Thoughts About Thomas Friedman

The other day, I finally got to see Thomas Friedman speak in person. He gave the keynote address to the Washtenaw Economic Club a few miles down the road from Ann Arbor on Eastern Michigan's campus on September 18th, and it was great. He was mainly promoting his new book, "Hot Flat and Crowded," but it's still amazing to hear his ideas come from his mouth instead of his pen. Feeling somewhat inspired, I decided to write an Op-Ed that ended up not being published in the Daily (perhaps because it was too dang long) So here it is:


Our E.T. Revolution

As I sat in my idling SUV in traffic attempting to exit from Eastern Michigan’s Convocation Center yesterday, I took note of the types of cars around me. At least half out of every ten cars I counted in this traffic jam were fellow SUV’s. I finally got out to the street, and a mile down the road, I drove by a gas station with an evil-looking bright green sign displaying $4.19 gasoline. Sitting in traffic reminded me: Thomas Friedman is so right.

The New York Times columnist and author of his new book, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” addressed the Washtenaw Economic Club yesterday, making the case – a plea really – that the United States finally do something about its shortcomings in the search for alternative energy. “If you name an issue, you own it,” Friedman said. Why shouldn’t it be America who takes the lead, takes ownership of solving the problems in this new green energy technology revolution, the successor to the information technology revolution of the early part of this decade? America used to enjoy being the best at everything, but circa 2001, America only wanted to be the best at fighting terrorism. What happened? Why does our government not challenge its citizens anymore to excel at something that serves a greater good?

In the Fifties, we were competing with the Soviet Union to have the most tanks, the biggest missiles, the first moon landing. President Bush doesn’t realize that we’re competing with China, Russia, India, Japan and Latin America to break dependence on fossil fuels in order to survive. “Where would Michigan State be without Michigan? Where would Wayne State be without Eastern Michigan?” Friedman asked. Where is America going to be in 2030 unless it wakes up and gets in the game? We are losing the fight to save our own future, and the rest of the world is going to be waving at us from atop the mountain of energy independence. It’s up to the government to allow America, and subsequently the University, to also climb that mountain, and it isn’t as difficult as it sounds.

In short, Friedman’s claim is that the world is (1) hotter (2) flatter and (3) more crowded than it’s ever been. The planet’s temperature has risen by 0.8 degrees above the normal levels recorded pre-industrial revolution as a result of carbon dioxide emissions, and temperatures will become dangerously high in the next hundred years. Combine that with the following two facts: The UN has data that says by 2053 the world’s population will have increased by the number of people that inhabited the planet in 1953 (2.6 billion) to a global population of 9 billion. Second, all of those people will have access to the global economy, and will need energy to power their computers and iPods. That’s a big challenge to come up with lightbulbs for that number of people, and for America’s part, we don’t have the capacity for it, nor should we expect to get very far with our current infrastructure. Michigan is powered primarily by coal, with one nuclear plant and natural gas power. Would we be able to support a million people suddenly moving to Detroit, in need of power for their homes? Maybe. How about if they all showed up within the next five years, and oil was at $200 a barrel? That’s the urgency we face, and the solution is to use what we already have (creativity) coupled with what we don’t (an enabling government instead of an anti-enabling one).

People began filing out when Friedman explained the economics of what needs to happen, but it’s not that different than what is happening now: American consumer goods are being outmatched by cheaper, better-made goods from China. The same goes for energy: America can’t expect to own the rights to the energy technology revolution if it can’t even scale its prices. And the Bush administration is responsible for this gap. Bush claims to believe in the market, as he says every time the stock market dips, but where on our markets is there affordable commodities such as solar cells, wind turbines and electric car batteries? There’s no scale, and thus no competition against Chinese manufacturers. Government is the enabler of competition when it reformats the market to handle a new industry, just as it did when it reformatted regulations on e-commerce for the dot com boom. This is no different: Encouraging research and development of technology that’s green doesn’t start with an end-product. It doesn’t start with Republicans shouting, “Drill Baby Drill!” at their convention. It starts with a market that is able to handle twenty different producers of a battery as opposed to one foreign producer that charges half the price and the sooner the government changes regulations, the quicker I don’t feel so bad for sitting in traffic for ten minutes in my car burning off five dollars worth of gasoline.

University President Mary Sue Coleman said at the close of Friedman’s speech that it is the state of Michigan’s charge to encourage more students to enter into fields of science and engineering, so that it is Michigan students that come up with the next great green technology, using their creativity to “Invent Baby Invent!” as Friedman put it as opposed to the 20th century American solution of putting it off for another ten years (case-in-point: General Motors unveiling of the Chevrolet Volt electric car last week, seven years after the invention of the Toyota Prius). The two-year old University Research Corridor could be working so much more intensely on this issue, if it only had the necessary federal funding to do so. More students would be getting engineering degrees if Governor Granholm would simply say, “OK, if you want to get a science degree, the state will pay for it.”

Our university can make this our issue, and with some help from the government, the University and the state, can do what so many have not wanted to do for so long: lead. I hope every person leaving the arena was thinking about how to do that as they hopped into their SUVs and sat in that same traffic jam that made me remember just how right Tom Friedman is, and how wrong our government has been.