Iain Murray
Friedman, Thomas L.
booKs IN revIeW Let Friedman Reign? Thomas friedman has come up with a grand unifying theory for combating existential threats. The left worries about global warming and 14 inches of...
...If America does it, there must be something wrong with it...
...let’s compare reality...
...They successfully communicate the ability of government to glorify do-nothings as heroes...
...That explains a lot...
...In other words, this ain’t going to be easy...
...Just call 800-524-3469...
...She quit early on...
...Richard Tol, whose extensive studies lead him to conclude that the cost November 2008 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor 77 booKs IN revIeW is “unlikely to be more than $50 [per ton of carbon] and likely to be substantially smaller than that...
...Meanwhile, anyone who has been paying attention to anti-Americanism knows that America’s existence is actually what people complain about—and have been complaining about for 250 years...
...So here’s my recommendation: this Christmas, give these books to the kid you like least...
...Friedman suggests that we will soon have a new dating system for years, replacing AD (or CE, as Friedperson calls it in his politically correct way...
...But this, as Friedman keeps saying, is the Internet age and we can fact-check his backside...
...In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, he suggests that by the one simple, affordable step of, err, completely re-engineering the way we power America, we will stop global warming, destroy Islamic fundamentalism, and reinvigorate America’s position in the world at a stroke...
...The other will be sniggering...
...The scale of Friedman’s ambition is breathtaking...
...Reading these books is like reading a memoir by an alcoholic...
...Doing nothing appears to be the best way to become a Democratic Party front-runner...
...He promptly financed the purchase of Brazilian soccer star Robinho for $65 million and promised more such signings to come...
...There, as a child, he contemplates racial tension or his parents’ divorce, a perfect reminder of what inspires Democratic politicians to wreak havoc with America’s own core values...
...And guess what...
...Mandela next to a sand castle...
...Friedman concludes by saying we are all pilgrims, sailing the Mayflower anew...
...At least not in so many words...
...He concludes, Iain murray is Senior Fellow in Energy, Science and Technology at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Won’t Tell You About—Because They Helped Cause Them (Regnery Publishing...
...Before Barack chased his future, he visited his past, traveling to Kenya…” There, he got an idea of the kind of robust economics he should bring to the U.S...
...If America adopted Friedman’s Code Green, anti-Americans would view it as a way to keep the world in energy poverty and stop businesses exporting to it...
...Barack Obama’s story takes a Matisse-meetsstrips-of-watercolored-wallpaper approach to illustration...
...The higher price of gas has indeed changed consumer demand in terms of the size of cars they want (or at least it will until people realize those smaller cars just aren’t as safe as their SUVs), but it has also led to political pressure to reduce gas prices...
...That’s why gas prices are an issue in the presidential election and global warming isn’t...
...Completely re-engineering the way we power our economy is expensive, enormously Hot, Flat, and Crowded: so...
...Al Gore actually has nothing on this guy...
...There, as a child, he contemplates racial tension or his parents’ divorce, a perfect reminder of what inspires Democratic politicians to wreak havoc with America’s own core values...
...Young Hillary Rodham J. Peter freire is managing editor of The American Spectator...
...Today we are facing $3.75 a gallon, on average...
...He believes that if the political leadership had used the events of 9/11 to tax gasoline a dollar a gallon, we wouldn’t be in the foreign policy mess we’re in now, because it’s all about ooooiiiiiillllll...
...Or replacing 273 million cars that get 20 mpg with new ones that get 40 mpg...
...This truly is millenarianism for the new millennium...
...Germany and France combined...
...Our gas consumption has only slightly curtailed recently—and is still up from what it was on 9/11...
...herself wanted to be an explorer in outer space, but was cruelly denied the chance to volunteer at NASA because “some paths were still closed to women, such as the job of astronaut...
...Guns and religion...
...Then Obama goes to Africa, where he finds out that they kind of do...
...Housing crisis...
...In other If America adopted Friedman’s Code Green, antiAmericans would view it as a way to keep the world in energy poverty and stop businesses exporting to it...
...How do we avoid a reviewed by Iain murray gigaton of emissions...
...mansion...
...According to Goklany, the dangers are apocryphal, not biblical...
...A second poll unanimously voted for the clipboard...
...These books look patently ridiculous set next to Meghan McCain’s own book, My Dad, John McCain (Aladdin, 2008), which chronicles her father’s heroism in war...
...Apparently, Barack Obama friggin loves beaches...
...Friedman has a solution to both, which he calls Code Green...
...He wants to do nothing less than restart American history...
...Thomas friedman has come up with a grand unifying theory for combating existential threats...
...words, in the seven years since 9/11, market forces have imposed double the price increase Friedman thinks would have been a miracle cure...
...Climate change is unlikely to be the world’s most important environmental problem of this century unless existing problems such as hunger, waterrelated diseases, lack of access to safe water and sanitation, and indoor air pollution are substantially reduced...
...Or converting a barren area to forest the size of In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Friedman suggests that by the one simple, affordable step of err, completely reengineering the way we power America, we will stop global warming, destroy Islamic fundamentalism, and reinvigorate America’s position in the world at a stroke...
...Avoiding one gigaton would require building 163 new nuclear power plants—about a third of current global capacity...
...There aren’t very many happy precedents among those who wanted to start again at Year Zero, with a grand plan for doing so...
...That certainly might be the reaction of one of the international community’s two faces...
...Opening each book and setting them next to the each other will provide a subtle contrast: Hillary Clinton smiling while she single-handedly runs health care into the ground, Obama glowing like a magical pixie, and John McCain sitting in a prison cell, alone and beaten...
...This is, in short, the biggest conflation of wishful thinking, confused priorities, and megalomania that I have ever seen...
...He’s off by a massive amount...
...What about those oil sheikhs...
...Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the royal family of Abu Dhabi recently used his oil wealth not to destroy America, but to take over the middling British soccer club Manchester City, paying $400 million for the privilege...
...Wouldn’t it be cool if we lived in sand castles...
...Would following Friedman’s plans impinge on our ability to tackle these other problems...
...He talks about global warming triggering “sea level rises, droughts and floods of a biblical scale,” at “just the mid-range projections,” and a choice between one scenario that might kill a million and another that would kill ten million...
...Yet Friedman supposes that if everyone uses an “energy internet,” everything will change by 2020—sorry, by 20 ECE...
...Vastly reduced oil wealth would not reduce the amount of money available to terrorists by any appreciable amount...
...And you know, this time they might have a point...
...Guys, let’s just go to the beach...
...January 1, 2000, will become the first day of the Energy-Climate Era, year 1 ECE...
...Tip: Find a corrupt slum lord like Tony Rezko to get you a bargain on your property...
...Obama’s time abroad wasn’t all Africa-based...
...We’re supposed to take his word for it...
...At least Friedman does acknowledge that this isn’t going to happen without some government coercion...
...Now Friedman, just like Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, supplies no references for any of this...
...This theme continues through the rest of the book...
...Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but McCain’s pretty old...
...And in a way, this is why Barack Obama was the Democratic nominee for president: He passed the “traveled to Indonesia at an early age” litmus test...
...The accompanying illustration shows Hillary primly sitting in class with a clipboard and pencil, with a newspaper underneath.Basedonthisinformation alone, a recent poll at AmSpec headquarters shows that if we had known Hillary in eighth grade, a majority of us would have thrown rocks at her...
...After all, it is written for the core liberal demographic: screaming eight-year-olds...
...In fact, the 2008 Democratic presidential This holiday season, give the gift of The American Spectator and receive an exclusive Ronald Reagan print, free...
...But what a precocious tyke...
...Hot, Flat, and Crowded is overheated, crowded with bad ideas, and flatly wrong...
...But these two books show exactly the sort of self-absorbed dinkelspiel that makes personalitydriven politics so messy to begin with...
...For instance, if we want to Why We Need a Green reduce global emissions from Revolution—and How It energy use to the level Gore and Can Renew America friends say is essential, that would By Thomas L. Friedman take a cumulative reduction over (Farrar, StrauS & giroux, 100 years of about 1,000 gigatons 438 pageS, $27.95) of CO2, according to the Department of Energy...
...Thebookdoesn’tgetinto Hillary Rodham Clinton: Dreams Taking Flight By Kathleen Krull (Simon & SchuSter, 40 pageS, $16.99) Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope By Nikki Grimes (Simon & SchuSter, 48 pageS, $16.99) reviewed by J. Peter freire that, though...
...We wouldn’t be transferring billions of dollars a year to the petrostates because we’d be using less gas, they would be in financial trouble and so freedom would be on the march there, and we’d have a happy, green economy developing free from the tyranny of oil...
...That translates to about 40 cents a gallon, maximum...
...Take, for instance, Indur Goklany’s meticulous research (google “Indur Goklany recent papers” and you’ll get them all) in examining the data and projections supplied by the British government...
...Tol was recently quoted by Bjorn Lomborg as telling him his feeling was that the cost is more like $2 a ton, which would translate to a global warming tax of a couple of pennies...
...The price of gas on 9/11 was about $1.50...
...Democrats call both “presidential material...
...booKs IN revIeW Let Friedman Reign...
...Obama went to Indonesia as a kid, too, so that he might discover really poor people and learn how not to become one of them...
...When most 14-year-olds announce their intentions to become astronauts, parents smile politely but secretly wonder if it means the kids will move out earlier...
...Hold your breath...
...It took fewer than four years for the price to hit $2.50...
...The cover resembles a portrait of Nelson Barack Obama friggin loves beaches...
...I’m not sure, though...
...Oh yes, Bethesda, MD, in an 11,400 sq...
...78 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor November 2008 booKs IN revIeW The Slaughterhouse Presidential Material Parents, you may be worried about all the time your 30-something kids spend “trying to figure it all out” while they live in your basement...
...Well, anyway, she did forge ahead by hitching her wagon to Bill Clinton and then winning a Senate seat on her husband’s name and her courageous willingness to look the other way...
...The campaign’s motto, I think, was “Kenya Dig It...
...America is too moralistic and too degenerate at the same time, for instance...
...By contrast, the attacks of 9/11 cost the perpetrators about $400,000–$500,000...
...80 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor November 2008 platform becomes much clearer when viewed through this lens...
...At some point, you want to say, “Yes, but what did you actually do...
...He also passed the “did you spend your early adulthood handing out pamphlets in an urban dwelling” litmus test, proving an early aptitude for handouts that would make him a star among the Democratic Party...
...The leading expert in the “social cost” of greenhouse gases is Dr...
...November 2008 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor 79 booKs IN revIeW Instead, the author directs children’s attention to the fact that by eighth grade, Hillary was able to not only talk but also “argue about current stories in the news...
...Foreign policy...
...When a kid sits on a beach to wonder what it all means, it’s called “California...
...Why would you bring those to a beach...
...Kids’ books are pretty hard to read...
...One intern suggested throwing the clipboard itself...
...EU leaders have expressly said that the point of the Kyoto Protocol is actually to level the playing field between British and American business, by bringing America down...
...That’s not to say that stopping terrorists is a bad thing, but re-engineering America’s energy system is an extraordinarily roundabout and expensive way of doing it...
...The left worries about global warming and 14 inches of sea level rise extinguishing modern civilization and the right to choose...
...The simple fact is that international terrorism operates on a shoestring...
...He suggests that we aren’t factoring in all the real costs of oil and coal use into the price, so government would be justified in raising the price to reflect this, by about a dollar a gallon...
...Oh, and he can completely reform China too...
...Nice theory...
...If Friedman doesn’t realize this, you’ve got to ask where he’s been living...
...Ah, but Our Hero (who literally wants to save the Earth, after all), has another justification for his tax...
...And like any trailblazer, Hillary… uh…quit...
...Neither worry is particularly realistic, yet they dominate much of American politics...
...A $1 tax on a gallon of gasoline would certainly have mobilized public opinion in America—it would have mobilized a vast movement for the abolition of the tax...
...Finally, Friedman suggests that America hamstringing itself in this way will earn international adulation...
...Err, yeah...
...Neocons worry about evil Muslims lurking behind the bushes ready to set off one of their millions of dirty bombs in suburban malls...
...Just look at these two children’s books: Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope and Hillary Rodham Clinton: Dreams Taking Flight...
...Not to worry...
...The Friedman Tax would be a massive overreaction to an exaggerated problem...
Vol. 41 • November 2008 • No. 9
