thoughtsignals

Tom Friedman, in a long piece in the Sunday New York Times magazine, argues that reducing CO2 emissions is not only an environmental necessity, but also vital to national security.

President Bush’s refusal to do anything meaningful after 9/11 to reduce our gasoline usage really amounts to a policy of “No Mullah Left Behind.” James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, minces no words: “We are funding the rope for the hanging of ourselves.”

No, I don’t want to bankrupt Saudi Arabia or trigger an Islamist revolt there. Its leadership is more moderate and pro-Western than its people. But the way the Saudi ruling family has bought off its religious establishment, in order to stay in power, is not healthy. 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 outright authoritarian governments. And this is another reason that green has become geostrategic. Soaring oil prices are poisoning the international system by strengthening antidemocratic regimes around the globe.

Link.

The Washington Post’s Sunday magazine has a story about a small “intentional community” in the mountains of North Carolina where the residents are trying to build a low-energy lifestyle.

Earthaven is not a “commune,” a term now in disfavor (too stale, too ’70s); the members prefer to call it an “intentional community.” It’s the kind of counterculture social experiment more typically found in places such as Oregon and Northern California. I visited because, while the rest of us worry about gas prices and global warming and terrorists taking over oil fields, the residents of Earthaven have a special approach to energy. They make their own.

Aside from how much I’m spending on gas, I tend to be an optimist about these things, believing that in the long term innovation, free markets and most people’s desire to have a clean environment will produce solutions to the “energy crisis.” I do not believe, as some folks in this article do, that a decades-long world-wide depression would help. Yes, that would lower overall consumption, but it would also likely lead people to practices that are environmentally harmful. Nonetheless, the Earthaven experiment is interesting.

Link.