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16 Apr 2007 10:15 am

The Green Imperative

If you haven't read Tom Friedman's NYT essay yesterday, then do yourself a favor. What I take from it is not just that we need to launch an unprecedented effort to reduce CO2 emissions for the climate's sake, but that we cannot win the war against Islamist terror without it. It's going to be a very long war, we have lost the early battles, and we have fatefully decided temporarily to wage it on the enemy's terms. A longer war requires taking the enemy's primary weapon away from him: petro-dollars. Money quote:

Being serious starts with reframing the whole issue — helping Americans understand, as the Carnegie Fellow David Rothkopf puts it, "that we're not 'post-Cold War' anymore — we're pre-something totally new." I'd say we're in the "pre-climate war era." Unless we create a more carbon-free world, we will not preserve the free world. Intensifying climate change, energy wars and petroauthoritarianism will curtail our life choices and our children’s opportunities every bit as much as Communism once did for half the planet.

Going green is integral to preserving liberty for the next generation. You don't have to go a government-heavy route. Friedman's favorite policy tool is also Steve Chapman's: a carbon tax. The market will do the rest. And if someone can actually explain to Americans that this sacrifice is worth it - that it's the real, long-term answer to the mass-murderers of 9/11 - then he or she deserves to be the next president. Right now, none of them does. So who's gonna bite the carbon tax bullet? Senator Obama? Senator Thompson? Do you really want to defeat Islamism? Or not?

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