That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back

by Thomas L. Friedman

  The professor then adds ominously, “This would render an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable.”

  In the film’s final scenes, Fonda, Douglas, and Lemmon commandeer the control room, locking it from the inside, and begin to broadcast an exposé of the plant’s dangers. Security guards break in and gun down Lemmon. Suddenly the room begins to shake violently. Part of the cooling system begins to crack apart, but the reactor holds. The movie ends with Fonda on live television saying, “I’m convinced that what happened tonight was not the actions of a drunk or a crazy man. Jack Godell [Lemmon] was about to present evidence that he believed would show this plant should be shut down.”

  Films often express our unspoken fears. The China Syndrome first appeared in U.S. movie theaters on March 16, 1979. Just twelve days later, on March 28, 1979, the worst nuclear accident in American history took place at Metropolitan Edison’s nuclear power plant—Three Mile Island Unit 2—outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

  An incorrect reading of equipment at Three Mile Island made the control operators overestimate the amount of coolant covering the plant’s nuclear core. In fact, the coolant was low, leaving half of the reactor’s core exposed. One report estimated that roughly one-third of the core may have reached temperatures as high as 5200 degrees Fahrenheit. Had the situation not been brought under control, the melting fuel core could have cracked open the reactor vessel and containment walls, leading to the China Syndrome. Radiation would have spewed out into the air, and would have done exactly what that professor in the movie warned of—“render an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.”

  As in the movie, Three Mile Island ended without a single person being killed or seriously injured. The releases of radioactive gas and water were inconsequential, and there has been no unusual incidence of cancer or other diseases for neighborhood residents since then. Three Mile Island’s long-term impact on America’s economic, geopolitical, and environmental health, however, was radioactive in the extreme.

  The coincidence of the movie The China Syndrome and the real-life Three Mile Island—and, most important, the steadily soaring costs and legal liabilities of building nuclear power plants that hit in the 1980s—gradually combined to bring a halt to the construction of any new commercial nuclear facilities in America. Unlike solar or wind power or batteries, which get cheaper with each new generation of technology, nuclear power plants have gotten more and more expensive to build. A one-gigawatt nuclear power plant today costs roughly $10 billion to construct and could take six to eight years from start to finish. So what began with fears of runaway reactors and morphed into fears of runaway construction budgets has resulted in this stark fact: It has been more than thirty years since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved construction of a new commercial nuclear power plant in America. The last new nuclear power plant to be completed in America was in 1996—the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in Tennessee. That plant was approved in 1977.

  At the time America abandoned nuclear energy, though, we actually led the world in generating electricity from carbon-free power. Our existing nuclear fleet of 104 reactors now has an average age of thirty years. Just to maintain the current contribution that nuclear power makes to America’s total output of electricity—about 20 percent of national usage—we will need to rebuild or modernize virtually our entire fleet over the next decade. The earthquake and tsunami-triggered Japanese nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in March 2011—which led to a release of radiation in both the air and water—makes a renewed emphasis on nuclear power in America politically difficult at best and impossible at worst. Because we have not increased the nuclear component of our energy mix for more than thirty years, as our total energy demand grew we came to rely all the more heavily on fossil fuels—coal, crude oil, and natural gas.

  The year 1979 proved crucial for energy and the environment for other reasons as well. The cost of oil skyrocketed that year as did oil’s toxic geopolitical consequences. The sequence of events began in January 1979, with the overthrow of the shah of Iran and the subsequent takeover in Tehran by Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers. Months later, on November 20, 1979, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, was seized by violent Sunni Muslim extremists, who challenged the religious credentials of the Saudi ruling family. After retaking the mosque, the panicked Saudi rulers responded by forging a new bargain with their own Muslim fundamentalists, which went like this: “Let us stay in power and we will give you a free hand in setting social norms, veiling women, curtailing music, restricting relations between the sexes, and imposing religious education. We will go even further and lavish abundant resources on you to spread the austere Sunni Salafi/Wahhabi form of fundamentalism abroad.” This set up a competition between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia to be the leader of the Muslim world, each exporting its puritanical version of Islam. In 1979, “Islam lost its brakes,” said Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian expert on the Middle East. Mosques and schools all over the Muslim world tilted toward more fundamentalist interpretations of the faith. There was no moderate countertrend, or at least none backed by resources remotely comparable to those of Iran and Saudi Arabia.

  As if that weren’t enough for one year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. In response, Arab and Muslim mujahideen fighters flocked there to drive the Russians out, a jihad financed by Saudi Arabia at America’s behest. In the process, both Pakistan and Afghanistan moved toward a more austere Islamist political orientation. Eventually, the hard-core Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, led by the likes of Osama bin Laden, turned their guns on America and its Arab allies, culminating on September 11, 2001.

  Gone were the harmless good old days when our foreign gasoline purchases merely bought villas and yachts on the Riviera for Saudi princes, not to mention gambling sprees in London and Monte Carlo. After the assault on Mecca and the Iranian revolution, our oil addiction started funding madrassas in Pakistan, fundamentalist mosques in Afghanistan and Europe, and Stinger missiles for the Taliban, all of which came back to haunt America in subsequent years. In other words, before 1979 our oil addiction was esthetically distasteful; after 1979 it became geopolitically lethal. We were funding both sides of the war with radical Islam—simultaneously paying for our own military with our tax dollars and indirectly supporting our enemies and their jihadist ideology with our oil dollars.

  Hard to believe, but 1979 was just getting started. The energy world would be substantially affected by two other political events of that year. Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister of Great Britain on May 4, 1979. She and Ronald Reagan, who took office as president of the United States in 1981, implemented free-market-friendly economic policies that helped to pave the way for the expansion of globalization after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This increased economic activity the world over, massively increasing the number of people who could afford cars, motor scooters, electric appliances, and international travel.

  Less noticed but just as important, in 1979, three years after Mao Tse-tung’s death, China’s communist government permitted small farmers to raise their own crops on individual plots and to sell the surplus for their own profit. The agricultural reforms had started in the countryside in 1978, but in 1979 capitalism broke out from China’s rural farms into the broader Chinese economy.

  In 1979, “the first business license in China was given to Zhang Huamei, a nineteen-year-old daughter of workers in a state umbrella factory who illegally sold trinkets from a table [but] who wanted to conduct her business legally,” according to a historical reconstruction of this era published in The Times of London (December 5, 2009). The Times noted that Zhang is now a dollar millionaire and head of the Huamei Garment Accessory Company, a supplier of many of the world’s buttons. Of her initial sale she said, “The first thing I sold was a toy watch. It was a sunny morning in May 1978. I bought it for 0.15 yuan and sold it for .20. I was very, very excited to make a profit. But I was also very ner
vous and very afraid the local government staff would come to stop it.” When the government granted her a business license in 1979, the shift of 1.3 billion people from communism to capitalism was on its way. That shift, which produced, among many other things, the conference center in Tianjin with which we began this book, has dramatically increased both global energy demand and the amount of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere. On January 7, 2010, China’s People’s Daily reported that “a total 16.7 million vehicles were sold in China last year, bringing the country’s total vehicles to more than 186 million,” about half of which are motorcycles. In 1979 virtually no Chinese owned a private car.

  One final notable event occurred in 1979. It drew almost no attention. America’s National Academy of Sciences raised its first warning about something called “global warming.” In a 1979 study, called The Charney Report, the academy stated that “if carbon dioxide continues to increase, [we find] no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.”

  Put all these events together and it becomes clear why 1979 was pivotal in creating today’s energy and climate challenge. The details of that challenge are complicated, and we will discuss some of them in the rest of this chapter. But the key to meeting it is straightforward. The United States must reduce its use of fossil fuels as fast and as far as is prudently possible. We have not begun to do this. All of us are ducking the challenge and some of us are denying that it even exists. This failure could not be more dangerous to our country and our planet, because matters of energy and climate touch on every big issue in American life. That is why we include them as one of the four great challenges the country faces. How we address, or do not address, our energy and climate challenge will affect our economic vitality, our national security, our food supply, and our capacity to benefit from what will be among the biggest industries of the future. Energy policy affects our balance of payments and the value of our currency. It affects the quality of the air we breathe and the level of the oceans on our shores. America will not thrive in the twenty-first century without a different energy policy, one better adapted than the policy we have now to the realities of the flatter world in which we live.

  Unfortunately, instead of debating how to generate more clean energy and to slow climate change, we are debating whether to do so. Instead of debating the implications of what is settled science, we are debating the integrity of some scientists. Instead of ending an oil addiction we know is unhealthy for our economy, our air, and our national security, we are begging our pushers for just one more hit from the crude-oil pipe.

  While there is much that we don’t know about when and how global warming will affect the climate, and what that will do to weather patterns, to call the whole phenomenon a hoax, to imply that we face no problem at all—that all the scientific evidence for its existence is bogus—is to deny the laws of physics. And while there is also much we do not know about when the earth’s supplies of oil, natural gas, and coal will be exhausted, to behave as if we can consume all we want forever without staggering financial, environmental, and geopolitical consequences is to deny not only the laws of physics but those of math and economics and geopolitics as well.

  Finally, to do all this at once is to mock the market and Mother Nature at the same time. It is to invite each of them to respond violently, suddenly, and at a time of its own choosing.

  Honk If You Believe in Climate Change

  In February 2010, after a particularly heavy snowfall in Washington, D.C., Oklahoma Republican senator James Inhofe’s daughter, Molly Rapert, her husband, and their four children built an igloo on the Mall near the Capitol in Washington. On one side they stuck a sign that said AL GORE’S NEW HOME. On the other they put one that read HONK IF YOU ♥ GLOBAL WARMING.

  We would not have honked.

  And neither would 99 percent of the scientists who have studied the problem. This is actually not complicated. We know that global warming is real because it’s what makes life on Earth possible. About this there is no dispute. We have our little planet Earth. It is enveloped in a blanket of naturally occurring greenhouse gases that trap heat and warm the Earth’s surface. Without those gases, our planet’s average temperature would be roughly zero degrees Fahrenheit. About that there is no dispute.

  We also know that this concentration of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere has been increasing since the Industrial Revolution, because we can actually measure levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There is no other scientifically plausible explanation for the increase in greenhouse gases than the increased burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—that began with the Industrial Revolution and surged in the last three decades with the latest stage of globalization. When the Industrial Revolution began, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere was roughly 280 parts per million by volume. By 2011 it was 390 parts per million. About that there is also no dispute.

  This naturally had an effect on global average temperatures, which, again, we can measure. As we thickened the blanket of greenhouse gases around the Earth, it trapped more of the sun’s rays and the heat that they generated. As the Earth Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research center dedicated to tracking climate change, notes in its report for 2010:

  The earth’s temperature is not only rising, it is rising at an increasing rate. From 1880 through 1970, the global average temperature increased roughly 0.03 degrees Celsius each decade. Since 1970, that pace has increased dramatically, to 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade. Two thirds of the increase of nearly 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in the global temperature since the 1880s has occurred in the last forty years. And nine of the ten warmest years happened in the last decade.

  The EPI report explains that global average temperature is influenced—up and down—by a number of factors besides carbon emissions, including various naturally occurring cycles involving the sun and atmospheric winds. But the current natural cycles should be causing global average temperatures to go down, not up. The recorded rise in global temperatures is therefore doubly worrying.

  The EPI report concludes as follows: “Topping off the warmest decade in history, 2010 experienced a global average temperature of 14.63 degrees Celsius (58.3 degrees Fahrenheit), tying 2005 as the hottest year in 131 years of recordkeeping.” In addition, “while 19 countries recorded record highs in 2010, not one witnessed a record low temperature … Over the last decade, record highs in the United States were more than twice as common as record lows, whereas half a century ago there was a roughly equal probability of experiencing either of these.”

  As the Earth’s greenhouse blanket traps more heat and raises global average temperatures, it melts more ice. According to the EPI, 87 percent of marine glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula have retreated since the 1940s. There is enough water frozen in Greenland and Antarctica to raise global sea levels by more than 230 feet if they were to melt entirely.

  These are facts about which there can be no dispute. They all can be measured.

  While no single weather event can be attributed directly to climate change, the large number of extreme weather events of 2010 are all characteristic of what scientists expect from a steadily warming climate. Climate change, they argue, will make the wets wetter, the snows heavier, and the dries drier, because warmer air holds more water vapor and that extra moisture leads to heavier storms in some areas and even less rainfall in others. The record events in 2010 included floods in Australia and Pakistan, a heat wave in Russia that claimed thousands of lives, unprecedented forest fires in Israel, landslides in China, record snowfall across the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, and twelve Atlantic Ocean hurricanes. That is why we believe the term “global weirding,” coined by L. Hunter Lovins, a co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, is a more accurate way to describe the climate system into which the world is moving than is “global warming.” Global warming … It sounds so cudd
ly. It will be anything but that.

  Beyond these well-established core facts lie many uncertainties. We do not know how hot the world will become or how rapidly it will warm. This is so not only because we cannot forecast precisely how much greenhouse gas the planet’s 6.8 billion humans will produce but also because, as many climate scientists believe, the Earth’s temperature may well rise at a rate even higher than greenhouse gas emission alone would cause, through what are called “feedback effects.” Higher temperatures, for example, could melt the tundra found in the world’s northern latitudes (this has already begun), releasing the potent greenhouse gas methane, which lies beneath it, and thereby thickening the heat-trapping blanket that surrounds the Earth. Nor can we be sure what the consequences of higher temperatures will be for the planet. The Earth’s atmosphere and its surface are complicated interrelated systems, too complicated to lend themselves to precise prediction even by the best scientists using the most sophisticated mathematical models. The social and political effects of the geophysical consequences of higher global temperatures involve even greater uncertainties. They could include famines, mass migrations, the collapse of governmental structures, and wars in the places most severely affected. Unfortunately, it is not possible to know in advance how, whether, and when global warming will trigger any or all of these things.

  So, yes, there are uncertainties surrounding the effects of climate change, but none about whether it is real. The uncertainties concern how and when its effects will unfold. Moreover, one thing that usually gets lost in the debate about these uncertainties is the fact that uncertainty cuts both ways. True, the consequences of the ongoing increase in the global temperature could turn out to be more benign than the forecasts of most climate scientists. Let’s hope that they do. But they could also turn out to be worse—much worse.