Best-selling author and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman rounded out Thursday’s An Afternoon of Conversation, which featured several hours of speakers taking on subjects from Iraq to education in the Benedict Music Tent. The three-time Pulitzer Prize winner discussed the necessity and challenge of really going “green” (also the subject of his next book), in his talk, Green Is the Next Red, White, and Blue.The following are some of the highlights from Friedman’s enlightening speech:“It’s really good to be here with all the people who have 7 o’clock dinner reservations." “My name is Tom Friedman, and I am a climate skeptic. I’m a total skeptic that we are really doing anything about it. I think we are in the middle of a huge green bubble.”“There is a saying at the Pentagon that a vision without resources is a hallucination.” “We’re all talking about it and trying to the heavens but we really haven’t bought a ticket. Let’s get real for a second. When we talk about battling global warming, what are we talking about? We are talking about changing the weather. If we pulled it off, it would be the biggest project mankind has ever taken on since the Tower of Babel.”“What do we have to do to actually prevent the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere between now and 2050? We have to conserve as much energy as we are now using as a world--13 trillion watts. We have to conserve that much…No one or very few people has actually been talking about the scale of what we need to do.”“This is a huge industrial project. How do we do it? I think to begin doing this you obviously have to widen the coalition of people involved in this project. It can not just be the people at the Aspen Ideas Festival.”“What I am trying to do is redefine green.”“Green is the new red, white, and blue. Unless we unbottle this idea and take it away from the two extremes who define it, you won’t begin to get change. Green is the answer to the three biggest issues facing us today: jobs, temperature, and terrorism.”“The good news is that green has gone mainstream…Green has gone mainstream, but it hasn’t gone down the main street.”“9/11 taught us that we are in a war with people who are funded by fuels and energized by our energy purchases.”“We are funding both sides of the war.”“You want to know plan B is for Iraq? Bring down the price of oil.”“Green is actually the most geostrategic thing we could be doing now to promote the reform agenda in the Middle East.”“The flattening of the world makes green hugely important both economically and obviously in terms of climate.”“I believe this is the foundation of the next great industrial revolution--green power. You can not make a product greener without making it smart.”“When I hear people say we can’t afford to be green, that’s utter lunacy. We can’t afford not to be green.”“We don’t have green policy in this country despite all of the hype. We have green politics.”“So you’ll pardon me when I hear people say we are in the midst of a green revolution. You ever study a revolution in history? You ever seen a revolution where nobody got hurt? Welcome to the green revolution where nobody gets hurt. This isn’t a green revolution friends, this is a party. We are having a green party. It’s a lot of fun. But it’s a party. Do not kid yourself for one second.”“The hallmark of companies and countries that thrive throughout changes is that they reinvent themselves. I have an intuition that we aren’t post something anymore. We are pre something right now. What we’re pre is the climate era. I have an intuition that if we don’t reinvent ourselves, we are in for something really harsh.”“Here’s the really hard thing. The people most affected the most aggrieved have not been born yet, and that means we have this really unusual challenge of stewardship. We have to act at scale with real sacrifice, real taxes, real things that produce a revolution--not a party. And we have to do it to prevent a gas that you cannot see, smell, or touch on behalf of a generation that hasn’t been born yet. It will be--if we do it--the greatest act of stewardship in our history.”
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