Green is the New Right Thing
Posted on Apr 23rd, 2007
by 
~C4Chaos
~C4Chaos
The other day I was surfing the cable TV channels when I came across a Discovery Channel feature on green technology. The program is called Green is the New Red, White and Blue. It's hosted by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas L. Friedman, author of the famous book, The World is Flat. In it Friedman took the viewers on a tour to the biggest corporations who are changing the world by adopting cleaner alternative energy sources. Google and Wal-mart are on the top of the list of these companies. This program is a must-see.
Below is a Google video with a title taken from the program. To see the actual program you must watch it on Discovery Channel. Check your local listings here.
Green is the New Red, White & Blue
Serendipitously, while researching for this blog post, I also came across this New York Times article by Friedman called, The Power of Green. It's a must-read. Here's an excerpt:
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.”
...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.
... 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.
...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.
Read more
Needless to say, I couldn't get enough of Friedman today, so I also aggregated the following videos:
Addicted to Oil - Parts 1 to 5
Here's part one. Check out the rest at Discovery Channel: Addicted to Oil.
Addicted to Oil - Part 1 of 5
Happy viewing. May these programs and articles enrich our collective eco-awareness.
And the Earth Week continues...
Access: PublicTagged with: green, Thomas Friedman, ecology, environment, petropolitics, energy, Addicted to Oil, oil, Earth Day, Earth Week, videos, Google, YouTube, Discovery Channel
addicted to oil
September 2008 
Wow…
Shining & Fluffy…
(“Fluffy” is a word I learned here,and this is the first time I use it since I could not figure out a better one:)
And I love this week…
Lingchao
I immediately thought of this same article by Tom Friedmann for the Earth Day pod. I ran across it in The New York Times magazine April 15th edition while waiting for my MIL in the dr's office last Wed. I didn't get to finish it then but managed to get a link from my BIL.
I would also recommend The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann. I am only about halfway through it but it has done a very good job of laying out an overview of how we have gotten to where we are today (the exponential rate of population increase blew me away - I am sure the point has been made many times before but I wasn't listening).
While Friedmann gives us about 50 yrs to change the CO2 concentration (and his point about China going from 1 vehicle per 100 people to 3 vehicles per 4 people by 2030 and thus, surpassing in that country alone, the total number of vehicles exisitng today worldwide, is just one example of just how hard making changes will be) before the monster behind the door can not be contained anymore.
Hartmann gives us about 25 yrs or less (deducting a few years, since it was written in the 90s) before we run out of coal and oil and worldwide crisis sets in as a result. Eckhart Tolle in his Even the Sun will Die, an interview given the day of 9/11 and concluded a few days later, says that for the first time in history, mankind can not continue without major changes and still be here 100 yrs from now. He gives a great analogy of the Earth Body developing a fever (global warming) to fight off the illness caused by it's human “germs”.
No matter what time frame you look at, it is no wonder I feel frantic at times, rushed to get where I'm trying to go. I am trying to slow down nevertheless, because getting stressed will not help anything, including my own ability to function. I have also the balance of optimism (thanks to some “good” news ideas and/or other reasons to be optimistic) to temper my passionate concern. I want my children to have a good life - who doesn't?
More later,
Deborah
PS I attended Earth Day in St Louis yesterday. They had a beautiful day and what I consider to have been a very good event. I do intend next to post an Earth Day blog at my profile. Look for it later today or at least by tomorrow.
You would probably be disappointed in me if I didn't offer a voice of dissent on the Tom Friedman bandwagon. This guy actually does it much better than I do, but then again he's a political scientist from Syracuse.
Friedman supported the Iraq war, and adopted this attitude of “give it just six more months”, “just six more months”, “just…” He's an apologist for corporatocracy, our piss-poor foreign policy, and as I read of one reporter of his work, he writes “globalization porn”. I don't know whether he is totally naieve, or believes the light and fluffy spin that he puts on everything.
He's pro-“free trade” which is anything but. He'd make a great politician (by today's horrendously low standards) because he's very good at packaging ideas with sugar coating, but that's all there is beneath it, shallow sugar coating. I think Edward Herman put it best when he called him the Geraldo Rivera of the New York Times.
If Tom Friedman is the guy we are depending on for leading the rally call for “Green” then we are really doomed. He's “safe”… He throws wonderful soft pitches that corporations and the US government can deal with. He can lead us in gentle, manageable changes that might save the planet in about 150 years.
I'm sorry if I don't share the love, but to me Tom Friedman is jumping a “cool” and “hip” and “MONEY MAKING” Green-colored bandwagon. He gets to clean up his image which hasn't been helped for supporting the Iraq war, he gets to make money, and he gets to go around proving how he was right, while revealing a squeeky clean new Green.
But I'll let Tom Friedman's own words close out my criticism of Tom Friedman :
“And now for a wild prediction.
Within 12 months President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and all their backers in the oil industry will be begging — begging — to revive the Kyoto protocol on climate change, the accord Mr. Bush yanked America out of after taking office.”
A wild prediction indeed. Made on June 1st, 2001.
A very necessary zBlog post - if for nothing else than the statistics contained therein - and the potential for understanding the significance of those statistics.
IT IS for each and everyone of us to make our own decisions based on information provided from whomever & wherever - & my inbox brims over daily with a multitude of new information - but despite ALL that is being said on this and other related topics by the likes of Gore, Friedman, Attenborough et al - the ONLY precisely constructive appraisal & suggested list of comprehensive solutions to the TOTAL problem has been proposed by Colin Mason in his book - A short history of the FUTURE - in the face of the clear-felling disaster which is Tasmania.
Lest we forget it was another Australian - a doctor - who started sucessfully treating gastric ulcer patients with antibiotics - a decade or more before ALL the experts on earth came around to excepting the evidence of his rebellious approach.
In THIS instance we haven't got a decade or more to make the switch from the unsustainable way we live now !
Darshan said: “If Tom Friedman is the guy we are depending on for leading the rally call for “Green” then we are really doomed. He's “safe”… He throws wonderful soft pitches that corporations and the US government can deal with. He can lead us in gentle, manageable changes that might save the planet in about 150 years. ”
no. not depending on Friedman, but the people he talked to and interviewed in his documentary and data he gathered for his presentations. i think that he didn't just put together those information out of thin air. personally, i don't care about his (or others like Gore) politics. i said it before and i'll say it again: Whether you think Climate Change is an inconvenient truth or a convenient fiction, green is the right thing to do. Friedman, or no Friedman.
~C
Yes, ~C. And that's the simple truth.