Bush's plan for bringing freedom to the Middle East relies heavily on conversions at gun-point. He and his people are stuck in the sixteenth century, when Spanish conquistadores used death and torture to convert Native Americans to Catholicism. Thomas Friedman writes about a fresh, energy-sensible approach:
Is there any other way the West can promote real reform in the Arab-Muslim world? Yes, there is an alternative to the Euro-wimps and the neocons, and it is the "geo-greens." I am a geo-green. The geo-greens believe that, going forward, if we put all our focus on reducing the price of oil - by conservation, by developing renewable and alternative energies and by expanding nuclear power - we will force more reform than by any other strategy. You give me $18-a-barrel oil and I will give you political and economic reform from Algeria to Iran. All these regimes have huge population bubbles and too few jobs. They make up the gap with oil revenues. Shrink the oil revenue and they will have to open up their economies and their schools and liberate their women so that their people can compete. It is that simple.
By refusing to rein in U.S. energy consumption, the Bush team is not only depriving itself of the most effective lever for promoting internally driven reform in the Middle East, it is also depriving itself of any military option.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/opinion/30friedman.html
Although I often disagree with Friedman, the strategy he describes has a lot of merits. It's peaceful, executable without traveling halfway around the world, and it's practical. These are steps that can be taken immediately and that, to some extent, are already being taken in Europe and much less so in the U.S. with an administration in power that loves fossil fuel extraction and combustion.
Europe gets 50% of its energy today from nuclear power and many of its countries have excellent public transportations systems runing on clean electricity. Wind power is also growing rapidly. Furthermore the EU has developed many conservation initiatives.
Yertle, a climatologist who wrote a very lucid diary summarizing the risks of fossil fuel combustion, has this to say:
Third, while I agree... that dumping CO2 into the atmosphere is probably a stupid thing to do when we don't really know the consequences and won't for another decade or two at least, I don't see much of a way out of it, save for a rapid switch to nuclear power for most of our energy needs (something I am most definitely in favor of).
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/24/20415/8197
James Lovelock, patriarch of the environmental movement and author of the Gaia Hypothesis, has, with co-author Bruno Comby of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy, compared the humanitarian catastrophes we can look forward to if prompt action is not taken to stop human contribution to greenhouse gases:
...[T]here is no direct relation between Gaia, global warming due to humans, and the recent tsunami, but this terrible event should be considered as a warning and incite us to be cautious before fooling around with the climate by burning fossile fuels as we are doing today. There are other much better solutions which do not affect Gaia instead of burning oil, gas and coal. Saving energy could contribute usefully, of course, and should be encouraged vigorously, but this will not suffice. Wind and solar energies can be developed but they are very dilute, produce only little amounts of energy, at great expense, and their production constantly varies, making these energies not only expensive but also unreliable on a large scale, incapable of meeting the vast requirements of our industrial society. On the contrary, nuclear energy is clean, reliable, and it can safely produce large amounts of energy while hardly affecting the biosphere at all (one gram of uranium produces as much energy as one ton of oil - this difference is a factor of one million). Clean nuclear energy should be developed as much as possible, and as rapidly as possible (the situation of our planet requires urgent action) to replace the dangerous habit of burning CO2-producing fuels which are dominating the energy production today. With all respect for our German friends, the decision of nuclear phase-out in Germany was a historical mistake, and it will lead to increasing (instead of softening it) the harm already inflicted to Gaia by the CO2 emissions into the atmosphere at world level. It would be good for Gaia, and for the environment, as well as a wise and courageous decision, if Germany reconsidered its nuclear phase-out from this perspective.
http://www.ecolo.org/lovelock/gaia_tsunamis-article-01_05.htm