The Chris Cuomo Project - Thomas L. Friedman

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

In a special bonus episode of The Chris Cuomo Project, Chris speaks with Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times’ foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist and bestselling author of “Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations,” about Vladimir Putin’s energy bomb threatening the Western alliance, the world’s approach to energy production at scale, the public’s fears about nuclear energy, what Russia has underestimated in its war on Ukraine, and more. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday. Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at https://www.stamps.com/chris. Thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring the show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Chris Cuomo. Thank you for listening to or watching or both this bonus episode of the Chris Cuomo Project. Tom Friedman, you know him from the New York Times, big thinker, understands the Middle East very well, understands politics in that part of the world, understands negotiation. How about a quick convo with him about what's happening in Ukraine, what it means for the United States, what the right posture is, what the risks are,

what the realities are, and how it most likely resolves. Important questions, and a guy who understands the situation and can help us figure out some answers. Tom Friedman. Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from Sundays. Now, we got a problem in the Cuomo house. We got three dogs who now likees better than the other food that I was giving them. Sundaes is healthy dog food, easy to store, okay?

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That's what you call yourself. Explain. Well, I once changed my business card because I realized that I had spent pretty much my career watching people act out in their sense of humiliation and questing for dignity, whether it was Palestinians versus Israelis or Muslim youth in Europe versus the Christian majority, whether it was China, which spoke about a century of humiliation, or Russia, Putin, after the fall of the Soviet Union. I've just spent a lot of my career watching people seeking dignity and expressing rage for their humiliation. And those are the two most powerful human emotions. How do you see that playing in our society right now? Well, I think, you know, Chris, there's no question that if you go back to the beginning of the Trump movement and the fact that, you know, Hillary Clinton once referred to them as deplorables and that sense of people feeling that elites were looking down on them is something that clearly fueled, you know, part of the Trump movement. You helped understand the negotiating of peace in the Middle East back in the early 2000s.

What did you learn that we could apply to our current division in this society? Chris, you know, I think the biggest thing I learned is what you say when you listen, because listening is a sign of respect. So two things happen when you listen. One is what you learn when you listen. All the big stories I got wrong were because I was talking when I should have been listening. But much more important is what you say when you listen, because listening is a sign of respect. And it's amazing what people will let you say to them if they think you respect them. Even if you are disagreeing on the face. If people don't think you respect them, you actually can't tell them the sun is shining out there or the sky is blue.

So I try, as a reporter in the Middle East in particular, as a columnist, to make sure I'm a good listener. Because that really is what opens up conversation. What would that lesson look like in terms of progress in our current dialogue here at home? to make sure I'm a good listener because that really is what opens up conversation. What would that lesson look like in terms of progress in our current dialogue here at home? Yeah, it's hard to say specifically, but we've just got so many people on broadcast and so few people on receive. That's the nature of social media.

I'm not a social media person, so I'm not on Twitter, I'm not on Facebook. I use Twitter as a broadcast mechanism, but I don't follow it. So I think there's Twitter. I'm not on Facebook. I use Twitter as a broadcast mechanism, but I don't follow it. So I think there's just a lot of broadcasting going on and too little receiving as a general phenomenon. I like that idea. You have on October 25th, the piece people should read where you speculate that maybe the Putin bomb is an energy bomb and that he's waiting on us until the winter time and he's going to put the squeeze on us. And the clever part of the piece is you say nuclear bomb would unite the world.

Energy bomb will actually have everybody at each other's throats in a blame game. Why don't we just drill instead of the Biden reserve strategy? why not just get people drilling again instead of giving their shareholders dividends? I mean, I think there has been a big issue, obviously, about the role of oil in our economy, in our society, and in our, obviously, climate. Seems to me, though, that we're at a stage right now, Chris, where we want to balance three things.

We want to balance energy security. We want to have enough energy, first of all, to take care of our country. Second, hopefully our allies. And third of all, so we don't have to be going off to beg petro-dictators around the world for oil and gas. can afford. And lastly, we want, of course, climate security and getting all three of those in balance, which would say getting off fossil fuels as quickly as we can to renewables and clean energy sources. So the job of leadership now is really to balance all three. That need for that balance, Chris, was less obvious when Russia, for instance, was basically filling in the gap for a country like Germany, which Germany could say, I'm going to get off nuclear. But the reason they could do that without going to coal right away was because Russia was actually providing all this natural gas. But once Putin pulled the plug on the gas, the game was kind of up for Germany. And having shut down nuclear, they had to go back to

now digging, mining, and burning coal. So you really know, you really got to look at all this in the full perspective. You got to balance all three of those things, energy security, climate security, and economic security. Sometimes you got to go slow to go fast. And maybe our problem here is with the politics of ambition. We say we're all going to be EV by this. So we're not selling regular cars anymore. On one side, yeah, maybe that motivates change. But on the other side, maybe it frustrates change because it's an unreasonable bar that makes everybody hate the endeavor.

I say, God bless people like Al Gore, who is a prophet in my book. We'll go down history for attentioning everyone to this problem. We need prophets, you know, sometimes to show us the way and to bang the drum. But at the same time, the energy problem that we face, Chris, is a scale problem. Energy is almost incomprehensible to people how big the scale of it is.

We basically, 20 years ago, were using about 85% fossil fuels to provide global energy needs, electricity and power, and about 15% renewables back then it was mostly hydro and some nuclear. Today, after 20 years of banging that drum, blessedly so, but with global population growing and middle classes growing, we're down to like about 80% fossil fuels. So it shows you the scale after everything that's happened in the last 20 years, we've moved the needle from 85 to roughly 80. These aren't exact numbers, but they're rough numbers and just shows you the scale of the problem. And so I wish we could flip a switch personally, but we can't. And so we just need to have a realistic approach. That doesn't mean a

laissez-faire approach. Again, I'm glad Al Gore's out there beating that drum, all the other people. I'm one of the people beating it as well. But the numbers are what the numbers are. And we have to be realistic about it and move as fast as we can to maximize energy security, climate security, and economic security. bit of an insight into what you said about how damaging an energy bomb would be from Putin, but also just a little bit of a head scratcher in terms of what's going on with our energy production situation that I was just reading that the Europeans have had their supplies stuffed by American LNG, liquid natural gas. So if we have enough to top them off for the coming winter, why do we have a problem in home? What's a good question? So basically, countries in Europe, France has a lot of nuclear, but Germany in particular, they've been able to get a hold of liquefied natural gas, LNG, have pretty well stocked

up for this winter. I think the stocks are about 90% full. And if you have a reasonably moderate winter, they probably will be fine. One reason, though, for that is because China, as you've followed, has got this crazy COVID lockdown policy. So their demand is down. China's buying a lot of natural gas from the Middle East on long-term contracts, and then turning around, marketing it up three times, and then shipping it off to Europe.

If China's economy were to come back, Chris, at anywhere near what it's been, which people expect by next winter, stocking up for next winter, everything else being equal, that is Russia really choking off these gas supplies for Europe, will be a huge problem. Because to build LNG facilities takes two or three years. Right. I'm just saying that American suppliers have enough LNG to top them off. They should be able to take care of us at home if there were pressure. I'm not worried. I'm not worried about here. The price will be higher, but I'm not. Right. What it does around the world. So that takes me to my last ask. Yeah. Germany went off nuclear. Why? We're still at about 13%. 13%. Has nuclear been falsely maligned? And should it be reconsidered given changes in technology and the fact that a lot of the phobia is phantom, isn't it?

Yeah, I certainly think so. I mean, how many people have been killed by nuclear accidents since the Three Mile Island or the accident in Ukraine? I think you can count on one hand, it may take two, compared to how many people have died from coal or been wounded from breathing, basically, socks and knocks that come out of coal plants. So, Chris, scale is so much of a problem here. And the only way you can get the scale of clean electrons that we need in the time we need it, which is in the next decade, if we're going to stay below the 1.5 average rising temperature since the Industrial Revolution, which is what the UN tells us is the key level, we have to have nuclear.

And so we're just having the first American plant, I believe, opening, Southern Company in Georgia is opening its first nuclear plant. This is since 1979, since three miles out. That's because it has such a bad name. I mean, you would love, because it's about me, not you, you would love to see the hate I get about how I want to kill my own kids and everybody else's by suggesting nuclear. Now, a little bit of that is that we confuse the nuclear idea of a bomb with nuclear energy, and we all watch too much of The Simpsons. But a little bit of it is

a cultural blind spot that I think is, if we're going to be talking about how we get off oil and gas, how do you not talk about nuclear energy when the rest of the world is kind of moving ahead of us in that regard? And this is the problem. I mean, we want a lot of things that involve trade-offs. We want, I want, you know, a zero emissions economy as soon as possible. But people don't want transmission lines. They don't want natural gas pipelines through their backyard. They don't want the transmission lines that solar and wind require. We want to be able to tell petrodictators to go take a hike. We want to not have to conserve any energy. We don't want to have to drive 55. We want to not have to put on a sweater. And so we want a lot of things that are actually incompatible. There are trade-offs.

And my criticism of our energy policy is we're not being honest about those trade-offs. And that's really what's got to happen here. And what Putin has done by withdrawing so much energy, oil and gas in particular, from the system has really forced us to confront those trade-offs. We don't fake the funk here, and here's the real talk. Over 40 years of age, 52% of us experience some kind of ED between the ages of 40 and 70. I know it's taboo, it's embarrassing, but it shouldn't be. Thankfully, we now have HIMS, and it's changing the vibe by providing affordable access to ED treatment, and it's all online. HIMS is changing men's health care. Why?

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your first order. CozyEarth.com and the code is Chris. Last question, Ukraine. I am heartbroken by the compassion fatigue in America about what's happening there. I've never had a conflict that I felt mattered more, matter less. I never thought we were going to build real democracies in the Middle East. I always thought it was about just finding who wanted to kill us and killing them first and secondarily trying to help people have a better way of life. But Ukraine smacks so much of what happened in the 30s. And except instead of Germany and Japan this time, it could be Russia and China. And I don't know that the rest of the world takes them on successfully. And there's a nonchalance here. We've spent enough. We did enough. Let them

fight their own fight. It doesn't really matter here. We've got to worry here. What are people missing? Well, you know, something very basic state. One country, Russia, decided it was going to basically devour another Ukraine. And we thought we had put that kind of behavior behind us with the Nazi invasion of its neighbors. And so if you just let a blind eye to it, obviously you're really encouraging Putin to take another bite out somewhere else or China to take another bite out somewhere else. And so it's harrowing what's going on. Look at the news today. Putin is rocketing cities.

He's trying to destroy their infrastructure basically before the winter. Trying to get their ability to put up electricity and heat so that they suffer and that they come to the table. What do you think America should do that it isn't? I think the Biden administration has handled this really pretty well. President Biden showed a lot of leadership and put the coalition together. And I think one of the things that Putin has underestimated was Biden's ability to put this Western coalition together and the willingness of that Western coalition to stick together. I think Putin thought it was going to break a long time ago. It hasn't. I hope he breaks first and gets out of Ukraine. I think that takes us back to the beginning, which is your energy piece

may be the biggest stress on that coalition. So we'll see how it goes. Thank you for giving me some of your time, Tom Friedman. You're always a pleasure and a friend, and I like learning from you, and I hope the audience does as well. Thanks, Chris. Good luck to you. All right. I'll see you again soon, I hope. Be well. Bye-bye. Tom is smart, but the struggle is real. And I don't know how soon we get to a better place when it comes to Ukraine. It seems like it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. I think we're seeing that right now. What will it mean for us? Here's what we know for sure. It ain't going to mean nothing. What's happening over there, specifically with Russia, clearly in agglomeration mode of wanting to bring back the Soviet Union, it can't not affect us. Learn from history or be

doomed to repeat it. Look at World War I, the nonchalance. Nobody wanted to get into that war, but they let things go too far. Even more true in World War II. People understood the Nazi threat. Read about Churchill. He understood what it was going to be. He had to wake up the rest of the world. And now what are we doing? We're going to live through it again?

God forbid. But it's about what we do, not what we pray for. Thank you very much for watching. Tom Friedman, always a good listen. Subscribe, follow. Don't forget the merch. Free agents. That's what we are.

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