- By Manhattan project I believe he meant metaphorically to mean heavy government funding for private sector or academic research into clean energy.
- The role individuals and SMBs can play now is small; through good public policies, standards, and market mechanisms, their collective contribution to averting climate change will increase.
- Cap and trade was barely mentioned; I should have placed that at the end of the sentence so to give greater prominence to Friedman’s continued propounding of a oil floor price and carbon tax.

Thanks for stopping by and for your views on cap and trade. It indeed is a murky field, and not the best one IMO, but at least it’s something.

Bottom line: I totally agree with your final paragraph.

That said, I feel an urge to point out that 3 of the 8 points you cite as his main messages seem inaccurate to me, as it could be argued that TF actually argued more against at least parts of these ideas than he did for them:
-Manhattan project for clean energy,
-role of individuals and SMBs [if the rules to guide the market are instituted, he says we need 100,000 of these, rather than a government-led Manhattan project], and
-cap-and-trade: this is the policy option he discussed least-barely at all – and he specifically noted that he leaned toward the other policy options and discussed them a lot more (carbon tax, floor price for oil, production targets].

Cap-and-trade is a halfway theoretical solution that in practice on this kind of problem will be inefficient both biophysically and economically. Unfortunately, this is part of what makes it more politically acceptable, because the true costs are masked, not direct. C&T is more likely than the other options to help entrenched interests PREVENT the revolution, by allowing them to trade conserving other people’s trees for real change in the energy/agriculture systems, buy “rights” to pollute and thereby keep new market entrants out, or if auctioned instead, cause more price volatility, not less (something he notes gets in the way of the revolution); and lastly, due to inefficiency, cause the carbon bubble he advocates to get too big, more like the mortgage bubble than the dot-com bubble…

Though I agree with his overall theses (and gave a talk at the US Chamber of Commerce 19 years ago saying much the same – and got laughed at), and he has some great up-to-8-months-ago anecdotes, as you say he is way too long-winded and repetitive, He also occassionally tries to make insightful conclusions based on anecdotes sound more cut-and-dried scientific than they are (like his oil price-democracy graphs).

Otherwise, thanks for an excellent summary!

Good post and even better summary. First time at your site, which I found because my mag recently posted a piece about Friedman’s musings (an objective piece).

great site, will be returning.

Take a stab at “Gusher of Lies” when you have a moment.

Regards.