美國在歷經伊拉克戰爭的國家分裂後，世界是平的作者THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN為美國找到一個團結全國人民、並且將美國往前推動，不分保守派、自由派的力量─綠色的力量。台灣呢？台灣在國家社會不斷撕裂後，團結全民的力量為何？值得大家深思。
The power of Green, THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush years will all be behind us - and America will need, and want, to get its groove back.
We will need to find a way to reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in the global order - as the beacon of progress, hope and inspiration. I have an idea how.
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 the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st century.
A new green ideology, properly defined, has the power to mobilize liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and atheists around an agenda that can both pull us together and propel us forward.
After World War II, President Dwight D. Eisenhower rallied us with the red menace. The next president will have to rally us with a green patriotism. Hence my motto: "Green is the new red, white and blue."
The good news is that after traveling around America this past year, looking at how we use energy and the emerging alternatives, I can report that green really has gone Main Street - more Americans than ever now identify themselves as greens, or what I call "Geo-Greens" to differentiate their more muscular and strategic green ideology.
Sometime after 9/11 - an unprovoked mass murder perpetrated by 19 men, 15 of whom were Saudis - green went geostrategic, as Americans started to realize we were financing both sides in the war on terrorism.
We were financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars; and by enriching the Saudi and Iranian treasuries via our gasoline purchases, we are financing the export of the Saudi puritanical brand of Sunni Islam and the Iranian fundamentalist brand of Shiite Islam, tilting the Muslim world in a more intolerant direction.
Cutting the price of oil in half would help change that. In the 1990s, dwindling oil income sparked a Saudi debate about less Koran and more science in Saudi schools, even experimentation with local elections. But the recent oil windfall has stilled all talk of reform.
That is because of what I call the First Law of Petropolitics: The price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in states that are highly dependent on oil exports for their income and have weak institutions or authoritarian governments. The elites running such states use their oil windfalls to ensconce themselves in power.
It is no accident that when oil prices were low in the 1990s, Iran elected a reformist parliament and a president who called for a "dialogue of civilizations." And when oil prices soared to $70 a barrel, Iran’s conservatives pushed out the reformers and ensconced a president who says the Holocaust is a myth.
People change when they have to and falling oil prices make them have to. That is why if we are looking for a Plan B for Iraq - a way of pressing for political reform in the Middle East without going to war again - there is no better tool than bringing down the price of oil. When it comes to fostering democracy among petroauthoritarians, if you’re not a Geo-Green, you won’t succeed.
The second big reason green has gone Main Street is because global warming has. People are seeing things they’ve never seen before in their own front yards.
I went to Moscow in February, and my friends told me they just celebrated the first Moscow Christmas in their memory with no snow. I stopped in London on the way home, and I didn’t need an overcoat. In 2006, the average temperature in central England was the highest ever recorded since the Central England Temperature series began in 1659.
Now we arrive at the first big roadblock to green going down Main Street. Most people have no clue how huge an industrial project is required to blunt climate change.
Here are two people who do: Robert Socolow, an engineering professor, and Stephen Pacala, an ecology professor, who together lead the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton, a consortium designing scalable solutions for the climate issue.
They first argued in a paper published by the journal Science in August 2004 that human beings can emit only so much carbon into the atmosphere before the earth’s climate system starts to go "haywire." The scientific consensus, they note, is that the risk of things going haywire - weather patterns getting violently unstable, prolonged droughts - grows rapidly as CO² levels "approach a doubling" of the concentration of CO² that was in the atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution.
So here is our challenge, according to Pacala: If global CO² emissions continue to grow at the pace of the last 30 years for the next 50 years, we will pass the doubling level - an atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide of 560 parts per million - around mid-century.
To avoid that - and still leave room for developed countries to grow, using less carbon, and for countries like India and China to grow, emitting double or triple their current carbon levels, until they climb out of poverty and are able to become more energy efficient - will require a global industrial energy project.
To convey the scale involved, Socolow and Pacala have created a pie chart with 15 different wedges. Some wedges represent carbon-free or carbon-diminishing power-generating technologies; other wedges represent efficiency programs that could conserve large amounts of energy and prevent CO² emissions.
They argue that the world needs to deploy any seven of these 15 wedges, or sufficient amounts of all 15, to have enough conservation, and enough carbon-free energy, to increase the world economy and still avoid the doubling of CO² in the atmosphere.
Here are seven wedges we could chose from: "Replace 1,400 large coal-fired plants with gas-fired plants; increase the fuel economy of 2 billion cars from 30 to 60 miles per gallon; add twice today’s nuclear output to displace coal; drive 2 billion cars on ethanol, using one-sixth of the world’s cropland; increase solar power 700-fold to displace coal; cut electricity use in homes, offices and stores by 25 percent; install carbon capture and sequestration capacity at 800 large coal-fired plants."
And the other eight aren’t any easier. They include halting all cutting and burning of forests, since deforestation causes about 20 percent of the world’s annual CO² emissions.
Green has also gone Main Street because the end of communism, the rise of the personal computer and the diffusion of the Internet have opened the global economic playing field to so many more people, all coming with their own versions of the American dream - a house, a car, a toaster, a microwave and a refrigerator. It is a blessing to see so many people growing out of poverty.
According to Lester Brown, the founder of the Earth Policy Institute, if China keeps growing at 8 percent a year, by 2031 the per-capita income of 1.45 billion Chinese will be the same as America’s in 2004. China currently has only one car for every 100 people, but Brown projects that as it reaches American income levels, if it copies American consumption, it will have three cars for every four people, or 1.1 billion vehicles.
The total world fleet today is 800 million vehicles! If Red China doesn’t become Green China there is no chance we will keep the climate monsters behind the door.
The good news is that China knows it has to grow green - or it won’t grow at all. On Sept. 8, 2006, a Chinese newspaper reported that China’s Environmental Protection Agency and its National Bureau of Statistics had re-examined China’s 2004 GDP number. They concluded that the health problems, environmental degradation and lost workdays from pollution had actually cost China $64 billion, or 3.05 percent of its total economic output for 2004. Some experts believe the real number is closer to 10 percent.
Thus China has a strong motivation to clean up the worst pollutants in its air. Those are the nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides and mercury that produce acid rain, smog and haze - much of which come from burning coal. But the Communist Party’s legitimacy and the stability of the whole country depend heavily on Beijing’s ability to provide rising living standards for more Chinese.
If China is having a hard time cleaning up its nitrogen and sulfur oxides - - which can be done relatively cheaply by adding scrubbers to the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants - imagine what will happen when it comes to asking China to curb its CO², of which China is now the world’s second-largest emitter, after America.
For green to go Main Street in the big developing countries, the prices of clean power alternatives - wind, biofuels, nuclear, solar or coal sequestration - have to fall to the "China price." The China price is basically the price China pays for coal-fired electricity today.
The only way we are going to get innovations that drive energy costs down to the China price - innovations in energy-saving appliances, lights and building materials and in non-CO²-emitting power plants and fuels - is by mobilizing free-market capitalism.
To a degree, the market is already at work on this project - because some venture capitalists and companies understand that clean-tech is going to be the next great global industry.
All that sounds great - but remember those seven wedges? To reach the necessary scale of emissions-free energy will require big clean coal or nuclear power stations, wind farms and solar farms, all connected to a national transmission grid, not to mention clean fuels for our cars and trucks.
If we were running out of coal or oil, the market would steadily push the prices up, which would stimulate innovation in alternatives. But what has happened in energy over the last 35 years is that the oil price goes up, stimulating government subsidies and some investments in alternatives, and then the price goes down, the government loses interest, the subsidies expire and the investors in alternatives get wiped out.
The only way to stimulate the scale of sustained investment in research and development of non-CO² emitting power at the China price is if the developed countries, who can afford to do so, force their people to pay the full climate, economic and geopolitical costs of using gasoline and dirty coal. Those countries that have signed the Kyoto Protocol are starting to do that. But America is not.
"We have about 100 scientists working on cellulosic ethanol," Chad Holliday, the CEO of DuPont, told me. "My guess is that we could double the number and add another 50 to start working on how to commercialize it. It would probably cost us less than $100 million to scale up. But I am not ready to do that.
"I can guess what it will cost me to make it and what the price will be, but is the market going to be there? What are the regulations going to be? Is the ethanol subsidy going to be reduced? Will we put a tax on oil to keep ethanol competitive?
"If I know that, it gives me a price target to go after. Without that, I don’t know what the market is and my shareholders don’t know how to value what I am doing."
Summing up the problem, Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman of General Electric, said the big energy players are being asked "to take a 15-minute market signal and make a 40-year decision and that just doesn’t work."
"The U.S. government should decide: What do we want to have happen?" he said. "How much clean coal, how much nuclear and what is the most efficient way to incentivize people to get there?"
The market alone won’t work. Government’s job is to set high standards, let the market reach them and then raise the standards more.
Government can do this by imposing steadily rising efficiency standards for buildings and appliances and by stipulating that utilities generate a certain amount of electricity from renewables like wind or solar. Or it can impose steadily rising mileage standards for cars or a steadily tightening cap-and-trade system for the amount of CO² any factory or power plant can emit.
Or - my preference and the simplest option - it can impose a carbon tax that will stimulate the market to move away from fuels that emit high levels of CO² and invest in those that don’t.
Am I optimistic? I want to be. Green has hit Main Street, but it’s still less than a new way of life. Why? Because big transformations usually happen when a lot of aggrieved people take to the streets, the politicians react and laws get changed. But the climate-energy debate is more muted and slow-moving.
"This issue doesn’t pit haves-versus-have-nots," notes the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum, "but the present versus the future - today’s generation versus its kids and unborn grandchildren." Once the Geo-Green interest group comes of age, Mandelbaum said, "it will be the biggest interest group in history - but by then it could be too late."
An unusual situation like this calls for the ethic of stewardship. Stewardship is what parents do for their kids: think about the long term, so they can have a better future. It is much easier to get families to do that than whole societies, but that is our challenge.
In many ways, our parents rose to such a challenge in World War II - when an entire generation mobilized to preserve our way of life. That is why they were called the Greatest Generation.
Our kids will only call us the Greatest Generation if we rise to our challenge and become the Greenest Generation
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