Despite protest, Friedman delivers green message
Chaz Firestone
Issue date: 4/23/08 Section: Campus News
The green revolution sweeping across the globe seems more like a "green party" to columnist, author and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman, who spoke to a captivated Salomon 101 audience Tuesday night about the causes of and solutions to global climate change.
"Have you ever been to a revolution where no one got hurt?"
But the revolution may be coming faster than Friedman thinks. In addition to the 600 audience members and two standing ovations that greeted him last night, a female student sitting in the front row jumped on stage and hurled a bright green pie at Friedman's face as he began his speech, covering him in a sweet paste before she dashed out of the auditorium with a male accomplice in tow and a police officer close behind.
Though initially startled, Friedman took the attack in stride, tasting the pie and leaving the room to wash up before quickly returning to deliver his lecture, titled "Hot, Flat and Crowded" after his upcoming book. He divided the lecture into sections that mirrored the book's chapters.
In chapters one and two, the New York Times columnist declared this past year the beginning of a new era, marked by a convergence of "individual flames that have come together into a fire."
"It's a perfect storm between global warming, what I call 'global flattening' ... and global population growth," said Friedman, whose book "The World is Flat" is an analysis of globalization. "We've gone from B.C.E. to C.E. to E.C.E. - the energy-climate era."
Friedman explained that temperature, access to information and population all reached "tipping points" in 2007, leaving the current generation to deal with a "monster truck with the gas pedal stuck."
Chapter three - titled "fill her up with dictators" - looked at the relationship between oil and freedom and the emergence of "petrodictatorships."
Friedman described current foreign and economic policy succinctly: "Maximize demand. Minimize supply. Buy the rest from the people who hate us the most."
"Have you ever been to a revolution where no one got hurt?"
But the revolution may be coming faster than Friedman thinks. In addition to the 600 audience members and two standing ovations that greeted him last night, a female student sitting in the front row jumped on stage and hurled a bright green pie at Friedman's face as he began his speech, covering him in a sweet paste before she dashed out of the auditorium with a male accomplice in tow and a police officer close behind.
Though initially startled, Friedman took the attack in stride, tasting the pie and leaving the room to wash up before quickly returning to deliver his lecture, titled "Hot, Flat and Crowded" after his upcoming book. He divided the lecture into sections that mirrored the book's chapters.
In chapters one and two, the New York Times columnist declared this past year the beginning of a new era, marked by a convergence of "individual flames that have come together into a fire."
"It's a perfect storm between global warming, what I call 'global flattening' ... and global population growth," said Friedman, whose book "The World is Flat" is an analysis of globalization. "We've gone from B.C.E. to C.E. to E.C.E. - the energy-climate era."
Friedman explained that temperature, access to information and population all reached "tipping points" in 2007, leaving the current generation to deal with a "monster truck with the gas pedal stuck."
Chapter three - titled "fill her up with dictators" - looked at the relationship between oil and freedom and the emergence of "petrodictatorships."
Friedman described current foreign and economic policy succinctly: "Maximize demand. Minimize supply. Buy the rest from the people who hate us the most."