thomas friedman goes green.

it appears that thomas friedman has jumped on the greenwagon. i commend him for it. i have, too. and i think that everyone should. friedman is a popular economist, and has a decent amount of influence. his books sell well. from the focus of his articles on nytimes.com--and the fact that he's on sabbatical--i would imagine he's working on a new book about the topic.

this article, "dumb as we wanna be," highlights the myopic attempts by mccain and clinton to provide a 'tax holiday' on gas this summer, as if that's a well-thought out energy strategy that will do any good. then it veers into how we're missing the boat on all other types of renewable energy business opportunities (particularly solar) because of the inability for congress and the president to agree on lickity-split. not the best article, but interesting nonetheless.

i haven't yet had a chance to get through the entire "the power of green" article i've got posted on semi-anonymous, but so far i like where he's going w/ the article. going green makes good business sense, and could be changed into a unifying political movement. i'll end w/ a lengthy excerpt from the article i like:

"In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. One thing that always struck me about the term “green” was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined by its opponents — by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as “liberal,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” “girlie-man,” “unpatriotic,” “vaguely French.”

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.

How do our kids compete in a flatter world? How do they thrive in a warmer world? How do they survive in a more dangerous world? Those are, in a nutshell, the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st century. But these problems are so large in scale that they can only be effectively addressed by an America with 50 green states — not an America divided between red and blue states.

Because a new green ideology, properly defined, has the power to mobilize liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and atheists, big business and environmentalists around an agenda that can both pull us together and propel us forward. That’s why I say: We don’t just need the first black president. We need the first green president. We don’t just need the first woman president. We need the first environmental president. We don’t just need a president who has been toughened by years as a prisoner of war but a president who is tough enough to level with the American people about the profound economic, geopolitical and climate threats posed by our addiction to oil — and to offer a real plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels."