Over coffee this morning on your way out to your local Earth Day pre-event you may have been pleasantly surprised to see a beautiful green vision of the American flag front-paged on the New York Times magazine.
The photograph takes on a menacing militarized hue, unfortunately, once you see the title: "the greening of geopolitics." Inside, an article advocating a green-tinted version of the Bush Doctrine.
The first clue is that the article is written by Thomas Friedman. The same hawkish neo-liberal who helped convince countless democrats that the war in Iraq was a just war, and who never wrote about the environment at all until he discovered the "geopolitical" angle.
Normally I would be glad that someone this influential is finally on the environmental bandwagon, but Thomas Friedman's reasoning here isn't just way off. It's a real obstacle to solving the problem.
For TF and other neo-liberal hawks, green issues are not seen as global problems to be solved by everyone on the planet. Green is the new stick that can be used to increase US geopolitical dominance from Venezuala to Indonesia.
On the upside: if this is how we try to lead on global warming (in Bush-doctrine, attack mode) it may convince some die-hard right wing hawks in the US to play petro-politics. On the down side: we will be turning the clock back on solving global warming, since it's an international problem.
Here's why: we've just reached the point where a new international consensus is emerging on global warming.
An international poll finds widespread agreement that climate change is a pressing problem. This majority, however, divides over whether the problem of global warming is urgent enough to require immediate, costly measures or whether more modest efforts are sufficient.
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/...
In other words, the consensus is there, but the details are far from worked out. The question is how to build international agreements on solutions like a a global CO2 tax. Or Cap and Trade and other measures to solve the problem.
If we frame solutions to global warming as Friedman does - about increasing US geopolitical power - how many developing countries are going to sign up? Will China and Russia get on board?
When we tie geopolitical issues to a scientitic problem, we muddy the waters and make it harder to buid consensus. The "geopolitics" TF talks about is a slight advantage domestically and a huge liability internationally. Not an asset in building an international consensus about dealing with global warming. We need more diplomacy to solve all our international problems from Iraq to C02. Not less as Thomas Friedman and others are proposing.