science, “infidels” and women’s
rights. By enriching the Saudi and Iranian treasuries via our gasoline
purchases, we are financing the export of the Saudi puritanical brand of
Sunni Islam and the Iranian fundamentalist brand of Shiite Islam,
tilting the Muslim world in a more intolerant direction. At the Muslim
fringe, this creates more recruits for the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hamas,
Hezbollah and the Sunni suicide bomb squads of Iraq; at the Muslim
center, it creates a much bigger constituency of people who applaud
suicide bombers as martyrs.
The Saudi Islamic export drive first went into high gear after extreme
fundamentalists challenged the Muslim credentials of the Saudi ruling
family by taking over the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979 — a year that
coincided with the Iranian revolution and a huge rise in oil prices. The
attack on the Grand Mosque by these Koran-and-rifle-wielding Islamic
militants shook the Saudi ruling family to its core. The al-Sauds
responded to this challenge to their religious bona fides by becoming
outwardly more religious. They gave their official Wahhabi religious
establishment even more power to impose Islam on public life. Awash in
cash thanks to the spike in oil prices, the Saudi government and
charities also spent hundreds of millions of dollars endowing mosques,
youth clubs and Muslim schools all over the world, ensuring that Wahhabi
imams, teachers and textbooks would preach Saudi-style Islam.
Eventually, notes Lawrence Wright in “The Looming Tower,” his history of
Al Qaeda, “Saudi Arabia, which constitutes only 1 percent of the world
Muslim population, would support 90 percent of the expenses of the
entire faith, overriding other traditions of Islam.”
Saudi mosques and wealthy donors have also funneled cash to the Sunni
insurgents in Iraq. The Associated Press reported from Cairo in
December: “Several drivers interviewed by the A.P. in Middle East
capitals said Saudis have been using religious events, like the hajj
pilgrimage to Mecca and a smaller pilgrimage, as cover for illicit money
transfers. Some money, they said, is carried into Iraq on buses with
returning pilgrims. ‘They sent boxes full of dollars and asked me to
deliver them to certain addresses in Iraq,’ said one driver. ... ‘I know
it is being sent to the resistance, and if I don’t take it with me, they
will kill me.’ ”
No wonder more Americans have concluded that conserving oil to put less
money in the hands of hostile forces is now a geostrategic imperative.
President Bush’s refusal to do anything meaningful after 9/11 to reduce
our gasoline usage really amounts to a policy of “No Mullah Left
Behind.” James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, minces no words: “We
are funding the rope for the hanging of ourselves.”
No, I don’t want to bankrupt Saudi Arabia or trigger an Islamist revolt
there. Its leadership is more moderate and pro-Western than its people.
But the way the Saudi ruling family has bought off its religious
establishment, in order to stay in power, is not healthy. Cutting the
price of oil in half would help change that. In the 1990s, dwindling oil
income sparked a Saudi debate about less Koran and more science in Saudi
schools, even experimentation with local elections. But the recent oil
windfall has stilled all talk of reform.
That is because of what I call the First Law of Petropolitics: The price
of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in
states that are highly dependent on oil exports for their income and
have weak institutions or outright authoritarian governments. And this
is another reason that green has become geostrategic. Soaring oil prices
are poisoning the international system by strengthening antidemocratic
regimes around the globe.
Look what’s happened: We thought the fall of the Berlin Wall was going
to unleash an unstoppable tide of free markets and free people, and for
about a decade it did just that. But those years coincided with oil in
the $10-to-$30-a-barrel range. As the price of oil surged into the
$30-to-$70 range in the early 2000s, it triggered a countertide — a tide
of petroauthoritarianism — manifested in Russia, Iran, Nigeria,
Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Egypt, Chad, Angola, Azerbaijan
and Turkmenistan. The elected or self-appointed elites running these
states have used their oil windfalls to ensconce themselves in power,
buy off opponents and counter the fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall tide. If we
continue to finance them with our oil purchases, they will reshape the
world in their image, around Putin-like values.
You can illustrate the First Law of Petropolitics with a simple graph.
On one line chart the price of oil from 1979 to the present; on another
line chart the Freedom House or Fraser Institute freedom indexes for
Russia, Nigeria, Iran and Venezuela for the same years. When you put
these two lines on the same graph you see something striking: the price
of oil and the pace of freedom are inversely correlated. As oil prices
went down in the early 1990s, competition, transparency, political
participation and accountability of those in office all tended to go up
in these countries — as measured by free elections held, newspapers
opened, reformers elected, economic reform projects started and
companies privatized. That’s because their petroauthoritarian regimes
had to open themselves to foreign investment and educate and empower
their people more in order to earn income. But as oil prices went up
around 2000, free speech, free press, fair elections and freedom to form
political parties and NGOs all eroded in these countries.
The motto of the American Revolution was “no taxation without
representation.” The motto of the petroauthoritarians is “no
representation without taxation”: If I don’t have to tax you, because I
can get all the money I need from oil wells, I don’t have to listen to you.
It is no accident that when oil prices were low in the 1990s, Iran
elected a reformist Parliament and a president who called for a
“dialogue of civilizations.” And when oil prices soared to $70 a barrel,
Iran’s conservatives pushed out the reformers and ensconced a president
who says the Holocaust is a myth. (I promise you, if oil prices drop to
$25 a barrel, the Holocaust won’t be a myth anymore.) And it is no
accident that the first Arab Gulf state to start running out of oil,
Bahrain, is also the first Arab Gulf state to have held a free and fair
election in which women could run and vote, the first Arab Gulf state to
overhaul its labor laws to make more of its own people employable and
the first Arab Gulf state to sign a free-trade agreement with America.
People change when they have to — not when we tell them to — and falling
oil prices make them have to. That is why if we are looking for a Plan B
for Iraq — a way of pressing for political reform in the Middle East
without going to war again — there is no better tool than bringing down
the price of oil. When it comes to fostering democracy among
petroauthoritarians, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a neocon or a
radical lib. If you’re not also a Geo-Green, you won’t succeed.
The notion that conserving energy is a geostrategic imperative has also
moved into the Pentagon, for slightly different reasons. Generals are
realizing that the more energy they save in the heat of battle, the more
power they can project. The Pentagon has been looking to improve its
energy efficiency for several years now to save money. But the Iraq war
has given birth to a new movement in the U.S. military: the “Green Hawks.”
As Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who has been working
with the Pentagon, put it to me: The Iraq war forced the U.S. military
to think much more seriously about how to “eat its tail” — to shorten
its energy supply lines by becoming more energy efficient. According to
Dan Nolan, who oversees energy projects for the U.S. Army’s Rapid
Equipping Force, it started last year when a Marine major general in
Anbar Province told the Pentagon he wanted better-insulated, more
energy-efficient tents in the Iraqi desert. Why? His air-conditioners
were being run off mobile generators, and the generators ran on diesel,
and the diesel had to be trucked in, and the insurgents were blowing up
the trucks.
“When we began the analysis of his request, it was really about the fact
that his soldiers were being attacked on the roads bringing fuel and
water,” Nolan said. So eating their tail meant “taking those things that
are brought into the unit and trying to generate them on-site.” To that
end Nolan’s team is now experimenting with everything from new kinds of
tents that need 40 percent less air-conditioning to new kinds of fuel
cells that produce water as a byproduct.
Pay attention: When the U.S. Army desegregated, the country really
desegregated; when the Army goes green, the country could really go green.
“Energy independence is a national security issue,” Nolan said. “It’s
the right business for us to be in. ... We are not trying to change the
whole Army. Our job is to focus on that battalion out there and give
those commanders the technological innovations they need to deal with
today’s mission. But when they start coming home, they are going to
bring those things with them.”
III.
The second big reason green has gone Main Street is because global
warming has. A decade ago, it was mostly experts who worried that
climate change was real, largely brought about by humans and likely to
lead to species loss and environmental crises. Now Main Street is
starting to worry because people are seeing things they’ve never seen
before in their own front yards and reading things they’ve never read
before in their papers — like the recent draft report by the United
Nations’s 2,000-expert Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which
concluded that “changes in climate are now affecting physical and
biological systems on every continent.”
I went to Montana in January and Gov. Brian Schweitzer told me: “We
don’t get as much snow in the high country as we used to, and the runoff
starts sooner in the spring. The river I’ve been fishing over the last
50 years is now warmer in July by five degrees than 50 years ago, and it
is hard on our trout population.” I went to Moscow in February, and my
friends told me they just celebrated the first Moscow Christmas in their
memory with no snow. I stopped in London on the way home, and I didn’t
need an overcoat. In 2006, the average temperature in central England
was the highest ever recorded since the Central England Temperature
(C.E.T.) series began in 1659.
Yes, no one knows exactly what will happen. But ever fewer people want
to do nothing. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California summed up the
new climate around climate when he said to me recently: “If 98 doctors
say my son is ill and needs medication and two say ‘No, he doesn’t, he
is fine,’ I will go with the 98. It’s common sense — the same with
global warming. We go with the majority, the large majority. ... The key
thing now is that since we know this industrial age has created it,
let’s get our act together and do everything we can to roll it back.”
But how? Now we arrive at the first big roadblock to green going down
Main Street. Most people have no clue — no clue — how huge an industrial
project is required to blunt climate change. Here are two people who do:
Robert Socolow, an engineering professor, and Stephen Pacala, an ecology
professor, who together lead the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at
Princeton, a consortium designing scalable solutions for the climate issue.
They first argued in a paper published by the journal Science in August
2004 that human beings can emit only so much carbon into the atmosphere
before the buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) reaches a level unknown in
recent geologic history and the earth’s climate system starts to go
“haywire.” The scientific consensus, they note, is that the risk of
things going haywire — weather patterns getting violently unstable,
glaciers melting, prolonged droughts — grows rapidly as CO2 levels
“approach a doubling” of the concentration of CO2 that was in the
atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution.
“Think of the climate change issue as a closet, and behind the door are
lurking all kinds of monsters — and there’s a long list of them,” Pacala
said. “All of our scientific work says the most damaging monsters start
to come out from behind that door when you hit the doubling of CO2
levels.” As Bill Collins, who led the development of a model used
worldwide for simulating climate change, put it to me: “We’re running an
uncontrolled experiment on the only home we have.”
So here is our challenge, according to Pacala: If we basically do
nothing, and global CO2 emissions continue to grow at the pace of the
last 30 years for the next 50 years, we will pass the doubling level —
an atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide of 560 parts per million
— around midcentury. To avoid that — and still leave room for developed
countries to grow, using less carbon, and for countries like India and
China to grow, emitting double or triple their current carbon levels,
until they climb out of poverty and are able to become more energy
efficient — will require a huge global industrial energy project.
To convey the scale involved, Socolow and Pacala have created a pie
chart with 15 different wedges. Some wedges represent carbon-free or
carbon-diminishing power-generating technologies; other wedges represent
efficiency programs that could conserve large amounts of energy and
prevent CO2 emissions. They argue that the world needs to deploy any 7
of these 15 wedges, or sufficient amounts of all 15, to have enough
conservation, and enough carbon-free energy, to increase the world
economy and still avoid the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Each
wedge, when phased in over 50 years, would avoid the release of 25
billion tons of carbon, for a total of 175 billion tons of carbon
avoided between now and 2056.
Here are seven wedges we could chose from: “Replace 1,400 large
coal-fired plants with gas-fired plants; increase the fuel economy of
two billion cars from 30 to 60 miles per gallon; add twice today’s
nuclear output to displace coal; drive two billion cars on ethanol,
using one-sixth of the world’s cropland; increase solar power 700-fold
to displace coal; cut electricity use in homes, offices and stores by 25
percent; install carbon capture and sequestration capacity at 800 large
coal-fired plants.” And the other eight aren’t any easier. They include
halting all cutting and burning of forests, since deforestation causes
about 20 percent of the world’s annual CO2 emissions.
“There has never been a deliberate industrial project in history as big
as this,” Pacala said. Through a combination of clean power technology
and conservation, “we have to get rid of 175 billion tons of carbon over
the next 50 years — and still keep growing. It is possible to accomplish
this if we start today. But every year that we delay, the job becomes
more difficult — and if we delay a decade or two, avoiding the doubling
or more may well become impossible.”
IV.
In November, I flew from Shanghai to Beijing on Air China. As we landed
in Beijing and taxied to the terminal, the Chinese air hostess came on
the P.A. and said: “We’ve just landed in Beijing. The temperature is 8
degrees Celsius, 46 degrees Fahrenheit and the sky is clear.”
I almost burst out laughing. Outside my window the smog was so thick you
could not see the end of the terminal building. When I got into Beijing,
though, friends told me the air was better than usual. Why? China had
been host of a summit meeting of 48 African leaders. Time magazine
reported that Beijing officials had “ordered half a million official
cars off the roads and said another 400,000 drivers had ‘volunteered’ to
refrain from using their vehicles” in order to clean up the air for
their African guests. As soon as they left, the cars returned, and
Beijing’s air went back to “unhealthy.”
Green has also gone Main Street because the end of Communism, the rise
of the personal computer and the diffusion of the Internet have opened
the global economic playing field to so many more people, all coming
with their own versions of the American dream — a house, a car, a
toaster, a microwave and a refrigerator. It is a blessing to see so many
people growing out of poverty. But when three billion people move from
“low-impact” to “high-impact” lifestyles, Jared Diamond wrote in
“Collapse,” it makes it urgent that we find cleaner ways to fuel their
dreams. According to Lester Brown, the founder of the Earth Policy
Institute, if China keeps growing at 8 percent a year, by 2031 the
per-capita income of 1.45 billion Chinese will be the same as America’s
in 2004. China currently has only one car for every 100 people, but
Brown projects that as it reaches American income levels, if it copies
American consumption, it will have three cars for every four people, or
1.1 billion vehicles. The total world fleet today is 800 million vehicles!
That’s why McKinsey Global Institute forecasts that developing countries
will generate nearly 80 percent of the growth in world energy demand
between now and 2020, with China representing 32 percent and the Middle
East 10 percent. So if Red China doesn’t become Green China there is no
chance we will keep the climate monsters behind the door. On some days,
says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, almost 25 percent of the
polluting matter in the air above Los Angeles comes from China’s
coal-fired power plants and factories, as well as fumes from China’s
cars and dust kicked up by droughts and deforestation around Asia.
The good news is that China knows it has to grow green — or it won’t
grow at all. On Sept. 8, 2006, a Chinese newspaper reported that China’s
E.P.A. and its National Bureau of Statistics had re-examined China’s
2004 G.D.P. number. They concluded that the health problems,
environmental degradation and lost workdays from pollution had actually
cost China $64 billion, or 3.05 percent of its total economic output for
2004. Some experts believe the real number is closer to 10 percent.
Thus China has a strong motivation to clean up the worst pollutants in
its air. Those are the nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides and mercury that
produce acid rain, smog and haze — much of which come from burning coal.
But cleaning up is easier said than done. The Communist Party’s
legitimacy and the stability of the whole country depend heavily on
Beijing’s ability to provide rising living standards for more and more
Chinese.
So, if you’re a Chinese mayor and have to choose between growing jobs
and cutting pollution, you will invariably choose jobs: coughing workers
are much less politically dangerous than unemployed workers. That’s a
key reason why China’s 10th five-year plan, which began in 2000, called
for a 10 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide in China’s air — and when
that plan concluded in 2005, sulfur dioxide pollution in China had
increased by 27 percent.
But if China is having a hard time cleaning up its nitrogen and sulfur
oxides — which can be done relatively cheaply by adding scrubbers to the
smokestacks of coal-fired power plants — imagine what will happen when
it comes to asking China to curb its CO2, of which China is now the
world’s second-largest emitter, after America. To build a coal-fired
power plant that captures, separates and safely sequesters the CO2 into
the ground before it goes up the smokestack requires either an expensive
retrofit or a whole new system. That new system would cost about 40
percent more to build and operate — and would produce 20 percent less
electricity, according to a recent M.I.T. study, “The Future of Coal.”
China — which is constructing the equivalent of two 500-megawatt
coal-fired power plants every week — is not going to pay that now.
Remember: CO2 is an invisible, odorless, tasteless gas. Yes, it causes
global warming — but it doesn’t hurt anyone in China today, and getting
rid of it is costly and has no economic payoff. China’s strategy right
now is to say that CO2 is the West’s problem. “It must be pointed out
that climate change has been caused by the long-term historic emissions
of developed countries and their high per-capita emissions,” Jiang Yu, a
spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry, declared in February.
“Developed countries bear an unshirkable responsibility.”
So now we come to the nub of the issue: Green will not go down Main
Street America unless it also goes down Main Street China, India and
Brazil. And for green to go Main Street in these big developing
countries, the prices of clean power alternatives — wind, biofuels,
nuclear, solar or coal sequestration — have to fall to the “China
price.” The China price is basically the price China pays for coal-fired
electricity today because China is not prepared to pay a premium now,
and sacrifice growth and stability, just to get rid of the CO2 that
comes from burning coal.
“The ‘China price’ is the fundamental benchmark that everyone is looking
to satisfy,” said Curtis Carlson, C.E.O. of SRI International, which is
developing alternative energy technologies. “Because if the Chinese have
to pay 10 percent more for energy, when they have tens of millions of
people living under $1,000 a year, it is not going to happen.” Carlson
went on to say: “We have an enormous amount of new innovation we must
put in place before we can get to a price that China and India will be
able to pay. But this is also an opportunity.”
V.
The only way we are going to get innovations that drive energy costs
down to the China price — innovations in energy-saving appliances,
lights and building materials and in non-CO2-emitting power plants and
fuels — is by mobilizing free-market capitalism. The only thing as
powerful as Mother Nature is Father Greed. To a degree, the market is
already at work on this project — because some venture capitalists and
companies understand that clean-tech is going to be the next great
global industry. Take Wal-Mart. The world’s biggest retailer woke up
several years ago, its C.E.O. Lee Scott told me, and realized that with
regard to the environment its customers “had higher expectations for us
than we had for ourselves.” So Scott hired a sustainability expert, Jib
Ellison, to tutor the company. The first lesson Ellison preached was
that going green was a whole new way for Wal-Mart to cut costs and drive
its profits. As Scott recalled it, Ellison said to him, “Lee, the thing
you have to think of is all this stuff that people don’t want you to put
into the environment is waste — and you’re paying for it!”
So Scott initiated a program to work with Wal-Mart’s suppliers to reduce
the sizes and materials used for all its packaging by five percent by
2013. The reductions they have made are already paying off in savings to
the company. “We created teams to work across the organization,” Scott
said. “It was voluntary — then you had the first person who eliminated
some packaging, and someone else started showing how we could recycle
more plastic, and all of a sudden it’s $1 million a quarter.” Wal-Mart
operates 7,000 huge Class 8 trucks that get about 6 miles per gallon. It
has told its truck makers that by 2015, it wants to double the
efficiency of the fleet. Wal-Mart is the China of companies, so,
explained Scott, “if we place one order we can create a market” for
energy innovation.
For instance, Wal-Mart has used its shelves to create a huge, low-cost
market for compact fluorescent bulbs, which use about a quarter of the
energy of incandescent bulbs to produce the same light and last 10 times
as long. “Just by doing what it does best — saving customers money and
cutting costs,” said Glenn Prickett of Conservation International, a
Wal-Mart adviser, “Wal-Mart can have a revolutionary impact on the
market for green technologies. If every one of their 100 million
customers in the U.S. bought just one energy-saving compact fluorescent
lamp, instead of a traditional incandescent bulb, they could cut CO2
emissions by 45 billion pounds and save more than $3 billion.”
Those savings highlight something that often gets lost: The quickest way
to get to the China price for clean power is by becoming more energy
efficient. The cheapest, cleanest, nonemitting power plant in the world
is the one you don’t build. Helping China adopt some of the breakthrough
efficiency programs that California has adopted, for instance — like
rewarding electrical utilities for how much energy they get their
customers to save rather than to use — could have a huge impact. Some
experts estimate that China could cut its need for new power plants in
half with aggressive investments in efficiency.
Yet another force driving us to the China price is Chinese
entrepreneurs, who understand that while Beijing may not be ready to
impose CO2 restraints, developed countries are, so this is going to be a
global business — and they want a slice. Let me introduce the man
identified last year by Forbes Magazine as the seventh-richest man in
China, with a fortune now estimated at $2.2 billion. His name is Shi
Zhengrong and he is China’s leading manufacturer of silicon solar
panels, which convert sunlight into electricity.
“People at all levels in China have become more aware of this
environment issue and alternative energy,” said Shi, whose company,
Suntech Power Holdings, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. “Five
years ago, when I started the company, people said: ‘Why do we need
solar? We have a surplus of coal-powered electricity.’ Now it is
different; now people realize that solar has a bright future. But it is
still too expensive. ... We have to reduce the cost as quickly as
possible — our real competitors are coal and nuclear power.”
Shi does most of his manufacturing in China, but sells roughly 90
percent of his products outside China, because today they are too
expensive for his domestic market. But the more he can get the price
down, and start to grow his business inside China, the more he can use
that to become a dominant global player. Thanks to Suntech’s success, in
China “there is a rush of business people entering this sector, even
though we still don’t have a market here,” Shi added. “Many government
people now say, ‘This is an industry!’ ” And if it takes off, China
could do for solar panels what it did for tennis shoes — bring the price
down so far that everyone can afford a pair.
VI.
All that sounds great — but remember those seven wedges? To reach the
necessary scale of emissions-free energy will require big clean coal or
nuclear power stations, wind farms and solar farms, all connected to a
national transmission grid, not to mention clean fuels for our cars and
trucks. And the market alone, as presently constructed in the U.S., will
not get us those alternatives at the scale we need — at the China price
— fast enough.
Prof. Nate Lewis, Caltech’s noted chemist and energy expert, explained
why with an analogy. “Let’s say you invented the first cellphone,” he
said. “You could charge people $1,000 for each one because lots of
people would be ready to pay lots of money to have a phone they could
carry in their pocket.” With those profits, you, the inventor, could pay
back your shareholders and plow more into research, so you keep selling
better and cheaper cellphones.
But energy is different, Lewis explained: “If I come to you and say,
‘Today your house lights are being powered by dirty coal, but tomorrow,
if you pay me $100 more a month, I will power your house lights with
solar,’ you are most likely to say: ‘Sorry, Nate, but I don’t really
care how my lights go on, I just care that they go on. I won’t pay an
extra $100 a month for sun power. A new cellphone improves my life. A
different way to power my lights does nothing.’
“So building an emissions-free energy infrastructure is not like sending
a man to the moon,” Lewis went on. “With the moon shot, money was no
object — and all we had to do was get there. But today, we already have
cheap energy from coal, gas and oil. So getting people to pay more to
shift to clean fuels is like trying to get funding for NASA to build a
spaceship to the moon — when Southwest Airlines already flies there and
gives away free peanuts! I already have a cheap ride to the moon, and a
ride is a ride. For most people, electricity is electricity, no matter
how it is generated.”
If we were running out of coal or oil, the market would steadily push
the prices up, which would stimulate innovation in alternatives.
Eventually there would be a crossover, and the alternatives would kick
in, start to scale and come down in price. But what has happened in
energy over the last 35 years is that the oil price goes up, stimulating
government subsidies and some investments in alternatives, and then the
price goes down, the government loses interest, the subsidies expire and
the investors in alternatives get wiped out.
The only way to stimulate the scale of sustained investment in research
and development of non-CO2 emitting power at the China price is if the
developed countries, who can afford to do so, force their people to pay
the full climate, economic and geopolitical costs of using gasoline and
dirty coal. Those countries that have signed the Kyoto Protocol are
starting to do that. But America is not.
Up to now, said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute,
we as a society “have been behaving just like Enron the company at the
height of its folly.” We rack up stunning profits and G.D.P. numbers
every year, and they look great on paper “because we’ve been hiding some
of the costs off the books.” If we don’t put a price on the CO2 we’re
building up or on our addiction to oil, we’ll never nurture the
innovation we need.
Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman of General Electric, has worked for G.E.
for 25 years. In that time, he told me, he has seen seven generations of
innovation in G.E.’s medical equipment business — in devices like
M.R.I.s or CT scans — because health care market incentives drove the
innovation. In power, it’s just the opposite. “Today, on the power
side,” he said, “we’re still selling the same basic coal-fired power
plants we had when I arrived. They’re a little cleaner and more
efficient now, but basically the same.”
The one clean power area where G.E. is now into a third generation is
wind turbines, “thanks to the European Union,” Immelt said. Countries
like Denmark, Spain and Germany imposed standards for wind power on
their utilities and offered sustained subsidies, creating a big market
for wind-turbine manufacturers in Europe in the 1980s, when America
abandoned wind because the price of oil fell. “We grew our wind business
in Europe,” Immelt said.
As things stand now in America, Immelt said, “the market does not work
in energy.” The multibillion-dollar scale of investment that a company
like G.E. is being asked to make in order to develop new clean-power
technologies or that a utility is being asked to make in order to build
coal sequestration facilities or nuclear plants is not going to happen
at scale — unless they know that coal and oil are going to be priced
high enough for long enough that new investments will not be undercut in
a few years by falling fossil fuel prices. “Carbon has to have a value,”
Immelt emphasized. “Today in the U.S. and China it has no value.”
I recently visited the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant with
Christopher Crane, president of Exelon Nuclear, which owns the facility.
He said that if Exelon wanted to start a nuclear plant today, the
licensing, design, planning and building requirements are so extensive
it would not open until 2015 at the earliest. But even if Exelon got all
the approvals, it could not start building “because the cost of capital
for a nuclear plant today is prohibitive.”
That’s because the interest rate that any commercial bank would charge
on a loan for a nuclear facility would be so high — because of all the
risks of lawsuits or cost overruns — that it would be impossible for
Exelon to proceed. A standard nuclear plant today costs about $3 billion
per unit. The only way to stimulate more nuclear power innovation, Crane
said, would be federal loan guarantees that would lower the cost of
capital for anyone willing to build a new nuclear plant.
The 2005 energy bill created such loan guarantees, but the details still
have not been worked out. “We would need a robust loan guarantee program
to jump-start the nuclear industry,” Crane said — an industry that has
basically been frozen since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. With
cheaper money, added Crane, CO2-free nuclear power could be “very
competitive” with CO2-emitting pulverized coal.
Think about the implications. Three Mile Island had two reactors, TMI-2,
which shut down because of the 1979 accident, and TMI-1, which is still
operating today, providing clean electricity with virtually no CO2
emissions for 800,000 homes. Had the TMI-2 accident not happened, it too
would have been providing clean electricity for 800,000 homes for the
last 28 years. Instead, that energy came from CO2-emitting coal, which,
by the way, still generates 50 percent of America’s electricity.
Similar calculations apply to ethanol production. “We have about 100
scientists working on cellulosic ethanol,” Chad Holliday, the C.E.O. of
DuPont, told me. “My guess is that we could double the number and add
another 50 to start working on how to commercialize it. It would
probably cost us less than $100 million to scale up. But I am not ready
to do that. I can guess what it will cost me to make it and what the
price will be, but is the market going to be there? What are the
regulations going to be? Is the ethanol subsidy going to be reduced?
Will we put a tax on oil to keep ethanol competitive? If I know that, it
gives me a price target to go after. Without that, I don’t know what the
market is and my shareholders don’t know how to value what I am doing.
... You need some certainty on the incentives side and on the market
side, because we are talking about multiyear investments, billions of
dollars, that will take a long time to take off, and we won’t hit on
everything.”
Summing up the problem, Immelt of G.E. said the big energy players are
being asked “to take a 15-minute market signal and make a 40-year
decision and that just doesn’t work. ... The U.S. government should
decide: What do we want to have happen? How much clean coal, how much
nuclear and what is the most efficient way to incentivize people to get
there?”
He’s dead right. The market alone won’t work. Government’s job is to set
high standards, let the market reach them and then raise the standards
more. That’s how you get scale innovation at the China price. Government
can do this by imposing steadily rising efficiency standards for
buildings and appliances and by stipulating that utilities generate a
certain amount of electricity from renewables — like wind or solar. Or
it can impose steadily rising mileage standards for cars or a steadily
tightening cap-and-trade system for the amount of CO2 any factory or
power plant can emit. Or it can offer loan guarantees and fast-track
licensing for anyone who wants to build a nuclear plant. Or — my
preference and the simplest option — it can impose a carbon tax that
will stimulate the market to move away from fuels that emit high levels
of CO2 and invest in those that don’t. Ideally, it will do all of these
things. But whichever options we choose, they will only work if they are
transparent, simple and long-term — with zero fudging allowed and with
regulatory oversight and stiff financial penalties for violators.
The politician who actually proved just how effective this can be was a
guy named George W. Bush, when he was governor of Texas. He pushed for
and signed a renewable energy portfolio mandate in 1999. The mandate
stipulated that Texas power companies had to produce 2,000 new megawatts
of electricity from renewables, mostly wind, by 2009. What happened? A
dozen new companies jumped into the Texas market and built wind turbines
to meet the mandate, so many that the 2,000-megawatt goal was reached in
2005. So the Texas Legislature has upped the mandate to 5,000 megawatts
by 2015, and everyone knows they will beat that too because of how
quickly wind in Texas is becoming competitive with coal. Today, thanks
to Governor Bush’s market intervention, Texas is the biggest wind state
in America.
President Bush, though, is no Governor Bush. (The Dick Cheney effect?)
President Bush claims he’s protecting American companies by not imposing
tough mileage, conservation or clean power standards, but he’s actually
helping them lose the race for the next great global industry. Japan has
some of the world’s highest gasoline taxes and stringent energy
efficiency standards for vehicles — and it has the world’s most
profitable and innovative car company, Toyota. That’s no accident.
The politicians who best understand this are America’s governors, some
of whom have started to just ignore Washington, set their own energy
standards and reap the benefits for their states. As Schwarzenegger told
me, “We have seen in California so many companies that have been created
that work just on things that have do with clean environment.”
California’s state-imposed efficiency standards have resulted in
per-capita energy consumption in California remaining almost flat for
the last 30 years, while in the rest of the country it has gone up 50
percent. “There are a lot of industries that are exploding right now
because of setting these new standards,” he said.
VII.
John Dineen runs G.E. Transportation, which makes locomotives. His
factory is in Erie, Pa., and employs 4,500 people. When it comes to the
challenges from cheap labor markets, Dineen likes to say, “Our little
town has trade surpluses with China and Mexico.”
Now how could that be? China makes locomotives that are 30 percent
cheaper than G.E.’s, but it turns out that G.E.’s are the most energy
efficient in the world, with the lowest emissions and best mileage per
ton pulled — “and they don’t stop on the tracks,” Dineen added. So China
is also buying from Erie — and so are Brazil, Mexico and Kazakhstan.
What’s the secret? The China price.
“We made it very easy for them,” said Dineen. “By producing engines with
lower emissions in the classic sense (NOx [nitrogen oxides]) and lower
emissions in the future sense (CO2) and then coupling it with better
fuel efficiency and reliability, we lowered the total life-cycle cost.”
The West can’t impose its climate or pollution standards on China,
Dineen explained, but when a company like G.E. makes an engine that gets
great mileage, cuts pollution and, by the way, emits less CO2, China
will be a buyer. “If we were just trying to export lower-emission units,
and they did not have the fuel benefits, we would lose,” Dineen said.
“But when green is made green — improved fuel economies coupled with
emissions reductions — we see very quick adoption rates.”
One reason G.E. Transportation got so efficient was the old U.S.
standard it had to meet on NOx pollution, Dineen said. It did that
through technological innovation. And as oil prices went up, it
leveraged more technology to get better mileage. The result was a
cleaner, more efficient, more exportable locomotive. Dineen describes
his factory as a “technology campus” because, he explains, “it looks
like a 100-year-old industrial site, but inside those 100-year-old
buildings are world-class engineers working on the next generation’s
technologies.” He also notes that workers in his factory make nearly
twice the average in Erie — by selling to China!
The bottom line is this: Clean-tech plays to America’s strength because
making things like locomotives lighter and smarter takes a lot of
knowledge — not cheap labor. That’s why embedding clean-tech into
everything we design and manufacture is a way to revive America as a
manufacturing power.
“Whatever you are making, if you can add a green dimension to it —
making it more efficient, healthier and more sustainable for future
generations — you have a product that can’t just be made cheaper in
India or China,” said Andrew Shapiro, founder of GreenOrder, an
environmental business-strategy group. “If you just create a green
ghetto in your company, you miss it. You have to figure out how to
integrate green into the DNA of your whole business.”
Ditto for our country, which is why we need a Green New Deal — one in
which government’s role is not funding projects, as in the original New
Deal, but seeding basic research, providing loan guarantees where needed
and setting standards, taxes and incentives that will spawn 1,000 G.E.
Transportations for all kinds of clean power.
Bush won’t lead a Green New Deal, but his successor must if America is
going to maintain its leadership and living standard. Unfortunately,
today’s presidential hopefuls are largely full of hot air on the
climate-energy issue. Not one of them is proposing anything hard, like a
carbon or gasoline tax, and if you think we can deal with these huge
problems without asking the American people to do anything hard, you’re
a fool or a fraud.
Being serious starts with reframing the whole issue — helping Americans
understand, as the Carnegie Fellow David Rothkopf puts it, “that we’re
not ‘post-Cold War’ anymore — we’re pre-something totally new.” I’d say
we’re in the “pre-climate war era.” Unless we create a more carbon-free
world, we will not preserve the free world. Intensifying climate change,
energy wars and petroauthoritarianism will curtail our life choices and
our children’s opportunities every bit as much as Communism once did for
half the planet.
Equally important, presidential candidates need to help Americans
understand that green is not about cutting back. It’s about creating a
new cornucopia of abundance for the next generation by inventing a whole
new industry. 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, which as Schwarzenegger argues would “create
a very powerful side product.” Those who dislike America because of
Iraq, he explained, would at least be able to say, “Well, I don’t like
them for the war, but I do like them because they show such unbelievable
leadership — not just with their blue jeans and hamburgers but with the
environment. People will love us for that. That’s not existing right now.”
In sum, as John Hennessy, the president of Stanford, taught me:
Confronting this climate-energy issue is the epitome of what John
Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, once described as “a series of
great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.”
Am I optimistic? I want to be. But I am also old-fashioned. I don’t
believe the world will effectively address the climate-energy challenge
without America, its president, its government, its industry, its
markets and its people all leading the parade. Green has to become part
of America’s DNA. We’re getting there. Green has hit Main Street — it’s
now more than a hobby — but it’s still less than a new way of life.
Why? Because big transformations — women’s suffrage, for instance —
usually happen when a lot of aggrieved people take to the streets, the
politicians react and laws get changed. But the climate-energy debate is
more muted and slow-moving. Why? Because the people who will be most
harmed by the climate-energy crisis haven’t been born yet.
“This issue doesn’t pit haves versus have-nots,” notes the Johns Hopkins
foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum, “but the present versus the
future — today’s generation versus its kids and unborn grandchildren.”
Once the Geo-Green interest group comes of age, especially if it is
after another 9/11 or Katrina, Mandelbaum said, “it will be the biggest
interest group in history — but by then it could be too late.”
An unusual situation like this calls for the ethic of stewardship.
Stewardship is what parents do for their kids: think about the long
term, so they can have a better future. It is much easier to get
families to do that than whole societies, but that is our challenge. In
many ways, our parents rose to such a challenge in World War II — when
an entire generation mobilized to preserve our way of life. That is why
they were called the Greatest Generation. Our kids will only call us the
Greatest Generation if we rise to our challenge and become the Greenest
Generation.
Thomas L. Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times specializing in
foreign affairs.
Post by TDCPost by Pedro SalazarMnaito, soy hombre de negocios, pero en tu caso, soy tu maestro (lo cual
no es gran elogio)