The New Dark Age

15 December 2009 — SolidarityEconomy.Net

Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. $27.95. Pp. 438.

Thomas Friedman is always the head cheerleader for the next big thing. At first it was globalization and now it’s the green revolution. Friedman’s instincts are good, it’s just his analysis and politics are lacking. There are certainly valuable and interesting insights in his work, but his adolescent enthusiasm for capitalism often turns his critique to shallow propaganda.

The book’s title, Hot, Flat, and Crowded is a good indicator as to how Friedman understands environmental problems. Underline that word crowded because the book takes us on a Malthusian ride through the Third World. It’s overpopulation, not capitalism and its need for every expanding accumulation that is destroying the world’s environment.

Friedman marches us through China, India, Brazil and Nigeria offering a myopic view that only occasional refers to the developed countries and their use of energy and resources. When it comes to energy markets transnationals such as Exxon and Shell disappear as does any discussion of imperialism and its history in the Middle East. Instead Friedman targets “petrodictorships” and “Sheikhs…with bags of cash” indoctrinating madrassa students to “breed like rabbits” and “swarm” over the Islamic world. (p.88)

In conjunction with this racist trash, Friedman advocates the green revolution as a matter of national security, joining those like James Woolsey, former CIA director, who call themselves “environmental hawks.” He makes the case for green technology like a salesman pitching venture capitalists. In the chapter “Green Is the New Red, White, and Blue” Friedman argues that companies who invent and deploy new technologies will have a “dominant place in the global economy.” (p.171) Exporting green technology will be the new “currency of power” and the “mother of all markets.” (p.172) “It’s all about national power…what could be more patriotic, capitalistic and geostrategic than that?” (p.173) Leave it up to Friedman to make saving the planet a project of U.S. imperialism.

Like others who understand globalization within a narrow national strategy the author finds himself in a trap. Friedman turns to First Solar, headquartered in Arizona with facilities in Ohio, as a leading example of a green U.S. corporation. But because Germany leads in solar technology CEO Mike Ahearn says, “First Solar is to a large extent a German success story…we purchase over half of the equipment used in our production lines from German manufacturers and we count suppliers in Eastern Germany as among our most important business partners.” (pps.389-90)

So much for U.S. dominance in a global market where technology and capital are transnational and borderless. Yet Friedman seems to be in séance with Rudyard Kipling’s ghost, voicing a new version of the “white man’s burden” now dressed up as green imperialism. For Friedman U.S. dominance benefits the planet, saves the world’s poor, and makes an Americanized global middle class possible. He believes everyone should have more energy, just as long as the U.S. sells it.

Nevertheless, the author is smart enough to understand the limits of “the ecological logic of capitalism.” (p. 57) Friedman calls for a fundamental redesign of the economy and in the second half of the book on “How We Move Forward” he makes use of Mao’s famous quote that “Revolution is not a dinner party.” In this section Friedman’s neo-Keynesian ideas emerge with his broad advocacy of government directed policies to enable corporations and markets to make sweeping changes. This is not old style Keynesianism focused on job creation, a social contract and national markets, but governmental policy for global competitive supremacy.

It’s in this area where Friedman scores his best points. He advocates a serious and deep structural change to our entire energy and transportation systems using a variety of regulations, performance standards, set prices, taxes, incentives and disincentives. As he states, “green will be the standard…It will be the new normal—nothing else will be available, nothing else will be possible.” (p.296) If previously Friedman acted as Silicon Valley’s best pitchman, he now joins Al Gore as salesman for green entrepreneurial capitalism.

As with Paul Hawkins and Amory Lovins, Friedman contends that capitalism can renew itself by building a sustainable green economy. They have no doubt that with the right government policies and market incentives a historic transformation is possible. To Friedman’s credit he admits for the green movement to make progress it needs “a million people on the Mall.” (p.399) Other environmental experts, like Marxists John Bellamy Foster and Joel Kovel, argue that such a transformation is impossible within the confines of capitalism, even with a mass movement. In their view capitalism by its very nature needs to constantly expand, using ever more resources that destroy our environment in the ongoing process of accumulation.

While I have sympathy for this view, Marxists have too often declared capitalism’s imminent demise. Such predictions are based on perceived irresolvable economic contradictions and the inability of capitalism to grow further without causing a permanent crisis that would destroy society. Friedman’s vision of growth is one that reduces inputs and energy, so that competition and profits turn on a qualitatively different type of sustainable expansion.

One problem with this debate is that Friedman and Gore reach millions, while Foster and Kovel speak to a much smaller audience. But in the sense that Friedman is making people aware that we face a deeply serious ecological crisis he helps lay the basis to consider many different alternatives beyond his own. Friedman doesn’t go beyond where Gore has already taken the public, nor does he add much new. But considering few mainstream elites have fully embraced the need for a “revolutionary” ecological change we shouldn’t begrudge Friedman his place. Neither do we need to endorse his views, but rather engage in an environmental debate that will determine the direction of our future.

[Jerry Harris is a professor at DeVry University, Chicago. He is author of Dialectics of Globalization (Cambridge Scholars Publishing) and, together with Carl Davidson, CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age (http://stores.lulu.com/changemaker).]