A reeling President Obama and his media allies are trying to turn the damage of the Gulf spill to their advantage. The spill is a cry from Mother Earth, they say, that we end our “addiction to oil” and pass cap-and-trade.

The New York Times’s Tom Friedman does his bit in his Sunday column, “This Time Is Different,” and it is a marvelous piece of self-parody from the Greendaddy of green columnists.

“We have met the enemy and he is us,” writes Friedman. We?

Friedman is a rich journalist who makes his living jetting around the globe on carbon-burning airplanes researching, hawking books, and speaking to rotary clubs. When he’s not guzzling jet fuel, he’s driving home in his Prius to his 11,000 square-foot Maryland home.

“We cannot fix what ails America unless we look honestly at our own roles in creating our own problems. So let’s pass an energy-climate bill that really reduces our dependence on Middle East oil,” he says.

Honestly? The Affordable Power Alliance (via Deroy Murdock here) finds that Mr. Friedman’s guilty conscience will come at greatest cost to the poor. “Rising energy costs have a disproportionately negative effect on the ability of minority families,” reports the APA.

Take Detroit. Increasing gas prices through carbon caps will penalize this city’s working class, which drives to jobs in suburban shopping centers (like those pioneered by Friedman’s wife’s family, the multi-millionaire Bucksbaums).

“We do not know when the next Times Square bomber might get lucky. We don’t know how long the U.S. and Israel will tolerate Iran’s nuclear program. We don’t know if Pakistan will hold together and what might happen to its nukes. We don’t know when North Korea will go nuts,” worries Friedman.

His plan to defend against these threats, apparently, is to cripple the U.S. economically.