Tom Friedman on ‘Being Green is the New Red White and Blue”

Weekend Reading: Thomas Friedman on Energy Gluttony and Security in the Middle East and Beyond
Tom Friedman on Energy SecurityIn Yesterday’s New York Times, columnist and author Tom Friedman writes calls for a mature U.S. energy policy as central to the US and global security. Unfortunately, the piece is behind New York Time’s firewall, but thankfully it is freely available from my city library’s online database.

Most strikingly Friendman states that “A democratization policy in the Middle East without a different energy policy at home is a waste of time, money and, most important, the lives of our young people.”

In a sense he is correct. Reform in the Middle East will be more about economic diversity/connectivity rather than democracy. As we know petrol states suffer from lacking both, but economic connectivity (beyond just state oil companies selling black gold abroad) will help foster political moderation and pull these states from Gap to the Seam and to the Core (to use Thomas Barnett’s terminology).

Here’s an excerpt from Friendman’s article, “Being Green is the New Red White and Blue“:

The biggest threat to America and its values today is not communism, authoritarianism or Islamism. It’s petrolism. Petrolism is my term for the corrupting, antidemocratic governing practices — in oil states from Russia to Nigeria and Iran — that result from a long run of $60-a-barrel oil. Petrolism is the politics of using oil income to buy off one’s citizens with subsidies and government jobs, using oil and gas exports to intimidate or buy off one’s enemies, and using oil profits to build up one’s internal security forces and army to keep oneself ensconced in power, without any transparency or checks and balances.

When a nation’s leaders can practice petrolism, they never have to tap their people’s energy and creativity; they simply have to tap an oil well. And therefore politics in a petrolist state is not about building a society or an educational system that maximizes its people’s ability to innovate, export and compete. It is simply about who controls the oil tap.

In petrolist states like Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Sudan, people get rich by being in government and sucking the treasury dry — so they never want to cede power. In non-petrolist states, like Taiwan, Singapore and Korea, people get rich by staying outside government and building real businesses.

Our energy gluttony fosters and strengthens various kinds of petrolist regimes. It emboldens authoritarian petrolism in Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Sudan and Central Asia. It empowers Islamist petrolism in Sudan, Iran and Saudi Arabia. It even helps sustain communism in Castro’s Cuba, which survives today in part thanks to cheap oil from Venezuela. Most of these petrolist regimes would have collapsed long ago, having proved utterly incapable of delivering a modern future for their people, but they have been saved by our energy excesses.

No matter what happens in Iraq, we cannot dry up the swamps of authoritarianism and violent Islamism in the Middle East without also drying up our consumption of oil — thereby bringing down the price of crude. A democratization policy in the Middle East without a different energy policy at home is a waste of time, money and, most important, the lives of our young people.

That’s because there is a huge difference in what these bad regimes can do with $20-a-barrel oil compared with the current $60-a-barrel oil. It is no accident that the reform era in Russia under Boris Yeltsin, and in Iran under Mohammad Khatami, coincided with low oil prices. When prices soared again, petrolist authoritarians in both societies reasserted themselves.

We need a president and a Congress with the guts not just to invade Iraq, but to also impose a gasoline tax and inspire conservation at home. That takes a real energy policy with long-term incentives for renewable energy — wind, solar, biofuels — rather than the welfare-for-oil-companies-and-special-interests that masqueraded last year as an energy bill.

Enough of this Bush-Cheney nonsense that conservation, energy efficiency and environmentalism are some hobby we can’t afford. I can’t think of anything more cowardly or un-American. Real patriots, real advocates of spreading democracy around the world, live green.

As usual, let me know if you would like to read the entire article (I excepted almost half of it), and I’ll send you a copy.


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One response to “Tom Friedman on ‘Being Green is the New Red White and Blue””

  1. IJ

    Thomas Friedman’s piece can be seen as an allegory. For the dangers of “petrolism”, substitute the dangers internationally of any of a couple of hundred national governments misusing their steady income stream of taxes, and controlling the levers of power in their sovereign nation.

    Checks and balances are safeguards for taxpayers, and are supposed to stop the misuses.

    Unfortunately they can be prevented. There’s a systemic flaw. The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago on the futile attempts to get value for money from the US defence budget:

    “But already there are signs of trouble ahead. In the last few years, Mr. Rumsfeld has tried to kill some weapons systems he saw as Cold War anachronisms and to push a military modernization plan. But his efforts were thwarted by what Washington calls the Iron Triangle of Congress, the uniformed military command and military contractors.”

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