Excerpt from “The New Red White And Blue,” by Thomas
L. Friedman, published in the New York Times on January 6, 2006.
“. . . The most important issue in U.S. foreign
and domestic policy today [is] making ourselves energy efficient
and independent, and environmentally green.
. . . being green, focusing the nation on greater energy efficiency
and conservation, is not some girlie-man issue. It is actually
the most tough-minded,
geostrategic, pro-growth and patriotic thing we can do. Living
green is not for sissies. Sticking with oil, and basically saying
that a country
that can double the speed of microchips every 18 months is somehow
incapable of innovating its way to energy independence -- that
is for sissies,
defeatists and people who are ready to see American values eroded
at home and abroad.
Living green is not just a ''personal virtue,'' . . . It's a national
security imperative.
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
to . . . inspire conservation at home. That takes a real energy
policy
with
long-term incentives for
renewable energy -- wind, solar, bio fuels -- rather than
the welfare-for-oil-companies-and-special-interests that
masqueraded
last year as an energy bill.
Enough of this . . . 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.
Green is the new red, white and blue.”
