Foreign Policy: Thomas Friedman’s Plan for a Hot, Flat, and Crowded World

One other article I found of interest today, a short interview by Foreign Policy magazine with Tom Friedman, the NY Times columnist and author. Tom is coming out with a new book, and I thought three sections of the interview were worth bringing some more exposure: on American oil "independence" and offshore drilling, on Tom's vision of a "green revolution," and a brief discussion about the possibility of China going green before the U.S. The entire article can be read here.

BTW, that "drill, drill, drill" quotation is a classic: When I hear McCain pounding the table for “drill, drill, drill,” it reminds me of someone pounding the table for IBM Selectric typewriters on the eve of the IT revolution.

Foreign Policy: In his speech to the Democratic National Convention last Thursday, U.S. Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama promised, “In 10 years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.” Is that even feasible? Does anyone you talk to believe that’s doable?

Thomas Friedman: Well, if you just talked about oil imports from the Middle East, I think it is feasible. I don’t know exactly how he would want to get there, but I think that it is a feasible goal if you’re just talking about the percentage of our oil that comes from the Middle East.

FP: And what about drilling? Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, his running mate Gov. Sarah Palin, and President George W. Bush are implying that lifting environmental restrictions on drilling is the way to promote energy independence.

TF: Well, I think it’s patent nonsense. No one believes that somehow offshore, there’s enough oil in any near term and even the long term to provide us oil independence. It’s the wrong approach because in a world that’s hot, flat, and crowded, fossil fuels—and particularly crude oil—are going to be expensive and exhausting. Therefore the focus should be on the next great global industry: clean energy technology. When I hear McCain pounding the table for “drill, drill, drill,” it reminds me of someone pounding the table for IBM Selectric typewriters on the eve of the IT revolution.

I’m not against offshore drilling, by the way, because I believe the technology and the safety has improved far beyond where it was back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, even. What I’m against is making it the centerpiece of our energy policy. If all McCain said was, “Let’s drill, but let’s also throw everything into innovating the next generation of clean-energy technologies,” I’d say, “You’ve got it exactly right, pal.”

FP: Your new book is called Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America. What do you mean by a “green revolution” and how do we get there from here?

TF: The green revolution is about how we produce abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons, which are the answer to the big problems we face in the world today. I would point to five problems, and they’re all related: Energy and resource supply and demand, petrodictatorship, climate change, biodiversity loss, and energy poverty. They all have one solution: abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons. The search for and the discovery of a source of those electrons is going to be the next great global industry. And I think the country that mounts a revolution to be the leader of that industry is going to be a country whose standard of living is going to improve, whose respect in the world is going to improve, whose air is going to improve, whose innovation is going to improve, and whose national security is going to improve. That’s what this book is about.
Click Here!

I want a green-energy bubble. I want so many people throwing crazy dollars at every idea, in every garage, that we have 100,000 people trying 100,000 things, five of which might work, and two might be the next green Google. But I don’t want a Manhattan Project of 12 people in Los Alamos. I want it to be like the IT revolution: everyone becoming a programmer. Only in this case, it’s everyone becoming a green innovator. What IT was to the 80s and 90s, ET, energy technology, will be to the early 21st century.

FP: What conditions don’t exist right now that could create this bubble?

TF: Three things. One is a price on carbon, a fixed, durable price signal that says, “Carbon is always going to be this price.” Let’s just use a simple example: We put a floor under the price of crude oil that says, “Oil simply will not fall below $110 a barrel. If it does, we’ll tax it up.”

Second, we need to change the bargain we have with our electric and natural gas power utilities. Your dad was right when he came into your room and you’d left the lights on and he said, “What, do you own stock in the utility company?” He was right, because the more you left your lights on, the more money the utility made. And we need to change that bargain—this is already going on in California—so that utilities are paid by how much energy they help you save, not by how much energy they help you consume.

And third, we need a national renewable portfolio standard that says to every utility, “By 2025, you need to produce 30 percent of your electricity by renewable power: wind, solar, biomass, hydro, you name it.”

...

FP: You went to China for the Olympic Games, and I know you’ve been there many times in the past. Do you think China is serious about going green? Is China going to have a green revolution before the United States does?

TF: Every time I go to China, as I say in the book, it always strikes me that people speak with greater ease and breathe with greater difficulty. As the country grows, it gets more integrated with the world, standards of living rise, and people are able to move more and have more personal freedom. I don’t want to exaggerate it, but clearly it’s a more open place.

So, they speak with greater ease but they breathe with greater difficulty. And that’s a real tension. Right now, if you said, “Tom, snapshot today: Where’s China at? OK, choice: More growth or less pollution?” They’re going to go for more growth. Look what happened after the Olympics. They cleaned up Beijing for two weeks by shutting down factories and limiting driving. But as soon as the Olympics were over, they went back to the old system.

But you’re also getting a transition. You’re getting the birth of wind power and solar companies in China, so they’re seeing the market potential. And you’re seeing the rise of an environmental consciousness. The inertia and the momentum of the old, pure GDP system is much stronger than the green GDP system, but there is now a competition between the two.

China is hiding behind the United States, saying, “If the Americans aren’t going to do it, why should we?” When we move they will move, because we define modernity for them. They’ve copied us: our highways, our cars—the whole thing. And when we change, they will change.

Six Pieces of Advice Meme, For Boys

Last month, I was asked by Aaminah (in one of the comments on Izzy Mo's blog) to do the "Six Pieces of Advice" meme, but for boys. I've been rather busy the past few weeks (the end of the current school term finished yesterday), but I hadn't forgotten about doing it. Now, as I've thought through this meme, I came to the conclusion that all of my advice applies not only to boys but to girls as well, so listen up, kids, Uncle JDsg has somethin' to say to you:

The Rules:
1. Post these rules before presenting your list.
2. List 6 actions or achievements you think every person (or in this case, young women/girls) should accomplish before turning 18.
3. At the end of your blog, choose 6 people to get tagged and list their names.
4. People who are tagged write their own blog entry with their 6 suggestions.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged.

Number 1: Learn to touch type. Doesn't sound like much, but it's one of the best pieces of advice I can give any teenager, boy or girl. When you get to college and you've got a dozen or so reports to write each semester, ranging anywhere between two and thirty pages long, you're gonna wish you had taken that typing course your high school offered when you had the chance. "Hunt and peck" takes for freakin' ever, so learn the language of the fingers while you have the chance. And if you have the opportunity to take a longer typing class (my high school offered both a half-year and full-year course), take the class over the full year. Not being the most nimble of fingers at the time, it took me about 3/4 of the school year to get the hang of touch typing. If I had taken the half-year course, I might never have gotten the brain-finger coordination that's needed. One other thing: boys, remember, typing class is where all the girls are! ;) No kidding. In my class there were four boys, including me, and about 26 girls. (A guy I knew when I was a teenager used the same logic when registering for a home ec class, but that's a different story.)

Number 2: Become fluent in a second language. Considering the number of times I've written on this topic on my blog, it should come as no surprise that I'd bring it up again. But seriously, don't just think, "I'll never leave the U.S." or "I'll never have the chance to use another language." This is not true. Especially if you're an American teenager living in certain states, like California, Arizona, New Mexico or Florida, a second language like Spanish is going to be immensely helpful for you to get a job or expand your career horizons. (American Express in Phoenix was always advertising for Portuguese speakers who could work with their Brazilian offices and customers.) A second language (and even a third) is absolutely vital if you have any interest in living or working overseas. (And, of course, if you're a young Muslim boy or girl, one of those languages should be Arabic.)

Number 3: Start becoming an expert in three subjects. This is something I picked up from Tom Friedman's book, The World is Flat. I once read that the half-life of a college education is five years. Meaning, in five years, half of what you learned at school will become irrelevant, and in ten years 75% of what you learned will be irrelevant, and so on. The sad fact of the matter is that it's true. If you have any desire for a decent-paying job, you need to accept that you've got to keep learning for the rest of your life. You may not necessarily have to go back to school, but you'll have to learn in one way or another. (I, personally, will buy and read through college textbooks on subjects that I think I should know or should refresh myself on.) Friedman's point was that you always need to keep rotating your areas of expertise. You become an expert in one topic; as that topic starts to fade in terms of importance, you start becoming an expert in a second topic. And then you begin learning about a third topic, one that you think may become important for the future. And then you keep on adding and dropping topics to learn about as you progress through your career. The topic may not necessarily be a full-blown subject like "psychology," but can be something as small as a specific job skill (e.g., knowing how to use a computer program). But you continue to learn new things over your lifetime that will help keep your career and job skills relevant.

Number 4: Join a band or a chorus. I'd have included this one anyway, coming from a musical family as I do, but another interesting point in Friedman's "The World is Flat" is that people who belong (or belonged) to musical organizations, such as bands, drum corps, choruses, etc., are more rounded individuals and are better able to interact with other people. Friedman discusses how Georgia Tech's retention and graduation rates improved dramatically when the university began emphasizing the admission of musically-gifted students. (Remember, Georgia Tech is known as an engineering university!) So, if you don't sing or play an instrument yet, by all means do so. (Just don't make a fool of yourself auditioning for American Idol. ;) )

Number 5: Start learning about personal finances and how the money and capital markets work. The simple fact of the matter is, you're going to have to learn this anyway. Earning and spending money is the easy part; trying to save your money and invest it wisely is much more difficult. Start with the basics: learning how to balance a checkbook, putting 10% of every paycheck into a savings account and learning how to live on the remainder, learning how to read the financial section of the newspaper and what all those numbers mean. Then start learning about the different types of investments (stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc.) and how they're bought and sold. (If you're Muslim, you'll also need to know which investments are halal or not.) This is not the sort of topic that you can read about overnight; most of us take years to fully understand it all (and understanding the financial jargon is half the battle). But plug away at it, try investing in some mutual funds and, above all, remember, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." :)

Number 6: Become a hafiz. Milady's suggestion was that Muslim teenagers should read through all of the Qur'an, from one end to the other, a minimum of three times. It's a very good suggestion, but I'll go one better, become a hafiz (or hafizah for the girls). It's so much more difficult to remember things as you get older (trust me on this), but when you're younger, it's much easier to remember (and retain knowledge of) whatever it is you're trying to memorize. And what's more important than memorizing the Qur'an? So crack open that Qur'an (after doing wudu, of course) and start memorizing those surahs.

Now, whom can I make moan and groan this time? ;) How about Abdurrahman Squires at Mere Islam (who doesn't write nearly as often as he should), Abu Sinan~Sayf (welcome back!), Bin Gregory (for his second meme), the inimitable Dr. M, Rob Wagner (who's not Muslim, but should be), and Brother Saifuddin, who helps me spread the word over at Street Prophets (along with a few other Muslims, like Amad, Dervish and Rockinhejabi).

Chinese Pity

This is one of two quotations at the beginning of Tom Friedman's book, The World is Flat (Chapter 8) that I thought is an excellent commentary on the state of American politics today:

"Chinese pity comes from their belief that we are a country in decline. More than a few Chinese friends have quoted to me the proverb fu bu guo san dai (wealth doesn't make it past three generations) as they wonder how we became so ill-disciplined, distracted and dissolute. The fury surrounding Monica-gate seemed an incomprehensible waste of time to a nation whose emperors were supplied with thousands of concubines. Chinese are equally astonished that Americans are allowing themselves to drown in debt and under-fund public schools while the media focus on fights over feeding tubes, displays of the Ten Commandments and how to eat as much as we can without getting fat."
-- James McGregor, a journalist-turned-businessman based in China, and a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, writing in The Washington Post, July 31, 2005

Pathetic Western Education

Another good article I'm stealing from IZ. The following geometry diagram comes from a British exam for college freshmen:


Now, compare that problem with the following problem, from a Chinese college entrance exam:

That's right, the Chinese test is for kids trying to get into a university, the first is for dunces who are already in their university.

BBC, where this article first appeared, says: "A glance at the two questions reveals how much more advanced is the maths teaching in China, where children learn the subject up to the age of 18, the society says.

"It has sounded a warning about Britain's future economic prospects which it claims are threatened by competition from scientists in China."

Gee, ya think? Tom Friedman says the world is flat. No, the world is tilting to the east, to Asia, and at an accelerating pace. The west is quickly becoming a has-been (read my previous post) as educational curricula - especially in the sciences and mathematics - become watered down for students who wouldn't make the grade otherwise. (See below.)

And you know things must be really bad in Britain when the Royal Society of Chemistry has to offer a £500 prize to see if anyone can solve the above Chinese problem.

----------------

So, how pathetic is education in the West? The BBC also reported that British schools are encouraging students not to take A-level mathematics courses: "...as maths was a difficult subject, schools feared examination failures which would threaten their standings.

...

"'Schools and students are reluctant to consider A-level mathematics to age 18, because the subject is regarded as difficult, and with league tables and university entrance governed by A-level points, easier subjects are taken.'

...

"'Increasingly, universities are having to mount remedial sessions for incoming science undergraduates because their maths skills are so limited, with many having stopped formal lessons in mathematics two years earlier at the GCSE level.'"

Also,

"Since 2002, there has been a 15% fall in the numbers taking maths at A-level in England, while those taking physics fell 14% and computer sciences 47%."


At least some people in the UK recognize that the problem needs to be solved, although some of the suggestions are mixed. On a positive note:

"'We are changing the curriculum, creating a new entitlement to give more pupils the chance to study separate physics, chemistry and biology GCSEs and piloting 250 science clubs for 11 to 14-year-olds.'

"Some £30m was being spent over the next two years on recruiting 3,000 extra science teachers and encouraging more students to study sciences..."

However, a third BBC article states that a report by the Council for Industry and Higher Education recommends that "A-level students should be paid for passing exams in science and maths... ...a payment of about £500 might be enough to encourage students to stick with Stem [Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics] subjects."

Our Diplomats' Arabic Handicap

There's a joke I've told my students numerous times over the past few years. It goes:

"A person who can speak three languages is known as?

Trilingual

And a person who can speak two langugages is?

Bilingual

And a person who can only speak one language?

An American!"

I tell this joke in part because I'm always amazed (and a little bit jealous) when my students can come to my lectures in business subjects - that are all given in English - and understand the difficult, theoretical concepts I talk about. After all, about 99% of all my students are non-native English speakers. We Americans have set ourselves up very badly in terms of our ability to speak in languages other than English. In fact, some backwards-thinking Americans have made matters worse, such as the 1998 passage of Proposition 227 in California and the 2000 passage of Proposition 203 in Arizona.

And, now, the chickens are coming home to roost. The Washington Post published an interesting article on Our Diplomats' Arabic Handicap. The United States' State Department has a grand total of eight (8) people worldwide who are able to speak Arabic at the highest levels of fluency. And I suspect that, while the article focuses on fluency in Arabic, the problem goes much deeper, that there are very few individuals employed by the State Department (and other agencies of the government) who can speak other important world languages. When do American school children begin learning foreign languages? When I was a teenager, my middle school had a short-lived pilot program to help teach Spanish. Regular foreign language instruction didn't begin until my sophomore year, with classes in Spanish, French and German - and these are still the only languages taught at my high school. That's waaay too late in life to start learning another language well.

Whereas...

...When I lived in Korea, foreign language instruction began for my university-aged students when they were in middle school. Today's Korean children begin learning English in primary school. Now, granted, most of those students use up all of their English conversational skills with a foreigner like me within a minute or two; however, I once had a 45-minute conversation with a group of ten or so primary school kids I had met at the beach. How many of us could have done the same at that age?

...Here in S'pore, all students learn both English and at least one "Mother Tongue" (either Mandarin Chinese, Malay, or Tamil - a language primarily spoken in southern India). Virtually all Singaporeans who are my age and younger are bilingual.

As Tom Friedman recently pointed out, the world is flat...and getting flatter. The need for Americans to speak another person's language, whether it's for diplomatic, military, educational, commercial, or just plain ol' social purposes is an absolute necessity. And I'm stunned that people still don't get this. For example, just now, while looking at Amazon's webpage for Tom Friedman's book, "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century", I found the following comment, "If the world is so flat, then why is everyone else in the world trying to beat a path to our door?" My response: Don't flatter yourself. Even if the United States opened up its doors to unlimited immigration, 99% of the world would still stay at home. You (Americans) will still have to deal with the rest of the world. And the only way you can really get to know someone is if you understand that person's language (which is also a gateway to understanding that person's culture).

This is an important topic, and one that I've only touched the merest surface of. Insha'allah, I'll write more about this in the future. In the meantime, my advice to those of you with young children is: get them started on a second and third language now!!! And don't just focus on European languages. Yes, Spanish is very helpful if you live in the Southwest, but the future belongs to Asia (if you haven't figured that out yet). Get those kids learning Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic. And it wouldn't hurt if you, mom and dad, joined in the language lessons either.

Tom Friedman and "Deaf" Americans

This post is a culmination of several articles I've read over the past few days. The impetus for this post was the article, "Muslim leaders condemning terror to deaf?" In the article, Mark Woods asked the question, "Why don't we hear Muslim leaders condemning terrorism?" His answer was, they do condemn terrorism. "Maybe we're not listening." Ameen!

Woods also referred to a recent article by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman wrote, "To this day, no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden." Now, I like Tom Friedman as a writer. I've read tons of his columns and all of his books with the exception of his most recent effort (I'm waiting for it to come out in paperback, insha'allah). Anyone who's familiar with Friedman knows that he's knowledgeable about Islam. But this was a really stupid statement on Tom's part, and I'm rather surprised that he wrote it. He's not the kind of right-wing idiot (like "fill in your favorite neo-con redneck blowhard here") who normally writes or speaks first and considers the facts later (if at all). So it was with great pleasure to see that Woods had rebutted Friedman's statement with the work of University of Michigan History Professor, Dr. Juan Cole. Cole's blog, Informed Comment, has a somewhat lengthy post in which he cites numerous "major Muslim clerics and religious bodies" that have all issued fatawa against OBL. And (hoping that Dr. Cole doesn't mind), I'm republishing that post below because, in part, I know that my Muslim brothers and sisters can use this information against those "deaf" Americans (like Friedman) who are (and remain) ill-informed about our resistance against the likes of OBL.


Friedman Wrong About Muslims Again
And the Amman Statement on Ecumenism

Tom Friedman is a Middle East expert who knows a lot about Islam. Why, then, does he keep saying misleading things? He wrote in his latest column, "To this day - to this day - no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden."

A "fatwa" is simply a considered opinion of a Muslim jurisconsult. Such opinions are numerous. First of all, almost all the major Shiite Grand Ayatollahs have condemned Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. You could say that is easy, since Shiites don't generally like Wahhabis. But they are the leaders of 120 million Muslims (some ten percent of the 1.2 billion). So that is one. Tracking these things down is time-consuming, but this should do:
Ayatollah Muhammad Husain Fadlallah of Lebanon condemns Osama Bin Laden.

So then what about the Sunni world? The leading moral authority for Sunnis is the rector or Grand Imam of the al-Azhar Seminary/ University in Cairo, Egypt. Al-Azhar is perhaps the world's oldest continuous university and has been since the time of Saladin a major center of Sunni religious authority. The current incumbent is Shaikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi. So what about Tantawi and Bin Laden?

Grand Imam of Al-Azhar seminary, Shaikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, condemns Osamah Bin Laden. And:

The Grand Imam of al-Azhar Seminary, Shaikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, condemns Osamah Bin Laden.

What about Pakistan? Admittedly, it has some clerics who are fans of Bin Laden, or at least who would avoid condemning him. But the allegation Friedman is making is that no major cleric has condemned him. Try this: Prominent Pakistani Cleric Tahir ul Qadri condemns Bin Laden.

I don't personally care for Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He is an old-time Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood preacher who fled to Qatar and now has a perch at al-Jazeera. But he does have some virtues. He is enormously popular among Muslim fundamentalists. And, he absolutely despises Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Al-Qaradawi has repeatedly condemned the latter. He even gave a fatwa that it was a duty of Muslims to fight alongside the US in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda! See also:
Yusuf al-Qaradawi condemns al-Qaeda.

There are also substantial Muslim communities in Europe with leaderships that have explicitly condemned Bin Laden. E.g.:

Spanish Muslim Clerical authorities Issue Fatwa against Osamah Bin Laden. There are on the order of 250,000 Muslims in Spain.

High Mufti of Russian Muslims calls for Extradition of Bin Laden. The Russian Muslim community is about 20 million strong, or 15 percent of Russia's 143 million population, and is growing rapidly, so that in a century Russia may be 50 percent Muslim. So this is not a pro forma thing here.

A good round-up on this sort of issue has been put up by al-Muhajabah.

See also Charles Kurzman's page.

Friedman also does refer to a major conference of Muslim clerics, thinkers and notables wound up just Wednesday that made a powerful statement about religious tolerance and condemned everything Osama Bin Laden stands for. But he seems oddly unaware of the significance of having Grand Ayatollah Sistani, Grand Imam of al-Azhar Seminary Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, and many other great Muslim authorities sign off on this epochal statement of Muslim ecumenism.

The statement forbids one Muslim to declare another "not a Muslim" if the believer adheres to any of the mainstream legal rites of Sunnism and Shiism. The whole basis of al-Qaeda is to call the Muslim leaders of countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as Shiites, "not Muslims." The statement also demands that engineers should please stop pretending to issue fatwas, which should be left to trained clerical jurisconsults. This para. is also a slam at Bin Laden.

PS As for Friedman's main point, that Muslims haven't done a good job of fighting jihadi ideology and terrorism, it is bizarre. The Algerian government fought a virtual civil war to put down political Islam, in which over 100,000 persons died. The Egyptians jailed 20,000 or 30,000 radicals for thought crimes and killed 1500 in running street battles in the 1990s and early zeroes. Al-Qaeda can't easily strike in the Middle East precisely because Syria, Egypt, Algeria, etc. have their number and have undertaken massive actions against them. What does Friedman want? And, besides, he is wrong that this is only a Muslim problem. In the global age all problems are everybody's. That's part of flat world, too, Tom.