I had the chance to see Thomas Freidman speak at Purdue University Friday evening. I was unsure which Friedman I was going to get - the pedantic one who makes me curse and stop reading the editorial page, or the one whose extensive experience really informs his judgement?
It turned out there was a third version - an enthused, optimistic and warm Thomas Friedman who kept the audience engaged the entire hour.
I wasn't sure whether to write this diary since he is selling a book right now, and the presentation was about the book. But then I just felt like the topic is just too important to let that stop me from sharing the information. So I apologize to any cynics out there - I'm not a shill. I'm just someone who went to a great presentation yesterday that i thought my fellow Kossacks would enjoy. So here goes...
He talked about something many of you have heard from him before - environmental technology, which he calls ET. But the real essence of his presentation was (in my summation), "We have to redefine what it means to be an American. And at the center of that definition must be environmental sustainability." He stressed that this will not be accomplished by just changing lightbulbs and one in 100 people driving a Hybrid; it must be a revolution that is led by the government and driven with the same hyper-intensity of the IT revolution.
There was tons of very compelling info throughout the presentation but the one that i can't shake is the idea of Americums. This is a unit of measure developed by one of Freidman's friends in which 1 Americum equals any population of 300 million people whose lifestyle (air conditioning, cars, consumables, etc.) is equivalent to those of us in the U.S. Freidman spoke about how, just a few decades ago, our world had basically the equivalant of 3 Americums - the U.S., western Europe and Japan. But today - with the incredible growth of massive cities in China, India and Qatar - we now have over 9 Americums on the globe. And that number is growing rapidly. This is clearly unsustainable.
Just to wrap up, I wanted to share one other very compelling point he made. In the 1950s, he said, Americans typically thought that if everyone in the world could live like us, the whole world would be free. But in truth, if the whole world lives like us, we we will all suffer from the environmental, political and economical devastation wrought by our addiction to oil. So the only solution is to dramatically change what it means to "live like us." Environmental sustainability - using clean energy, reducing consumables - must be at the center of that change. Then perhaps one day the measurement of Americums may even be a positive thing. But there is no time to lose.