Friedman falls flat

In his NYT column today, Thomas Friedman celebrates the fact that investment banks have added yet another group to their client base: environmental activists. In an otherwise moderately interesting, if overly exuberant, piece about the power of environmental groups to use market forces to their advantage (an idea I unqualifiedly endorse), Friedman writes:

First, Mr. Krupp said, “what is the message when the largest buyout in history is made contingent [by the buyers] on winning praise for its greenhouse gas plan? ... The markets are ahead of the politicians. The world has changed, and these guys see it.”

TXU not only didn’t understand that the world was getting green; it didn’t understand that the world was getting flat. “Going online,” Mr. Krupp said, “we shifted this from a local debate over generating electricity to a national debate over capping and reducing carbon emissions.” So, what TXU had hoped would be just a local skirmish was instead watched on computer screens in every global market.

According to Mr. Krupp, the group's remarkable achievement was to take a local issue and nationalize, even globalize, its scope. Friedman's parsing of this is "the world is not only getting green, but also getting flat." What do either of those statements mean? First, my understanding is that the environmentalists' real problem is that the world is getting greener (that is in fact what happens when ice melts). But joking aside, the "greening" of the world plugs into a shared metaphor about increased awareness of the impact of human actions on the environment. But what does it mean for the world to "get flat?" Some readers will no doubt be protesting that this is eloquently explained in Mr. Friedman's recent tome about the flattening of the world (insert joke about the Flat Earth Society. But why should the reader of a column have to go and read an explanation of this mysterious usage? Shouldn't Mr. Friedman cabin his idiosyncratic usage to a place where the average reader will actually have some idea of what he is talking about? I admit that part of my animus is driven by my dislike for the term, even when fully explained, but I think I can put that aside sufficiently to make a reasonable argument that a columnist should speak in plain language, instead of using unexplained self-invented terminology in his columns.