Tom Friedman: How Mad Is It To Go Back to Digging Coal?

‘Would you want your kids to go back digging coal?’

FRIEDMAN: “You know, the best response is to look at the pictures from Beijing and New Delhi. In case people haven’t noticed, people there can’t breathe. New Delhi shut down a coal plant because the pollution there has gotten so intense and so toxic for people. So what does that tell you? It tells you that the next great global industry is going to be around clean air and clean power when the two most populated countries in the world are also barreling down that path themselves because they can’t breathe. So we should invest in coal while the next great global export industry is going to be clean air, clean water and efficiency technologies? Oh, technology, wait a minute, that’s our specialty. No, let’s give that up and let’s go back to digging coal. How mad is that?”

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