Less Stuff, or More Blood

by Tom Prugh

The world's rich people must decide whether they want to share the planet's resources, or send their children to kill and die for them.

 

Thomas Friedman's latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, is a ringing and persuasive call for the United States to lead a green revolution that would restore U.S. economic strength and put the globe on the path to longterm sustainability. Amazon describes the book as "brilliant," "incisive," and "groundbreaking," and a worthy successor to his "phenomenal number-one bestseller" The World Is Flat-high praise for a wonkish volume about economic and environmental policy, even one written in the accessible prose of his previous books and New York Times columns. It's gratifying and hopeful to see a popular book (now out in paperback) that faces squarely our increasingly desperate environmental and geopolitical dilemma. Friedman is far ahead of the public on this issue and it can't hurt if his sales soar, and citizens and policymakers heed his message.

So, two cheers.

Why only two? Because, despite the book's insights, there is a deeply flawed assumption at its heart. While Friedman readily acknowledges the rapidly growing scale and urgency of our plight-as the climate threatens to tip into instability, population continues to rise, extinctions race far ahead of background rates, and political elites cling stubbornly to the delusion of perpetual economic growth-in the end he falls back, as most solutions-oriented analysts do, on technology as our savior. More specifically, he argues that we must harness technology to radically increase resource efficiency-the amount of economic benefit that can be squeezed from each input unit of materials and/or energy (sometimes called eco-efficiency). These excerpts from Chapter 3 of HF&C sum up his argument:

[T]he steady rise in energy, food, and other commodity prices since 2000 is surely a sign that the world, at present levels of science and technology, is straining to supply all the raw materials for the growth of so many Americums [sic; meaning large, rich, consumerist nations]. Without a dramatic improvement in sustainable energy and resource productivity, China, India, and the Arab world's strategy of just aping the resource-wasting development model of America is unviable. The old way is not replicable on the China-India scale in a flat world, without irreparable harm to planet earth.... [I]f the spread of freedom and free markets is not accompanied by a new approach to how we produce energy and treat the environment...then Mother Nature and planet earth will impose their own constraints and limits that will be worse than Communism.