Appearing on NPR's Fresh Air to discuss his new book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded," Friedman was asked by host Terry Gross whether or not the term "green energy" might be implicitly off-putting to many Americans. As Gross put it to Friedman "How do you shatter the boring, 'granola' image of the green energy industry?"
Here's what Friedman said (full transcript of interview):
That's what the book is about. The problem is the term "green" was really owned by its opponents. To name something is to own it. The people who named it "green" named it a "liberal, tree-hugging, girlie-man, sissy, unpatriotic, vaguely French!
What I'm out to do in this book is to rename green. Geo-political. Geo-strategic. Geo-economic. Innovative. Competitive. Patriotic. "Green" is the new red, white and blue. Because this is all of those things. To conservatives, I say, "Look, this book is a plan to make America stronger, more energy and nationally secure, more competitive and entrepreneurial, more economically healthy and more respected in the world. (Oh, and by the way, all that stuff Al Gore talks about? We'll take care of that as a by-product!) To liberals and "greens" I say it's a plan to make America greener. (Oh, and by the way, all that stuff Dick Cheney talks about? We'll take care of that as a by-product.)
I'm doing it because I honestly believe this is an issue joining both of those things. It not only does it intellectually, but it must. Because if you don't -- if "green" is owned as a kind of Birkenstock-wearing hippie wine-and-cheese-eating issue and isn't seen as an issue about national security and growth and making American stronger, healthier, more competitive ... then we'll never have scale. Until you have scale on this issue, you really have nothing.
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US environmentalists - the vast majority of whom are NOT over-educated, granola-eating, birkenstock-wearing, bicycle-riding, non-pit-or-face-or-leg-shaving, patchuli-wearing, organic-eating, microbrew- and wine-drinking, tree-spiking, labor-hating, anti-globalization, hiking-camping-kayaking, tree-hugging, indoor-plumbing-eschewing PETA-members - have, nevertheless, done themselves a HUGE disservice framing their politics as a politics of nature to be solved by technoscientific experts.
As any decent scholar of environmentalism can tell you (and them), 1) preservationism has always been as much about a combination of spiritual reconnection to higher powers, cultural patrimonies and elite aesthetics, 2) conservation a mixture of sustainable resources and profits, technical efficiency and true (wo)manhood; and 3) the middle-class environmentalism of the 60s and 70s was much more about the public health consequences and suburban aesthetics of pollution than resources. Furthermore, as Friedman OUGHT to be aware, fundi Greens in Europe have historically been aligned with urban anarchism far more than romantic hippiedom and - like the environmental justice movement in the US - most European environmentalism and Third World political ecology rejects out of hand the North American framing of environmentalism in anthropocentric vs. ecocentric terms for just such reasons.
So long as purported supporters of environmentalism, like Friedman, accept the Right's stereotypic critique of the character and "green politics" - and seek to move beyond it - they effectively reinforce the stereotypical framing of environmentalism in the first place... Here's hoping Framing Science's framing of environmentalism moves away from this kind of framing.