Green activities can reduce the export of
puritanical Islam and also address two other issues facing America:
jobs and temperature. Following Iraq, our post 9/11 trauma, and the political conflicts of the Bush administration,
green can provide the mechanism to restore America in the global order. “Green,” understood as geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic, can be a unifying political movement. Green ideology has the power to actively involve all types of people with opposing philosophies – liberals and conservatives, believers and atheists, corporations and environmentalists.
After World War II, President Eisenhower built our interstate system to move military equipment across the U.S. to
address the Communist threat. Opening up the U.S. to automobile and truck traffic created an America addicted to cheap fossil fuels. Now we are dependent on that fuel and paying for it in economic, geopolitical, and climate effects. Eisenhower rallied America against the red menace. The next president needs to rally us to green patriotism. Green is now the new red, white, and blue.
Green has now gone geostrategic. We have realized that we are financing both sides of the war on terrorism. We finance our army to fight terrorism while at the same time financing the transformation of Islam to its more intolerant strand through our gasoline purchases. By enriching the coffers of Saudi and Iranian treasuries, we are financing the export of the Saudi
puritanical brand of Sunni Islam and the Iranian fundamentalist brand of Shiite Islam. That is, we are funding the rope to hang ourselves. We have found that the price of oil is inversely proportional to the pace of freedom. That is, when the price of oil rises, the expansion of free societies decreases. This is illustrated by the First Law of Petropolitics. Plot the price of oil on one axis of a graph and the freedom indexes from the Fraser Institute and you see that as oil prices decline, free elections occur, newspapers open up, economic reform is initiated and reformers elected, and companies are privatized. The reverse tends to occur as oil prices rise. To bring political reform to the mideast and stop the next war, bring down the price of oil. Foster democracy among the petroauthoritarians by decreasing their oil income.
The U.S. Army now has a new movement amongst its ranks: the Green Hawks. The Army is looking for ways to become more energy efficient, to eat its tail. The Army has found that to run its generators it needs to import diesel via trucks which insurgents are blowing up. Eating its tail means trying to generate needed materials on-site. When the Army goes green, the U.S. could really go green.
The second reason green is Main Street is global warming thanks now to a draft U.N. report that concluded climate change is affecting natural systems on every continent. Some scientists are saying human beings can emit only so much carbon dioxide before things go haywire. A solution is to replace coal-fired power plants with gas-fired plants, increase auto fuel economy and make other changes in how man uses electricity.
Green also has gone Main Street because of the decline of Communism, the rise of computers, the internet, and the exposure of the American dream to the world. But, for example, as the three billion people of China move from low-impact to high-impact life styles it becomes urgent that we find cleaner fuel for their dreams. However, the challenge is if you’re a Chinese mayor and must choose between jobs and reducing pollution, you’ll choose jobs. A coughing worker is less dangerous than an unemployed worker. Green will not go down Main Street unless it goes there in China and India and Brazil as well. And it won’t go there unless the price of clean fuel falls to the China price. There is significant innovation needed to get the price of clean fuel to what countries like China and India can pay.
The solution is mobilizing free-market capitalism. Wal-Mart is an example that has instituted sustainability practices and begun saving money by eliminating packaging and increasing the fuel mileage of its fleet trucks. It is stocking its shelves with compact fluorescent bulbs that can have a revolutionary impact if all its customers just buy one each. Although the federal government has not imposed conservation or clean power standards, governors of U.S. states have started to set their own energy standards and reap the benefits.
Another corporate example of how Green can pay is G.E. Transportation that has trade surpluses with China and Mexico. Although China can make locomotives 30 percent cheaper, G.E. Transportation make the most efficient locomotives in the world with the best mileage per ton pulled. China and Mexico, as well as Brazil and Kazakhstan are buying from G.E. – at the China price by virtue of G.E.’s lowered the total life-cycle cost.
We need a Green New Deal in America if we hope to maintain our leadership. We need to get our best brains out of hedge funds and into giving us innovations for clean-power. We need to break our addition to fuel that powers regimes hostile to our way of life.