Has Thomas Friedman Joined The Doomer Team?

I've been feeling a little burnt-out lately. Some days it's tough to post something I think you'll find worth reading, especially with the overwhelming heat & humidity. (It's only early June!) So I'm grateful when irresistible material just falls into my lap like manna from Heaven. Thomas Friedman's The Earth Is Full fits the bill in every way. Allow me a very brief preamble.

I have criticized Doomer Porn on various grounds. Selling end-of-the-world predictions is no different than selling toothpaste. I am not trying to sell you anything on DOTE. Even worse, Doomer Porn gives thoughtful doomers a bad name. I think humankind's chance of emerging unscathed in the 21st century are zero. I don't know what life will look like in 2050, or 2100, but it's definitely not going to be pleasant.

If not quite a return to Richard Duncan's Olduvai Valley, I believe life will resemble medieval Europe well before the Industrial Revolution, with some exceptions. For example, we'll have burned all the fossil fuels. And it will be a lot hotter. And there won't be any fish in the oceans, and we won't have any way of catching them if there were. And so on.

In this context, we must ask ourselves: has Thomas Friedman joined the Doomer Team?

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

“The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”

Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding.

This is not science fiction...

No, it's not science fiction! It's really happening! Actual thought is extremely difficult for Thomas. If you compared his mental prowess to that of a cabbage, it would be an insult not only to the cabbage, but to all vegetables everywhere. And if you were to look up status quo or conventional wisdom in a dictionary, and it was a dictionary worth using, the entries would both say see Thomas Friedman. This is why he has a regular gig at the New York Times.

Has something unexpected happened? Is there really something new under the Sun? It's time to use the red font for emphasis.

Wait for it ... wait for it ... be patient ... wait for it ... now!

But Gilding is actually an eco-optimist. As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, he says, “our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.”

We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.”

Sounds utopian? Gilding insists he is a realist.

“We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”

My God, man! If most people weren't tragically, hilariously stupid, I'd be out of a job. I'm counting on that stupidity. Without it, DOTE could not exist. And neither would Shakespeare. Or Kurt Vonnegut. Or Mark Twain. They were counting on it, too.

With a sigh of relief, I can report that no, there is nothing new under the Sun. There was no fucking way Thomas Friedman was going to end his column on a sour note. I'm pleased to report to my regular readers that DOTE can continue because it's still true—not only are most human beings slow, but they're stupid, too.

Bonus Video — Paul Gilding gives us the good news

 

Comments

[Dan]

Dave,

A good many writers feel it their duty, as "reasonable" commentators, to offer hope at the end of an essay, book lecture, etc. When you speak to them privately, however, they they sing a different tune, including a forecast that is often markedly more pessimistic than they are willing to serve up in public. Is that necessarily bad or dysfunctional -or denial? We're going to find out in the next several years...Friedman, for all his superciliousness, is a weathervane/thought leader of conventional wisdom, as you note. The fundamental paradigmatic breakthrough is when those in power realize they have "Bad knowledge," that is, the paradigm of modernism/growth cannot solve problems, even for the rich and powerful. That breakthrough might not happen, but then again it could...
That's why you write DOE in my opinion. You know the jokes: "I went to the fights and a hockey game broker out." Or, "Here comes Mongo!"