Sorry, having trouble tell snark from trolling, I suppose.

Noise level has been very high on pro-environmental forums lately.

A friend of mine who lives in Alaska and served with two different governors — and who knows Palin — noted that when she signed AO 238, she promptly tried to stack the deck by appointing deniers and oil sympathizers to oversee the sub cabinet’s activities.

As for appointing an observer to the Western Climate Initiative, he says it’s not because she wants to support it, rather it’s a case of “keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.”

Actions do speak louder than words, and Palin’s actions reveal her to be a climate denier and oil troll.

Your actions, Paul, show you to be so partisan and doctrinaire that your comments are at best, worthless, at worst, dangerous and disingenuous.

I’ve long been ambivalent about Friedman myself. I agree completely with his energy-climate change-national security-economic integrity nexus.

But, as a Peak Oiler, I don’t find his prescription – breathless technophilia and rampant globalization – realistic. That’s just digging deeper when you’re in a deep hole. (I also reject globalization on many other grounds, so I’d have a problem with F even leaving Peak Oil out of it.)

This line from the Raibbi review made me break up laughing:

It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans.

That’s as dead on as it gets. I’m very familiar with F’s way from reading his columns.

Then there’s this:

The book’s genesis is conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.” To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase—the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:

As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: “The playing field is being leveled.”

What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened… Flattened? Flattened? My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!

This is like the pseudo-profound musing you have when you’re stoned or on an acid trip.

As for Iraq, from that clip I couldn’t quite tell if F was just describing that way of looking at it, or if he was endorsing it. I don’t recall his ever giving that kind of justification in his columns.

I dislike the columnists in my paper and their columnists are a big reason why my subscription has lapsed. They now carry more green features, but they should also be carrying Friedmans editorials on Energy and Climate.

I plan on making the case to phone solicitors who call me, to salespeople who recruit subscribers in kiosks in local stores and in letters to the editorial board. I will also seek out their advertisers who might be like minded and ask them to do the same things.

Activist groups with mailing lists could include the above review, the video link and some choice editorials. His ideas are great. Let’s work to get his columns in front of more and more people.

I challenge all whose newspapers don’t carry Friedman to do the same thing.

I challenge all whose newspapers don’t carry Friedman to do the same thing.