I’ve talked in these pages about Tom Friedman’s Geo-Green ideas before (here, and here), but I’ll summarize it again quickly: geo-green means being green for the sake of national and economic security as much as for traditional environmentalist reasons. For the feature article in Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine, and his longest writing yet on the topic, he stakes out the geo-green position, and calls for serious change at every level of American society.
Of particular interest for those, like me, who think that being green, capitalist, and expansionist is not an oxymoron:
Equally important, presidential candidates need to help Americans understand that green is not about cutting back. It’s about creating a new cornucopia of abundance for the next generation by inventing a whole new industry. It’s about getting our best brains out of hedge funds and into innovations that will not only give us the clean-power industrial assets to preserve our American dream but also give us the technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams without destroying the planet. It’s about making America safer by breaking our addiction to a fuel that is powering regimes deeply hostile to our values
I’m not to happy with the way capitalism is to the point where I attend meetings with the local socialist group. However my distinction between socialist and capitalist is merely one of who holds the power. I don’t see how being Green and capitalist is any more of an oxymoron than being socialist and Green since both capitalists and socialists still want to get the most production out of the capital of production. Anyway all sides of the political spectrum should be interested in pursuing new opportunities provide by a new way of thinking be it the ramifications of globalwarming or the anti-democratic states in control of the world’s most valuable resource (which i suppose is oil). Since you can’t control the middle-east why would you do anything else but proceed to the next level. Maybe Wall street and big oil companies and the way lobby groups seem to rule D.C. has something todo with it.