The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is arguably one of the most influential voices in current American journalism. The Brandeis-and Oxford-schooled Friedman writes engagingly on such heavy-duty subjects as immigration law, oil addiction, and outsourcing. His examination of globalism, The World is Flat, has sold two million copies, and he is a solid favorite to win his fourth Pulitzer Prize for his latest best-seller, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. No ivory-tower thinker, he’s connecting with people in real life about the power of retooling the world’s economy by preserving the planet. "I’m getting big, big audiences. It tells me that people are really hungry to talk about this agenda."
How would you summarize your new book The core of this book is that clean energy technology, clean water, all the clean sources of growth and sustenance are going to be the next great global industry. I know that for sure. What I don’t know is who’s going to lead that industry. Is it going to be America Is it going to be Russia, China, Japan, India All I know is ET, energy technology, is going to be the next great global industry, and if we want to maintain our standard of living we have to lead that industry. I want to make America the example of a country that grows rich, innovative, entrepreneurial, competitive, healthy, secure, and respected by taking the lead in inventing "clean and green" power, because I think many more people will follow us voluntarily than will ever reduce their emissions by compulsion of a treaty. If we build it, they will come.
An op-ed in the Washington Post titled "Don’t Go There" argued that tourism is "nothing short of a planet-threatening plague". What’s your take In a world of increasingly rising, dangerous levels of CO₂, and in a world of rising middle classes of India, China, Russia, Brazil — where more and more people will be able to do package tours like Americans or Europeans have done for years — there is no question that tourism has to put stress on ecosystems, on beaches, coral reefs, forests, ski slopes, and on ancient and cherished sites. But I just have a hard time saying, "Don’t go there." Those charged with protecting those ecosystems have to be that much more vigilant. The real point is pay attention wherever you are. Pay attention to your environment, your ecosystem, your carbon footprint, whether you’re at home or abroad. And if we all do that, then there’s no reason that travel will hurt things. If none of us do that or we only do that episodically, then even the smallest amount of travel will cause damage. A hundred tourists can spoil a great site or a lush valley as easily as 100,000 if you don’t have the right regulations.
As parents, how can we inculcate in our children the idea of seeing and embracing the world When our girls were very young, my wife taught a class called World Class. She would pick a country or a city or a culture and do a little lesson about it for kids once a week. Other parents used to drop their kids off at our house to take the class. And so from a very young age, our girls were taught to be interested in and love different cultures, to go to museums, things of that nature. And that’s the most important thing you can do. You have to start them young. And another way to do that is to subscribe to magazines and newspapers. I got interested in news because my parents subscribed to Time magazine. Take your kids out to different dining experiences. Expose them to foreign movies. Make sure they study a foreign language in school. There are just myriad ways to get your kids to appreciate different cultures. Our girls are 23 and 20 now. They were both born in Jerusalem, so their very first trip was coming to America. Paragraph 3 is mainly about Friedman’s opinion on