When you watch a baby being born, after a difficult pregnancy, it is so painful and bloody for the mother it is always hard to tell the truth and say, “Gosh, that baby is really ugly.” But that’s how I feel about the energy legislation passed (and not passed) by the Senate last week.
I have a long time love-hate relationship with Tom Friedman. I started reading him when he was reporting from Beirut, and then from Jerusalem, decades back, and found his reports stimulating and illuminating. They, along with my university studies and visits to Israel, helped to shape (and to reinforce) my views of the Middle East. I like him less as a columnist, particularly outside this initial area of his expertise. I particularly haven't liked his flogging of a particular (and in my view, limited and distorted) view of globalization. (I'm aware others would apply those adjectives to his work on the Middle East). And then, of course, there is the Iraq War.
Given Friedman's tendency to flog a topic of choice in the runup to and aftermath of his best-selling book on the given topic, I'm relatively pleased that he seems to be moving toward some combination of green/energy themes, and that he--so far at least--hasn't bought into an obvious pro-corporate smokescreen, so to speak, as he largely did on globalization. The energy/environmental nexus needs flogging, over multiple dimensions and a long time. His early columns, including this one, offer some promise.
In my deeply repressed pre-law, pre-bioethics past, I studied economics, with a particular focus on economic development in the third world and on the economics of oil and energy. It wasn't a good fit for me--I was too values-infused and opinionated for a purportedly "value-neutral" (or values hidden), efficiency uber alles academic discipline, or for adhering to the party lines of the time. No regrets--law and bioethics suit me better, and have treated me reasonably well. But the repressed past has made me a more critically informed reader and thinker on the issues I professionally left behind. That was even more so during the late 1970s, when Jimmy Carter was being ridiculed for proposing energy taxes and floor prices to create incentives to reduce gas consumption and facilitate major investments in innovation and alternative energy technologies, and when I was more hopeful that we could master and control the safety, environmental, and disposal challenges of nuclear power technologies.
That was thirty years ago. Glad to see we have solved all those problems and moved on so successfully. (I was somewhat less cynical about the government/corporate/ lobbying/campaign financing nexus in the days of my naive and innocent youth). I suppose most public issues have a cyclical dimension to them. We thought we cleaned up the augean stable of the imperial presidency with the post-Watergate reforms back in those years, too. (Little inside joke there.)
Where was this going? Does it matter? I'll follow Friedman's newest, uh, Crusade with interest.
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