Writing from Heidelberg, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman points out how Europe – and specifically Germany – could lead a new trans-Atlantic alliance based on preventing climate change and achieving energy security to replace the US-led global "War on Terror":
"Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Western allies have been asking: What will replace the threat of communism as the cement that holds together the Atlantic alliance? Some have argued terrorism, but I don’t think so. I think my German friends have the best idea: the issue that will and should unite the West is energy and all its challenges."
"Therefore, green is not just the new red, white and blue — the next great American national security project — it should also be the color, focus and cement of the Atlantic alliance in the 21st century. As a German official remarked to me, “The whole issue has the potential of becoming a big trans-Atlantic project at a time when we have no other good big project that [embodies] a vision.”
"The intertwined environmental and energy challenges we face today are so acute that they can no longer be addressed by “virtuous individuals hopping on a bus instead of taking the car,” argued Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian. “This is a job for government.”
While many of the ideas behind "geo-greenism" orginated with the German Green Party, Friedman believes the Greens are stymied by their opposition to nuclear power.
"Jürgen Hogrefe, who was spokesman for the Green Party in Lower Saxony, Germany, in the 1980s, is today a senior executive with EnBW, a German energy company with nuclear plants."
“The Green Party has been extremely important for German society,” he said, helping to transform the post-Nazi society into a more liberal domain. But an antinuclear stance has been at the core of the party, and now that the German mainstream has embraced a green agenda, the Greens need to rethink nuclear energy. “The Green Party should redefine itself,” added Mr. Hogrefe. “In some fields they are very modern party. … But concerning nuclear energy and ecology they are stubborn, not open enough to see what is happening around the globe.”
I’m unconvinced that nuclear energy is the key to Western energy security – although I can understand why Germany would be wary of relying too much on Russian gas supply. But Friedman may be on to something here. Unfortunately, a trans-Atlantic policy based on scientific fact will have to be put on ice until the "faith-based" policy-makers in Washington are removed or leave in 2008.
