Easy Ways to Save the Earth

Last night Tom and I heard Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who wrote The World is Flat, at the Atlanta International School. Mr. Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America, was just published. We bought the book and stood in line after the talk to get it signed, but I haven't started reading it yet. (This was the first book signing that I have ever attended where there were police officers there - we weren't that rowdy a crowd. Were they that concerned that people were going to cut in line?)

He gave a great talk. He talked about the big global trends - rapidly growing demand for energy around the world, climate change, oil-enriched dictatorships - that were shaping the future of our country and the rest of the world. It is very clear, he said, that we cannot drill our way out of this, nor can we conserve our way out - it will take radical change in policy to support a radical change in the economics of energy that could ultimately drive the innovation that could develop the new technology that is needed to solve the problem and lead the way to a future that is not dependent on us sending all our money to countries that hate us so we can burn their oil to power our country and destroy the planet.

He listed the book titles you can find on Google under "Easy Ways to Save the Earth" - there are a lot of them, and they are all wrong, because the things that need to be done are not going to be easy. They will be disruptive, painful, and scary. They will require focus and longterm vision and investment in the future that has been in short supply among the leadership of our country. What's needed is revolutionary change, not evolutionary change, and in revolutions, someone always gets hurt. Right now, all this talk about "green" is just rebranding; it's something the marketing people dreamed up. It's a party.

Which leads one to the obvious question, what can we do. The answer seemed to be get involved, demand that our country's leaders do a better job and actually address the real threats to our country. Of course, we have been replacing our lightbulbs with compact fluorescents, and I've got those cloth bags in the back of my car that I take with me to Kroger. I'll keep doing those things not because they are going to be the solution but because they will keep reminding me that we need a solution.