Somebody Else’s Mess

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: September 16, 2007

George W. Bush delivered his farewell address on Thursday evening — handing the baton, and probably the next election, to the Democrats.

Why do I say that? Because in his speech to the nation the president basically said that on the most important, indeed only, legacy issue left in his presidency, Iraq, there would be no change in policy — that a substantial number of U.S. troops would remain in Iraq “beyond my presidency.” Therefore, it will be up to his successor to end the war he started.

“In one fell swoop George Bush abdicated to Petraeus, Maliki and the Democrats,” said David Rothkopf, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment, referring to Gen. David Petraeus and the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki. “Bush left it to Petraeus to handle the war, Maliki to handle our timetable and therefore our checkbook, and the Democrats to ultimately figure out how to end this.”

The sad thing for the American people is that we have no commander in chief anymore, framing our real situation and options. The president’s description on Thursday of the stakes in Iraq was delusional. An Iraqi ally fighting for “freedom” against “extremists”? There are extremists in the Iraqi government, army and police. There is a civil war on top of tribal, neighborhood and jihadist wars, fueled not by a single Iraqi quest for freedom, but by differing quests for “justice,” revenge and, yes, democracy. The only possible self-sustaining outcome in the near term is some form of radical federalism.

We also do not have a commander in chief weighing the costs of staying in Iraq indefinitely against America’s other interests at home and abroad. When General Petraeus honestly averred that he could not say whether pursuing the surge in Iraq would make America safer, he underscored how much the war there has become disconnected from every conceivable worthy goal — democratization of Iraq or spreading progressive governance in the Arab-Muslim world — and is now just about itself and abstractions of “winning” or “not failing.”

That is why I thought the most relevant comments from the Petraeus hearings last week were those offered by the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Ike Skelton, when he said at the outset:

“We must begin by considering the overall security of this nation. It’s our responsibility here in Congress under the Constitution to ensure that the United States military can deter and if needed prevail anywhere our interests are threatened. Iraq is an important piece of the overall equation, but it is only a piece. There are very real trade-offs when you send 160,000 of our men and women in uniform to Iraq. Those troops in Iraq are not available for other missions.”

While Mr. Bush’s tacit resignation last week greatly increases the odds of a Democratic victory in 2008, there are several wild cards that could change things: a miraculous turnaround in Iraq (unlikely, but you can always hope), a terrorist attack in America, a coup in Pakistan that puts loose nukes in the hands of Islamist radicals, or a recession induced by the meltdown in the U.S. mortgage market, which forces a stark choice between bailing out Baghdad or Chicago.

The first three, for sure, could propel the right Republican candidate right back into the thick of things — especially if the Democrats have not positioned themselves with a credible approach to Iraq and the wider national security issues facing the country.

There is an opportunity now for Democrats, and Americans will be listening — but they need to articulate a concrete endgame policy, and it would have to include at least three components:

First, a detailed blueprint with a fixed withdrawal date tied to a negotiation with Iraqi factions on a federal solution tied to a military redeployment plan to contain the inevitable spillover from Iraq.

Second, a commitment by the next president to impose a stiff tariff on all imported crude oil, to make sure we become less dependent on what is sure to be a more unstable Middle East as we leave Iraq. And third, a plan to deal with the broader terrorist challenge. Set a date. Set a price. That will get people’s attention.

Democratic candidates have been talking about health care and other important issues, but the overriding foreign policy message that still comes across from them to many Americans, argues Mr. Rothkopf, is that Democrats are simply “anti-Bush, antiwar and antitrade.” Be careful: despite the mess Mr. Bush has made in the world, or maybe because of it, Americans will not hand the keys to a Democrat who does not convey a “gut” credibility on national security.

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The Road to Partition

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: September 11, 2007

Zealots don’t laugh when elevators break. Shatha al-Musawi did laugh. She smiled at the camera crew that was following her to her Baghdad office, and she sighed, “We’ll have to take the stairs.”

Thoughts of Musawi ran through my head as I watched David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker testify yesterday. Musawi was the subject of a profile by Damien Cave that ran on the front page of The Times a few weeks ago, and a Web cast on The Times’s Web site by Damien Cave and Diana Oliva Cave.

Musawi is a moderate Shiite member of the Iraqi Parliament who earned a university degree after her children grew up. She speaks thoughtfully and gently, but there is a wall in her mind separating Sunnis from Shiites, a wall that was erected during Saddam’s persecution and that has been fortified by the violence since. For her, the conflict with the Sunnis is not over oil; it’s a matter of honor. She wants them to accept historical guilt and grant Shiites moral supremacy.

As she said in the Web cast: “If they come and apologize to victims, if they admitted their faults and asked for forgiveness, maybe we can forget about it. But now with this continuous killing and continuous crimes against us, how could we? How could we?”

This is how many Palestinians and Israelis talk. When conflicts become struggles for moral capitulation, they take forever to end.

Musawi’s words are just one more piece of evidence that Iraq will not be put together the way it was. It’s one more piece of evidence that America’s best course is not to reunify Iraq, but simply to inhibit the violence as Iraqis feel their own way to partition.

What we’re really trying to build, in other words, is a road to partition. We’re trying to build a pathway to separation that involves the sort of low-intensity civil war that Iraq is enduring right now. We’re trying to prevent a pathway that is even worse — a high-intensity genocide.

As I was watching yesterday’s hearings, I was thinking of the sensible yet sectarian Musawi. How many American lives is it worth to save those like her? Is it realistic to think U.S. troops can help Iraqis move on that less barbaric path?

If you look around, you see this is the wrong time to give up hope, for circumstances in Iraq are better than they were in the spring.

First, there’s clearer evidence than ever that U.S. forces can inhibit violence. Despite all the debates over the data, violence over all is on the decline. In neighborhoods where 30 and 40 bodies used to show up a night, now only one or two do. After rising in 2006, violent civilian deaths of all kinds are down 45 percent since December.

Second, the worst of the ethnic cleansing may be over. For years, Shiites and Sunnis have been purging each other from towns and neighborhoods. That ugly process may be nearing its completion, and stabilization may be possible. As Damien Cave and Stephen Farrell wrote in The Times last Sunday, “Iraq’s mixed neighborhoods are sliding toward extinction.”

Third, the tribal revolt against extremism is real and growing. Few anticipated it. Few predicted that it would spread from Anbar to Diyala to Salahaddin and beyond. But it has, and U.S. troops are essential to its success.

Fourth, U.S. commanders finally have a realistic definition of their mission. We’re not trying to determine the future shape of Iraq, Petraeus said yesterday. We’re just trying to ensure that Iraqi sects compete for power in less violent ways.

Fifth, American diplomats are no longer waiting for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Yesterday Crocker made some dubious assertions about Iraqi elites discovering the virtues of power-sharing. But the concrete parts of Crocker’s efforts do not require those virtues. They involve bulking up municipal governments and disbursing money from Baghdad.

What we have then, is a confluence of events, a series of processes that weren’t happening four months ago. Obviously, these processes are tenuous. But, given the consequences, it would be foolish to give up now. It would be foolish to weaken U.S. support for the sane sectarians just when they are striving to create a segregated yet inhabitable Iraq.

Shatha al-Musawi is one of those Iraqis unwilling to reconcile. In that way, she’s part of the problem. But she doesn’t want to die in some cataclysmic civil war. There may come a time when the U.S. can do nothing for her. But with all that is happening, that time is not now.

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Watch the Sunni Tribes

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: August 29, 2007

Baquba, Iraq

When U.S. Army officers try to explain the challenge of rebuilding Iraq, they often talk about the three different time pieces they’re working with: Washington’s is a stop watch, where every second longer we stay in Iraq is a problem; the Iraqi Shiite-led government’s watch often seems broken, and you have to regularly tap it to get it to work; and the Iraqi Sunni watch always wants to go in reverse — back to Saddam’s day, when Sunnis were in charge.

I’ve just bounced between Baquba and Balad and a Sunni and Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad as an embedded reporter with the visiting Adm. William Fallon, head of the Central Command. I don’t know whether the surge is working — too early, too short a visit. But I did see something new here, which, if played right, could help to stabilize Iraq and better synchronize some of those watches.

It’s this: the willingness of the Sunni tribes, and key Sunni neighborhood leaders in Baghdad, to work side by side with the American soldiers they’ve been shooting at for four years in order to retake Sunni towns and districts from the Taliban-like, pro-Al Qaeda Iraqi Sunnis who took charge in 2006, when the undermanned United States forces pulled out of many areas and handed over security to unprepared Iraqi Army units.

Ironically, a key reason violence appears to be trending lower here is because Al Qaeda’s “surge” in 2006 so frightened Iraq’s more moderate, occasionally whisky-drinking Sunni tribal leaders — the backbone of the Sunni community here — that they became willing to work with the Americans just when the U.S. surge was taking off.

Warning! This important shift by the Sunni tribes could come unglued if the Shiite-led Iraqi government doesn’t start providing government services — water, fuel and electricity — to the Sunni areas the tribes have retaken.

It could also come apart because, well, this is Iraq. As one U.S. general said to me of the Sunni tribes, “They still hate us. They just hate Al Qaeda even more right now and they hate the Persians even more than them. But they could turn their guns back on us anytime.”

Baquba, in the heart of Diyala Province, north of Baghdad, is a microcosm of what happened. Last March, as the U.S. military was trying to retake this region from Iraqi jihadists — who had declared it the capital of “The Islamic State of Iraq” and imposed a reign terror, including beheadings for un-Islamic behavior, restrictions on women’s dress and a ban on smoking and alcohol — a U.S. intelligence drone picked up fighting between two Iraqi factions inside the city.

The next day, one of those factions, representing local Sunni tribes, asked a U.S. field officer for help in evicting the Islamic extremists. Thus began a cooperative endeavor that now embraces virtually all 25 Sunni and Shiite tribes in the area, and has the U.S. paying the tribes’ sons to be neighborhood patrols in their own towns and villages. As a result, Baquba’s market, which was sealed shut three months ago, was jammed on Sunday with women shopping for cucumbers, tomatoes and figs at different stalls and men making copies of documents at sidewalk Xerox machines.

Meanwhile, the U.S. forces also brought the official Iraqi Army back into Baquba — only this time with a new division commander — Maj. Gen. Salim Karim Salih, a respected, retired Sunni Army officer, who was one of Saddam’s top generals in the Iran-Iraq war and whose home was nearby. He, too, was ready to work with the Americans to get rid of the pro-Al Qaeda Iraqis.

“The citizens asked me to come back,” he told me. “We need a political solution. But the politics has to be impartial and not just favor one side. And we need action not more words.” That is code for the Shiite-led central government sending money to help repair the town, which it has started to do. “We are in a disaster state now,” added the governor of Diyala Province, Ra’ad al-Tamimi. “We hope the central government will interact with us in a better way.”

I understand the Shiite’s reticence. The Sunnis have resisted everything for four years and now they want government services.

But it is in our interest, because it increases the chances of the only possible solution here, and that is a loose federation in which each sect controls its own areas and Baghdad serves as an oil-funded A.T.M., dispensing cash proportionally.

That is the only way we can get out of here without Iraq exploding. Or, as a Kurdish official said to me: “If you wanted a united Iraq, you never should have gotten rid of Saddam, because he was the only one who could hold this place together.”

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Go Green and Save Money

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: August 22, 2007

Have your eyes recently popped out of your head when you opened your electric bill? Do you, like me, live in one of those states where electricity has been deregulated and the state no longer oversees the generation price so your utility rates have skyrocketed since 2002?

If so, you need to listen to a proposal being aired by Jim Rogers, the chairman and chief executive of Duke Energy, and recently filed with the North Carolina Utilities Commission. (Duke Energy is headquartered in Charlotte.) It’s called “save-a-watt,” and it aims to turn the electricity/utility industry upside down by rewarding utilities for the kilowatts they save customers by improving their energy efficiency rather than rewarding them for the kilowatts they sell customers by building more power plants.

Mr. Rogers’s proposal is based on three simple principles. The first is that the cheapest way to generate clean, emissions-free power is by improving energy efficiency. Or, as he puts it, “The most environmentally sound, inexpensive and reliable power plant is the one we don’t have to build because we’ve helped our customers save energy.”

Second, we need to make energy efficiency something that is as “back of mind” as energy usage. If energy efficiency depends on people remembering to do 20 things on a checklist, it’s not going to happen at scale.

Third, the only institutions that have the infrastructure, capital and customer base to empower lots of people to become energy efficient are the utilities, so they are the ones who need to be incentivized to make big investments in efficiency that can be accessed by every customer.

The only problem is that, historically, utilities made their money by making large-scale investments in new power plants, whether coal or gas or nuclear. As long as a utility could prove to its regulators that the demand for that new plant was there, the utility got to pass along the cost, and then some, to its customers. Mr. Rogers’s save-a-watt concept proposes to change all of that.

“The way it would work is that the utility would spend the money and take the risk to make its customers as energy efficient as possible,” he explained. That would include installing devices in your home that would allow the utility to adjust your air-conditioners or refrigerators at peak usage times. It would include plans to incentivize contractors to build more efficient homes with more efficient boilers, heaters, appliances and insulation. It could even include partnering with a factory to buy the most energy-efficient equipment or with a family to winterize their house.

“Energy efficiency is the ‘fifth fuel’ — after coal, gas, renewables and nuclear,” said Mr. Rogers. “Today, it is the lowest-cost alternative and is emissions-free. It should be our first choice in meeting our growing demand for electricity, as well as in solving the climate challenge.”

Because energy efficiency is, in effect, a resource, he added, in order for utilities to use more of it, “efficiency should be treated as a production cost in the regulatory arena.” The utility would earn its money on the basis of the actual watts it saves through efficiency innovations. (California’s “decoupling” systems goes partly in this direction.)

At the end of the year, an independent body would determine how many watts of energy the utility has saved over a predetermined baseline and the utility would then be compensated by its customers accordingly.

“Over time,” said Mr. Rogers, “the price of electricity per unit will go up, because there would be an incremental cost in adding efficiency equipment — although that cost would be less than the incremental cost of adding a new power plant. But your overall bills should go down, because your home will be more efficient and you will use less electricity.”

Once such a system is in place, Mr. Rogers added, “our engineers would wake up every day thinking about how to squeeze more productivity gains out of new technology for energy efficiency — rather than just how to build a bigger transmission or distribution network to meet the growing demands of customers.” (Why don’t we think about incentivizing U.S. automakers the same way — give them tax rebates for save-a-miles?)

That is how you produce a more efficient energy infrastructure at scale. “Universal access to electricity was a 20th century idea — now it has to be universal access to energy efficiency, which could make us the most energy productive country in the world,” he added.

Pulling all this off will be very complicated. But if Mr. Rogers and North Carolina can do it, it would be the mother of all energy paradigm shifts.

Maureen Dowd is off today.

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Seeing Is Believing

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: August 19, 2007

Is the surge in Iraq working? That is the question that Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker will answer for us next month. I, alas, am not interested in their opinions.

It is not because I don’t hold both men in very high regard. I do. But I’m still not interested in their opinions. I’m only interested in yours. Yes, you — the person reading this column. You know more than you think.

You see, I have a simple view about both Arab-Israeli peace-making and Iraqi surge-making, and it goes like this: Any Arab-Israeli peace overture that requires a Middle East expert to explain to you is not worth considering. It’s going nowhere.

Either a peace overture is so obvious and grabs you in the gut — Anwar Sadat’s trip to Israel — or it’s going nowhere. That is why the Saudi-Arab League peace overture is going nowhere. No emotional content. It was basically faxed to the Israeli people, and people don’t give up land for peace in a deal that comes over the fax.

Ditto with Iraqi surges. If it takes a Middle East expert to explain to you why it is working, it’s not working. To be sure, it is good news if the number of Iraqis found dead in Baghdad each night is diminishing. Indeed, it is good news if casualties are down everywhere that U.S. troops have made their presence felt. But all that tells me is something that was obvious from the start of the war, which Donald Rumsfeld ignored: where you put in large numbers of U.S. troops you get security, and where you don’t you get insecurity.

There’s only one thing at this stage that would truly impress me, and it is this: proof that there is an Iraq, proof that there is a coalition of Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds who share our vision of a unified, multiparty, power-sharing, democratizing Iraq and who are willing to forge a social contract that will allow them to maintain such an Iraq — without U.S. troops.

Because if that is not the case, even if U.S. troops create more pockets of security via the surge, they will have no one to hand these pockets to who can maintain them without us. In other words, the only people who can prove that the surge is working are the Iraqis, and the way they prove that is by showing that violence is down in areas where there are no U.S. troops or where U.S. troops have come and gone.

Because many Americans no longer believe anything President Bush says about Iraq, he has outsourced the assessment of the surge to the firm of Petraeus & Crocker. But this puts them in an impossible position. I admire their efforts, and those of their soldiers, to try to salvage something decent in Iraq, especially when you see who we are losing to — Sunni suicide jihadists and Shiite militants, who murder fellow Muslims by the dozen and whose retrograde visions offer Iraqis only a future of tears. But we could never defeat them on our own. It takes a village, and right now too many of the Iraqi villagers won’t work together.

Most likely the Bush team will say the surge is a “partial” success and needs more time. But that is like your contractor telling you that your home is almost finished — the bricks are up, but there’s no cement. Thanks a lot.

The Democrats should not fight Petraeus & Crocker over their answer. They should redefine the question. They should say: “My fellow Americans, ask yourselves this: What will convey to you, in your gut — without anyone interpreting it — that the surge is working and worth sustaining?”

My answer: If I saw something with my own eyes that I hadn’t seen before — Iraq’s Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni leaders stepping forward, declaring their willingness to work out their differences by a set deadline and publicly asking us to stay until they do. That’s the only thing worth giving more time to develop.

But it may just be too late. Had the surge happened in 2003, when it should have, it might have prevented the kindling of all of Iraq’s sectarian passions. But now that those fires have been set, trying to unify Iraq feels like doing carpentry on a burning house.

I’ve been thinking about Iraq’s multi-religious soccer team, which just won the Asian Cup. The team was assembled from Iraqis who play for other pro teams outside Iraq. In fact, it was reported that the Iraqi soccer team hadn’t played a home game in 17 years because of violence or U.N. sanctions. In short, it’s a real team with a virtual country. That’s what I fear the surge is trying to protect: a unified Iraq that exists only in the imagination and on foreign soccer fields.

Only Iraqis living in Iraq can prove otherwise. So far, I don’t see it.

Maureen Dowd is off today.

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The Green Road Less Traveled

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: July 15, 2007
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Whoever knew — I.B.M. is managing traffic congestion in Stockholm. Well it is, and therein lies a story.

Probably the biggest green initiative coming down the road these days, literally, is congestion pricing — charging people for the right to drive into a downtown area. It is already proving to be the most effective short-term way to clean up polluted city air, promote energy efficiency and create more livable urban centers, while also providing mayors with unexpected new revenue.

Imagine a day when you will go online and buy a pass to drive into any major urban area and the price of your pass will be set by whether you are driving a hybrid or a Hummer, the time of day you want to drive, the road you want to use and how much carbon your car trip will emit. And if there is an accident on the route you normally take, an alert will be sent to a device in your car warning you to go a different way.

Well, that day is pretty much here for London, Stockholm and Singapore — and New York City could be next. In a few years, the notion that you will be able to get into your car in the suburbs and drive downtown for free will be as old-fashioned as horses and buggies.

But what does this have to do with I.B.M.? To make congestion pricing work, you need technology — cameras, software and algorithms that can read auto license plates as they flash by and automatically charge the driver or check whether he or she has paid the fee to enter the city center. (The data is regularly destroyed to protect privacy.) That is what I.B.M. is providing for the city of Stockholm, which, after a successful seven-month trial in which traffic dropped more than 20 percent, will move to full congestion pricing in August.

“In Stockholm, we built a system where we have a ring of cameras around the city — 18 entry points with multiple lanes,” explained Jamie Houghton, I.B.M.’s global leader for road charging, based in London. “I.B.M. Stockholm runs the whole system.”

O.K., Friedman, so I.B.M. is now in the traffic biz. Who cares?

I care, because it underscores a fundamental truth about green technology: you can’t make a product greener, whether it’s a car, a refrigerator or a traffic system, without making it smarter — smarter materials, smarter software or smarter design.

What can many U.S. companies still manufacture? They can manufacture things that are smart — that have a lot of knowledge content in them, like a congestion pricing network for a whole city. What do many Chinese companies manufacturer? They manufacture things that can be made with a lot of cheap labor, like the rubber tires on your car. Which jobs are most easily outsourced? The ones vulnerable to cheap labor. Which jobs are hardest to outsource? Those that require a lot of knowledge.

So what does all this mean? It means that to the extent that we make “green” standards part of everything we design and manufacture, we create “green collar” jobs that are much more difficult to outsource. I.B.M. and other tech companies are discovering a mother lode of potential new business for their high-wage engineers and programmers thanks to the fact that mayors all over the world are thinking about going green through congestion pricing systems.

“Congestion pricing of traffic is emerging as a completely new services market for I.B.M.,” said Mr. Houghton. “I.B.M. is in discussion with major cities worldwide, including some in China.”

Hopefully, if the New York State Legislature acts, New York City will get access to a $500 million Department of Transportation grant for a pilot congestion pricing system. The more U.S. cities adopt congestion pricing, the more U.S. companies will quickly develop the expertise in this field, which is going to be a huge growth industry on a planet where more and more people will be living in cities. Congestion pricing is the only way to make them livable without trillions of dollars of new infrastructure.

As New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who’s trying to bring this system to his city, put it to me: “The percentage of your working day spent in a commute will go down and the time you spend being productive and being paid, or simply relaxing, will go up. Also, more people will do business in the city, because they can get to stores, offices or the theater more easily.”

So if you hear a politician say that we can’t afford to impose green standards because it will cost us jobs, tell them: “Hogwash.” The more we elevate, expand and globalize green, clean-power standards the more we play to the strengths of the American economy, American jobs and American-based companies.

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Live Bad, Go Green

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: July 8, 2007
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Over dinner with friends in London the other night, the conversation drifted to global warming and whether anything was really being done to reverse it. One guest, Sameh El-Shahat, a furniture designer, heaped particular scorn on programs that enable people to offset their excessive carbon emissions by funding green projects elsewhere. “Who really checks that it’s being done?” he asked. And how much difference does it really make?

But then he hit on an ingenious idea: If people really want to generate money to plant trees or finance green power, why not have them offset their real sins, not just their carbon excesses? We started to play with his idea: Imagine if you could offset the whole Ten Commandments.

No, really, think about it. Imagine if there were a Web site — I’d call it GreenSinai.com — where every time you thought you had violated one of the Ten Commandments, or you wanted to violate one of them but did not want to feel guilty about it, you could buy carbon credits to offset your sins.

The motto of Britain’s Conservative Party today is “Vote Blue, Go Green.” GreenSinai’s motto could be: “Live Bad, Go Green.” That would generate some income.

Here’s how it would work: One day, you’re out in the backyard mowing the lawn and suddenly you covet your neighbor’s wife. Hey, it happens — that’s why “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” is one of the Ten Commandments. No problem. You just go to GreenSinai.com and buy 100 trees in the Amazon or fund a project to capture methane from cow dung in India — and, presto, you’re free and clear.

Obviously there would be a sliding scale. Taking God’s name in vain or erecting an idol might cost you only a few solar water heaters for a Chinese village, whereas bearing false witness or stealing would set you back a pilot sugar ethanol plant in Louisiana.

As for adultery, well, I think that’s where the big money could be made. My guess is that we could achieve a carbon-neutral world by 2020 if we just set up a system for people to offset their adultery by reversing deforestation of tropical rain forests or funding mega wind and solar power systems in China and India.

O.K., O.K., more seriously, I raise this issue of carbon offsets because they’re symptomatic of the larger problem we face in confronting climate change: everyone wants it to happen, but without pain or sacrifice. On balance, I think carbon-offsetting is a good thing — my family has purchased offsets — if for no other reason than it directs resources toward clean technologies that might not have been funded and, therefore, moves us down the innovation curve faster.

But the danger, argues Michael Sandel, Harvard’s noted political philosopher, “is that carbon offsets will become, at least for some, a painless mechanism to buy our way out of the more fundamental changes in habits, attitudes and way of life that are actually required to address the climate problem.”

“If someone drives a Hummer and buys carbon offsets to salve his conscience, that is better than driving the Hummer and doing nothing,” added Mr. Sandel, author of “The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering.” “But it would be even better to trade in the Hummer for a hybrid. The risk is that carbon offsets will make Hummers seem respectable rather than irresponsible, and distract us, as a nation, from harder, bigger changes in our energy policy.”

People often refer to the current climate buzz as “a green revolution,” but the very term revolution suggests a fundamental break with past habits, attitudes and public policies. Yet, when you suggest a carbon tax or a higher gasoline tax — initiatives that would redirect resources and change habits at the scale actually needed to impact global warming — what is the first thing you hear in Congress? “Impossible — you can’t use the T-word.”

A revolution without sacrifice where everyone is a winner? There’s no such thing.

Katherine Ellison wrote a wonderful piece on this topic for Salon.com in which she quoted Stephen Schneider, the Stanford University climatologist, as saying: “Volunteerism doesn’t work. It’s about as effective as voluntary speed limits. No cops, no judges: road carnage. No rules, no fines: greenhouse gases. We’re going to triple or quadruple the CO2 in the atmosphere with no policy. I don’t believe offsets are just a distraction. But we’ll have failed if that’s all we do.”

There’s a saying at the Pentagon that “a vision without resources is a hallucination.” For my money, the green revolution today is still a hallucination.

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