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Combating climate change requires government policy, and most conservatives hate the idea of more government regulation. Because they hate the prescription, they deny the diagnosis.

Thomas Friedman

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Thomas Friedman
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: July 20
Columnist
Journalist
Screenwriter
Television Producer
Writer
Saint Louis Park
Minnesota
Thomas Loren Friedman
Thomas L. Friedman
Government
Regulation
Requires
Deny
Climate
Policy
Combating
Idea
Prescription
Hate
Diagnosis
Change
Conservatives

More quotes by Thomas Friedman

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Tap into people's dignity and they will do anything for you. Ignore it, and they won't lift a finger.
Thomas Friedman
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I was in Bangalore, India, the Silicon Valley of India, when I realized that the world was flat.
Thomas Friedman
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I am hoping, though, that many of them have kids, who, when they have a moment to take a break from their iPods, Internet, or Google, will explain to their parents running the country just how the world is being flattened.
Thomas Friedman
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American young people have got to understand from an early age that the world pays off on results, not on effort. Not everyone should win a prize no matter where he or she finishes.
Thomas Friedman
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Iraq today does have a chance to shape its own future. They may not do that, or this generation may not do that. But maybe the next one will, I don't know. They may try and fail, and stumble, get up and fall back.
Thomas Friedman
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The Middle East would always be an important trading partner in just a market sense, like America is a big market for us, Asia is a big market, Europe is a big market. You are going to have hundreds of millions of consumers there, from just a standard market point of view, from a very narrow American point of view.
Thomas Friedman
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So what am I? I guess I would call myself a sober optimist...If you are not sober about the scale of the challenge, then you are not paying attention. But if you are not an optimist, you have no chance of generating the kind of mass movement needed to achieve the needed scale.
Thomas Friedman
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Almost all the students who make it to Caltech, one of the best scientific universities in the world, come from public schools. So it can be done.
Thomas Friedman
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What every employer is looking for is not someone who can do the job, but someone who can reinvent the job.
Thomas Friedman
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Everyone needs to get together and say: Our objective is to preserve and enhance the game and the planet on which it's played. To make golf a leader in greening the world.
Thomas Friedman
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Scientists tend to focus on what they don't know more than what they do know. And there are a lot of things we still don't know about the climate. But we know the difference between climate variability and climate change, and right now the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is well outside the variability pattern - and that's quite quantifiable.
Thomas Friedman
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What we do know is that the planet is going from 7 billion people today to 9 billion. More people want to live like us, drive American- size cars, live in an American-size home, and eat American-size Big Macs. What does that mean? It means that energy demand is going to be going up.
Thomas Friedman
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The reason that we are becoming less equal is because of the greater requirements, secure requirements, for a good job. This goes back to the '80s basically, this started changing as globalization and the IT revolution merged, and each started to drive the other.
Thomas Friedman
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What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain.
Thomas Friedman
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I love America. I think it's the best country in the world. But I also think we're not tending to our sauce.
Thomas Friedman
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Water is our next great environmental challenge. It is the new oil. How are we going to preserve this sport unless we are designing and maintaining golf courses that are energy net zero, carbon net zero and water net zero? Or ideally, energy positive, carbon positive and water positive, where they are taking out more than they are using.
Thomas Friedman
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There are elites that are real leaders and role models. There are elites that are really selfish and want to pull up the ladder once they've reached the roof.
Thomas Friedman
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It created a global platform that allowed more people to plug and play, collaborate and compete, share knowledge and share work, than anything we have ever seen in the history of the world.
Thomas Friedman
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I don't think the Arab Spring had much to do with energy. I think it was just the opposite, in fact. I think the Arab Spring happened because particularly young people knew they were living in a context where they could not realize their full potential, that they are being kept down by their own governments.
Thomas Friedman
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The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political-economic garment of globalization. [...] The tighter you wear it, the more gold it produces.
Thomas Friedman