Nov 2008: Greenie criticizes Tom Friedman, who heroically saved property from developers, then built his own massive fossil-fueled mansion there

A very long review of Friedman’s latest book | Grist

He bid against developers to buy the last large piece of property in his (suburban) Maryland neighborhood to keep it from being turned into another subdivision. I was expecting to hear him describe how they then placed it into a conservation easement to preserve a piece of nature into perpetuity. Friedman mentions twice in the book that his wife on the board of Conservation International (Conservation International is also mentioned 30 times in the book). Instead he tells us they then built their own house on it and "turned the rest into a parklike green space."

They incorporated a geothermal heating and cooling system in their new home of (suspiciously) unspecified size and have enough solar panels to provide a whopping 7 percent of their electricity use -- leaving 93 percent still coming from Maryland's grid. Scouring the internet, I find that 85 percent of Maryland's electricity comes from coal, and other fossil fuels.
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A little more sleuthing and I find the reason he forgot to mention how big this 11,400-square-foot, $10 million house is. Although Hummers are held up throughout the book as symbols of unpatriotic conspicuous consumption, references to the house equivalent (the McMansion) is entirely missing. A McMansion is to a Hummer as Friedman's house is to an M1 Abrams tank.
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...Friedman on the other hand (thanks to the internet) could have skipped the travelogue filler material and written a shorter more concise book without leaving his basement:

Anyone who has visited Moscow regularly over the years ... I've visited China regularly since 1990 ... I visited McDonough in his office near the University of Virginia ... He gestures from the window of his 26th floor Cairo office ... during an interview in his office in Sydney ... From an office in Casablanca ... when I visited him in his lab at Harvard ... I visited Australia in May 2007 ... In late 2007, I went to Atlanta ... In June 2006, I visited Peru ... in Richland, Washington, gave me a ... I visited him in his office in Shanghai ... I visited Beijing in the middle of ... I visited the MIT campus ... I was visiting London ... I went to Moscow ... we went to Brazil ... went by riverboat up Peru's Rio Tanibopata ... I was visiting The Hague