Saturday Morning in Santa Fe

02008-10-11 | Reading | 0 comments

Dancing for Bees. (Vid)

Finished Anathem by Neal Stephenson yesterday evening. It’s still swirling around in my head. Some books leave a wonderful lingering aftertaste.

Friendman spoke to Chinese Car Guys – that last paragraph is what counts:

Yale Environment 360: Thomas Friedman: Hope In A Hot, Flat and Crowded World
Friedman: Well I answer that really with a story I tell in the book. Last year, I was invited to the China Clean Car Conference. China has a clean car conference — who knew? — in Tianjin, China, their kind-of Detroit, kind of a rather grimy city, the Marriott Tianjin.

And, I was the closing speaker. The audience was all Chinese car guys. All kind of grizzled Chinese car guys, all listening to me — nobody spoke English, they were all listening on headsets through an interpreter. And I thought, “What do I tell these guys?” And so, my basic message was this: “Guys,” — it was only guys — “guys, I have got to tell you, every time I come to China young Chinese say to me, ‘Mr. Friedman, you guys got to grow dirty for 150 years. Now it’s our turn.’ And my message to you, on behalf of all Americans, is to tell you, ‘You’re right. It’s your turn. All the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.” Grow as dirty as you want.’ Because I think we just need about five years now to invent all the clean-power technologies you’re going to need as you choke to death, and we’re going to come over, and we’re going to sell them all to you. And we’re going to clean your clock. I don’t know how you say that in Chinese, we’re going to clean your clock in the next great global industry. So, please, if you want to give me a five-year lead, I’d love five. I’d prefer 10. Take your time. Because we are going to clean your clock in the next great global industry.”

Now it takes about 30 seconds for the translation to get through — and that’s when you see everyone adjusting their headsets, eyes lighting up — and then about one second for them to understand exactly what I’m saying: That they basically have a choice. They can do what they did on telephony, which was to go from no phones to cellphones, and skip landlines, and they can do that in clean power… But unless they really change, they’re going to miss the new IT, which is ET.

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