Get Energy Smart! NOW!

Tom Friedman has set out a leading position in the media landscape on the need for Green to be the new Red, White, and Blue. He has made articulate — and forceful — arguments underlying the basic national security (and economic) reasons for moving forward with an aggressive clean energy program across the United States. In his Sunday column, he takes this into the Tea Party domain. Among the tea partiers, anti-science syndrome climate denial is rampant. Friedman puts that aside in arguing that the Tea Party would be well served, and true to many of its ‘members’ underlying beliefs, if it transformed itself into the “Green Tea Party”.

“We, the Green Tea Party, believe that the most effective way to advance America’s national security and economic vitality would be to impose a $10 “Patriot Fee” on every barrel of imported oil, with all proceeds going to pay down our national debt.”

Put aside the issue of environmental considerations and the challenges of climate change, Friedman attempts to seize the nationalistic (if not isolationist / jingoist) chord within the Tea Party movement to lay out an agenda for why they should embrace a path toward cutting oil imports.

This works, imo, to a point.

Where Friedman — and this argument — fails is that cutting oil imports doesn’t necessarily have to rely on sound, sustainable paths forward. While “Drill, Baby, Drill” is a chimera in terms of serious impact on addressing America’s energy challenges, do we expect the Tea Party movement to embrace hybrids or oil platforms? Are Tea Partiers more likely to promote electrification of rail or devastation of vast parts of North America to squeeze oil for their SUVs out of tar sands and oil shale?

Friedman understands that limitation and thus asserts that a “Green Tea Party” should emerge from a radicalized center, which recognizes the health, national security, economic, environmental, and other benefits from moving forward with a clean energy future.

If we put a Patriot Fee on all of those imported barrels, we would use less, cease enriching bad regimes, strengthen our own dollar, make the air cleaner and the climate more stable, foster the exploitation of domestic and renewable energy sources, promote electric vehicles, help bring down the global price of oil (which hurts Iran and helps poor Africa), and we could use the revenue to shrink the deficit. It’s win, win, win, win, win, win …

Indeed, the Green Tea Party could say, “We’ve got our own health care plan — a plan to make America healthy by simultaneously promoting energy security, deficit security and environmental security.”

“Think about it,” said Carl Pope, the chairman of the Sierra Club. “Green tea is full of antioxidants,” which some believe help reduce cancer and heart disease. “It’s really good for your health.” And a Green Tea Party, he added, could be good for the country’s health “by harnessing all of its energy and unconventional politics” to end our addiction to oil.

Yes, I know, dream on. The Tea Party is heading to the hard libertarian right and would never support an energy bill that puts a fee on carbon.

So if there is going to be a Green Tea Party, it will have to emerge from a different place — the radical center, a center committed to a radical departure from business as usual.

Mistakenly, Friedman links the (semi-)suspended Kerry-Graham-Lieberman to this radical shift, “a radical departure from business as usual.” Everything leaked to date suggests otherwise, that the compromising after compromising after compromising looks to create the fig leaf of change while lining the pockets of the nation’s serial polluters. (While it would be great to be surprised that this is not the case, the indications are not positive …)

Friedman is right. There are so many wins to be seized with a clean energy future … understanding the extent of opportunities before us suggests that we face a problem like Goldman Sachs cheering the failures of the housing market: what are the financial and political interests secretly cheering their short-term gains as they help drive the nation (and the planet) into catastrophic climate chaos?