Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green
Revolution—and How It Can Renew America
By Thomas L. Friedman
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 438 pages, $27.95)
Poor Thomas Friedman, he tries so hard. He wants to explain
everything — energy, poverty, world climate catastrophes — and
offer a comprehensive solution as well. The only problem he doesn’t
much know what he is talking about.
Hot, Flat and Crowded is the latest of Friedman’s
reports from his globetrotting for the New York Times. The
“hot,” of course, means global warming. Friedman is a devotee and
does present some pretty convincing research that we are setting
off changes in the earth’s climate that may be hard to undo. The
“flat” is a reference to Friedman’s previous book, The World Is
Flat, in which he tried to convince liberals that
globalization isn’t such a bad thing after all. “Crowded” is
warmed-over Paul Ehrlich in which Friedman frets about world
overpopulation. (In fact, the numbers are generally expected to
level off at around 8-10 billion in 2050. Europe and Japan are
already depopulating.)
These concerns don’t really hang together but no matter,
Friedman has the solution to them all — America must “go green.”
We should develop wind, solar and other “renewable” technologies,
promote conservation and a build a “smart grid.” “[T]he best way to
re-energize America, rebuild its self-confidence and moral
authority, and propel it forward as a society is by focusing on the
green agenda….Green is the new red, white and blue!”
Now don’t get upset, Friedman is not one of those coercive
utopians such as Al Gore who want people to take to the streets
shutting down coal plants. He actually likes “markets” — or thinks
he does, at least. Having made numerous processions through Silicon
Valley, Friedman acknowledges that free enterprise has its
virtues.
Code Green…is a “quintessential American
opportunity.”…It requires enormous amounts of experimentation —
the kind you find in our great research universities and national
laboratories; it requires lots of start-up companies that are not
afraid to try, risk fail, and try again;… it requires thousand of
people working in their garages, trying thousands of
things.
All this is in quest of the Holy Grail — “Clean Electrons” — and
like some Huey Long of the Age of Facebook, Friedman is ready to
tie his solution to everything:
Give me abundant, clean, reliable, and cheap electrons
and I will give you a world that can continue to grow without
triggering unmanageable climate change….Give me abundant, clean,
reliable, and cheap electrons, and I will put every petrodictator
out of business. Give me abundant, clean, reliable and cheap
electrons, and I will end deforestation from communities desperate
for fuel and I will eliminate any reason to drill in Mother
Nature’s environmental cathedrals.
Unfortunately, he confesses, “no one has yet come up with a source
of electrons that meets all four criteria: abundant, clean,
reliable, and cheap.” But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done!
[I]t is precisely [this] kind of innovation we need to
be, and can be, stimulating right now to overcome the technological
barriers that prevent existing wind and solar systems from being
cheap, abundant, and reliable — today. The way to stimulate this
kind of innovation…is by generous tax incentives, regulatory
incentives, renewable energy mandates, and other
market-shaping mechanisms that create durable demand for
these existing clean power technologies…..That kind of [progress]
will come about only if government uses its power to set
prices, regulations, and standards to reshape the energy
market and force utilities and other big players to
either innovate or die. [Emphasis added.]
So there you have it. Friedman really doesn’t like markets at all.
What he likes is
government manipulation of markets
forcing people to adopt technology. Only a collection of
carrots and sticks can goad this dumb donkey-cart of an energy
economy onto the proper pathway.
In case you haven’t noticed, it’s already happening. You would
be amazed at the number of windmill and solar projects popping up
all over the country in response to the maze of federal and state
mandates and incentives, to push us in that direction. None of
these projects make sense economically and none will ever produce
much useful energy, but what else are government mandates for?
WHAT FRIEDMAN DOESN’T understand is that markets are a network of
information. They inform us, in rapid and uncompromising
fashion, about the availability of resources and the rewards for
turning them to specific uses. Windmills and solar collectors
remain a very bad investment for one reason — they produce very
little useful electricity. As an example it is only necessary to
note Friedman’s sorrowful history of First Solar (“Read it and
weep!”), an Ohio company that invented thin photovoltaic films to
capture solar energy on buildings. Although the company was funded
at one point by John Walton, it eventually relocated to Germany in
order to take advantage of a German law that forces
utilities to buy solar electricity from any provider at a
government-fixed price. “That is a no-brainer,” exuded Mike Ahearn,
First Solar’s CEO.
But a no-brainer for whom? When we finally get down to details,
it turns out that First Solar’s annual production target is 25
megawatts worth of electricity. The average coal or nuclear
plant now produces 1,000 MW and the newer ones get 1500 MW. It
would take more than a hundred square miles of First Solar cells to
match the output of the average power plant. The market is telling
us that solar and wind are hideously expensive and then don’t
produce much electricity anyway. Every time the wind dies down or
the sun goes behind a cloud the power goes out.
Of course that doesn’t mean that Americans won’t indulge in such
folly. Late last month, Republican Governor Charlie Crist of
Florida announced the cancellation of a 700-MW “clean coal” plant
in favor of 10 MW of thermal solar power. The installation is
supposed to expand to 300 MW at some point, although “a site has
not yet been chosen.”
The uniform disadvantage of all forms of solar energy is that
they must consume vast, almost unthinkable, amounts of land.
Biofuels suddenly tanked last winter when it was recognized that
they are consuming one-third of America’s corn crop, leveling whole
tropical forests, and causing a world food shortage — all to
replace 3 percent of our oil supply. In fact, the only technology
that can match fossil fuels while creating far less environmental
disruption is nuclear power.
SO DOES NUCLEAR enter Friedman’s field of vision? Tolerant fellow
that he is, Friedman is not ready to condemn nuclear to outer
darkness. He even mentions it once or twice as a “clean
alternative,” although with no visible enthusiasm.
To build a new nuclear plant costs a minimum of $7
billion today, and would take probably eight years from conception
to completion. Most CEOs have about eight years in office, and
there are not a lot of utility CEOs who would bet $7 million —
which might be more than half the company’s market cap — on one
nuclear project.
Nevertheless, there are now more than a dozen license applications
for new reactors before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Whether
or not these proposals go anywhere will depend entirely on whether
the general public achieves a better understanding of the
technology. Concerned as he is with petrodictators, global warming,
and world energy shortages, you’d think Friedman would spend more
of his own time learning how “abundant, clean, reliable and cheap”
nuclear technology can be.
