[A-List] Blowing Green Smoke

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of The Long Emergency {1}

www.kunstler.com (April 16 2007)


Tom Friedman, celebrated New York Times columnist and author of The World is
Flat {2}, riffed on (or around) the issues of climate change and energy in that
newspaper's Sunday Magazine this week {3}, and managed, in the process, to
misunderstand just about every implication these conjoined problems present.
Friedman's specious thinking is symptomatic of exactly what is wrong with our
public discussion of these matters generally, and their presentation in
mainstream media in particular.

I'm fond of saying that if America could harness the power it wastes blowing
smoke up its own ass, we could magically escape our energy-and-climate-change
predicament. I say this repeatedly to counter the increasing volume of lies we
tell ourselves in order to maintain the illusion that we can continue living the
way we do. Like so many other commentators suffering from cranial-rectosis,
Friedman believes that we can keep on running our Happy Motoring utopia if we
just switch fuels.

Friedman gives no indication that he understands the fundamentals of the global
oil situation. He writes:

"People change when they have to - not when we tell them - 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."


This is a fascinating statement. It's predicated on the idea that the US can
achieve "energy independence", which is itself predicated on the further idea
that we can accomplish this by switching out gasoline for ethanol. This is such
an elementary error in thinking that it would be funny if it wasn't the lead
story in the flagship of the mainstream media. As a Pennsylvania farmer put it
to me in February: "It looks like we're going to burn up the last remaining six
inches of Midwest topsoil in our gas-tanks". Friedman's statement also ignores
the facts that running cars on ethanol would make no material difference in the
amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, or that ethanol is twenty
percent less efficient than gasoline, meaning we would have to produce and use
that much more of the stuff just to stay where we are.

Where climate change is concerned, this is a variation of the "Red Queen
syndrome" (from Alice in Wonderland) in which one has to run faster and faster
to stay in place. It also fails to take into account the tragic ramifications of
setting up competition between food for humans and crops for motor fuels just at
the point when a growing scarcity of oil-and-gas-based soil "inputs" (as well
increasing climate problems in the grain belt) will drastically lower American
crop yields. The symptoms of this unintended consequence have already begun to
present themselves - for instance, January's food riots in Mexico, which
resulted from Mexican corn being sold to American ethanol distillers rather than
Mexican cornmeal millers, who couldn't match their bids.

Friedman goes on to tout Wal-Mart's mendacious campaign to "green" up its
operations by, among other things, improving the mileage of its truck fleet 
from six miles per gallon to twelve miles per gallon. He writes:

"Take Wal-Mart. The world's biggest retailer woke up several years ago, its CEO
Lee Scott told me, and realized 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 his 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."


The smoke Mr Scott blew up Friedman's ass is leaking out of the columnist's
pie-hole here. I've been to dozens of permitting battles over Wal-Mart in the
planning boards of America, writing on suburban sprawl, and I can assure you
that the the pro Wal-Mart factions in these fights uniformly couldn't give a
fuck about anything except saving five bucks on a plastic salad shooter ("we
want bargain shopping!!!"). Not to put too fine a point on it, but these are
precisely the members of the American public who sold their own local economies
down the river, who led their towns into destitution, and who believe with all
their hearts that it is possible to get something for nothing (which is why this
large cohort of citizens spends so much of its meager income on lottery tickets,
trips to Las Vegas, and gets suckered into ruinous "miracle" mortgages).

Friedman's invocation of Wal-Mart here offers another layer of misunderstanding
from the work he is best-known for, his best-selling book, The World is Flat,
which asserts that globalism is now a permanent feature of the human condition.
I demur from this view. I think we will discover (probably painfully) that
globalism was a set of transient economic relations made possible by a half
century of cheap oil and relative peace between the great powers, and that
enterprises that rely on these transient mechanisms - such Wal-Mart, with its
12,000-mile merchandise supply chain to China, and its "warehouse on wheels" of
tractor-trailor trucks circulating incessantly on America's interstate highways
- will be on their knees in a few years as we enter the export crisis phase of
post-peak terminal oil depletion and the great powers of the world act with
increasing desperation to compete over the remaining supplies.

For someone operating at the top of journalism's food chain, Friedman is
astoundingly ignorant. He asserts at another point in this article that climate
change will require us to "[r]eplace 1,400 large coal-fired plants with
gas-fired plants". Earth to Tom: America's natural gas supply is arguably more
tenuous and problematic than its oil supply. To put it bluntly, over the next
five years, we will fall off a cliff with natural gas. Apparently Friedman
hasn't heard. Nor are we going to make up for this loss by importing liquid
natural gas from distant lands. Nor would it make any sense to burn expensive
imported methane gas to run power generation turbines. So, you see, there is no
chance whatsoever that we will do what Friedman suggests. In fact, the seventeen
percent of all electric power that we currently get from gas will be lost to us
in the near future, which could leave us with Third World style electric service.
(Incidentally, the terminal decline of our natural gas supply also means we will
lose control of the crucial resource used for making nitrogenous fertilizers,
with self-evident further implications for our crop yields and our ability to
feed ourselves or manufacture alternative motor fuels.)

Friedman's equations regarding continued industrial expansion in China and India
are based on the assumption that they somehow will be immune to the global
energy crisis and to the ecological catastrophes entailed by climate change.
More likely: both nations will be overwhelmed by these things and the only
question will be how desperate their political convulsions will be in response
(or how rapidly they devolve back to twelfth century living standards).

At the heart of Friedman's thesis is his notion that the current incarnation of
"the American Dream" is a good thing and can continue. By American Dream he
apparently means membership in the Happy Motoring Utopia, with all its
accessories, furnishings, and usufructs - the system broadly known as suburban
sprawl. Here's the truth, Tom: suburban sprawl is a living arrangement with no
future. It was a tragic mistake to squander the post World War Two wealth of our
society to build it. It will come to represent an immense liability for this
country's future, as it loses both monetary and practical value. And we will
have to make comprehensive arrangements for living differently, if we want to
continue this project of American civilization.

A telling omission in this article, by the way, is any mention of public transit.
It's especially significant because the one thing we really could do right away
to reduce our oil consumption would be to get passenger rail going again in this
country. But this blind spot in Friedman's vision is only the flip side to his
stupid belief that we can just keep all the cars running by other means.

Tom Friedman has no idea what the implications are of all these things. His
fatuous advice to the nation - served up by a confused and cowardly Times
editorial staff - will only spur more delusional thinking, which is, of course,
the last thing we need. The showcasing of Friedman's article may represent an
inflection point in the fate of the mainstream media - the moment when it
demonstrates most clearly its failure to make current events comprehensible, the
moment when its lost legitimacy is finally recognized. That legitimacy has been
passing to the Internet, where commentators have no advertisers to pander to and
no need to defend any status quo.


Notes:

{1} http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780802142498-0

{2} http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780374292881-0

{3} "The Power of Green" http://www.kunstler.com/Grunt_Friedman_green.html


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