The renewable energy movement’s leaders are green alright: Green with dictatorship envy.
“Get this,” says natural gas-mogul T. Boone Pickens in a television ad Promoting his self-serving plan for a natural gas-powered transportation. “Iran is changing its cars to run on national gas and we’re not doing a thing here.”
Meanwhile, in his best-selling green treatise, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman includes a chapter called “China for a day, but not for two.” The point of the chapter, the columnist explained to a credulous Tom Brokaw recently, is “about what we would do if for one day we could impose, cut through all the lobbyists, all the amendments, all the earmarks, and actually impose the right conditions to get our market to take off.”
“Because once the directions are given from above,” Friedman further explains in his book, “we would be overcoming the worst part of our democracy (the inability to make big decisions in peacetime), and the next day we would be able to enjoy the best part of our democracy (the power of our civic society to make government rules stick and the power of our markets to take advantage of them.)”
So the only way for American democratic capitalism to prosper is by adopting the lessons of Islamic theocracy and Chinese communism. Words matter, and the totalitarian reflex behind the Pickens-Friedman agenda should not be ignored.