Friedman:Flush With Energy

[fencesitter]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/opinion/10friedman1.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

Flush With Energy

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: August 9, 2008
Copenhagen

******** A day later, I flew back to Denmark. After appointments here in Copenhagen, I was riding in a car back to my hotel at the 6 p.m. rush hour. And boy, you knew it was rush hour because 50 percent of the traffic in every intersection was bicycles. That is roughly the percentage of Danes who use two-wheelers to go to and from work or school every day here. If I lived in a city that had dedicated bike lanes everywhere, including one to the airport, I’d go to work that way, too. It means less traffic, less pollution and less obesity.

What was most impressive about this day, though, was that it was raining. No matter. The Danes simply donned rain jackets and pants for biking. If only we could be as energy smart as Denmark!

Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)

What was the trick? To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than us and was lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite that, Danes imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, CO2 taxes and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow their economy — while barely growing their energy consumption — and gave birth to a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most competitive in the world today. Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind. America? About 1 percent.

**********
much more!

[ixion]

1. Gee, Thom... maybe if you hadn't been propping up the so-called "oil men [sic]" these past

few years, maybe we wouldn't quite so deep in this sh*t creek.

[GoesTo11]

2. Tom is a modern-day Indiana Jones

"Our toilet even had two different flushing powers depending on — how do I say this delicately — what exactly you’re flushing. A two-gear toilet! I’ve never found any of this at an American hotel. Oh, if only we could be as energy efficient as Greenland!"

Wow, I've never heard of such a thing. Oh, wait, I have many times.

Friedman's breathless relation of the obvious is always good for a chuckle.

[bdf]

3. Hey, I got one of them toilets

But this is a very new place I'm living in. They're not common in the UK because most of the housing stock is old.

[depakid]

4. Every dunny in Australia has got a dual flush

but apparently, our "flat earther" either doesn't remember or has never been to that part of the globe.

[GoesTo11]

5. Toilets use water, not energy

"A two-gear toilet! I’ve never found any of this at an American hotel. Oh, if only we could be as energy efficient as Greenland!"

You see the two-gear toilets in places where water is scarce. This has nothing at all to do with energy.

Tom shows his keen understanding. This is pretty funny, actually.