In search of Code Green

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: This was the right week to pick up Thomas Friedman’s new book. There is too much of the enveloping global financial crisis all around us. In fact, my one regret coming from Hot, Flat and Crowded is if the author had timed the release of the book for end December 2008, we could have enjoyed this 360 degree vision of our overcrowded world even more.

As the title suggests, Friedman advocates a robust case to take up the green cause. But that is being facile. If this was another piece to add to the literature on environment, I would have had serious reservations. Code Green, as he terms his agenda, is far more than that. For any author to expand on a phenomenon like The World Is Flat is intimidating. It is too early to say if Friedman has been able to achieve that. One suspects that he has not. But leaving such comparisons aside, Friedman brings the debate on green a far more well-researched analytical thinking than a large percentage of the current literature on the subject.

It is this aspect which makes the book the sort of read most often necessary to make the subject clear, and cut down on the holy right or left humbug that goes under this garb. Just sample this: “If you are in the technology business today and you have not been invited to a green-tech conference somewhere, you must not be breathing or everybody has lost your e-mail address. To say that green is the color de jour is an understatement. ‘Green’ was actually the single most trademarked term in 2007, according to the US patent and trademark office. Environmental reporters in newsrooms, who used to sit in the corner farthest from the editor’s desk, are suddenly cool.”

Friedman says the politics of the issue has shifted so much that even “al-Qaeda supporters, who always have their fingers on the global pulse, are getting in on the green branding thing”!