Best-selling author Thomas Friedman on Tuesday praised Barack Obama's new energy team and said the next US president had to insist on a radical environmental agenda to tackle global warming.
Friedman, whose new book "Hot, Flat and Crowded" is a call-to-arms to reduce US dependency on oil and coal, said Obama's nomination of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as his new energy secretary was a "terrific" move.
He insisted that the challenge facing Obama required a revolutionary attitude to environmental policy, if the new administration wanted to avoid the devastating effects of global warming.
"We can do it if our next president, who I have great hopes for, is ready to be as radical as the moment we are in," Friedman, whose previous bestseller was "The World is Flat", told a lunch hosted by The Asia Society.
"Our next president is going to be called on to be more radical — I am talking crazy, wild-hair, paint-on-your-face, ring-in-your-nose radical — in what he does, than any president since FDR," he said, referring to Franklin D Roosevelt, US president during the 1930s depression and the Second World War.
"The real question I have is… will he have the courage of our crisis? I think our crisis is so deep that only truly radical behaviour will be required to get us out of it."
Friedman, a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a New York Times columnist, called on the United States to become a world leader in green technology.
He said that could only be achieved with strong leadership and called on Obama to put a price on carbon and introduce higher taxes on gasoline, moves that could face strong political opposition.
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