Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Thomas Friedman called for a new way of thinking about energy policy on Friday, underscoring the growing environmental, economic and political consequences of America’s reliance on fossil fuels.

“We don’t have an energy policy in this country,” the New York Times columnist and self-described “geo-green” told a packed Memorial Auditorium crowd. “We have energy politics in this country.”

Friedman’s speech was the keynote address of Stanford’s inaugural Energy Crossroads, a three-day student-run conference intended to foster interdisciplinary collaboration on clean energy. His address generally mirrored the tone of the conference and reflected many familiar themes from his columns and books.

“Green has to be green,” he said. “It has to be profitable. It also has to be seen as strategic. That’s why I say green is the new red, white and blue. It isn’t just some little boutique thing. It’s central to our economy’s ability to grow and our ability to defend ourselves globally.”

Friedman, whose biweekly foreign policy columns for The Times are syndicated to 700 newspapers worldwide, postulated that “a perfect storm called 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Internet revolution” brought the environment into the national consciousness and suggested that “green has gone Main Street” thanks to growing unease about national security, natural disasters and global economic competitiveness.

A former Middle East correspondent, Friedman said the United States’ reliance on imported fossil fuels has funded both sides of the war on terror, because it has empowered the region’s oil-rich autocrats. Based on what he called “the First Law of Petropolitics,” Friedman said that rising oil prices have allowed Middle Eastern leaders to rule without accountability and to erode democratic institutions.

Although he said he considers himself an optimist, Friedman stressed that the challenge of curbing carbon dioxide emissions was bigger than most Americans believed. Preventing the doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and the potentially perilous climate change that would ensue — “will require the biggest industrial project mankind has ever undertaken.”

“I’m not talking about buying a Prius,” he deadpanned.

To spur this undertaking, Friedman noted, business leaders will need the right incentives to make clean energy a priority.

“You can only get green down Main Street if you can leverage Wall Street,” he said. “I don’t think we have to radically change our lifestyle, but we have to radically change the way we do business around energy.”

These changes would first need to stem from government regulations, Friedman said, praising Germany’s efforts to stimulate solar energy investment as well as California’s ability to grow economically without increasing its carbon output.

“God bless California,” he said. “What California is doing should be federal legislation.”

But inventing and implementing clean energy solutions in the United States alone is not the complete answer, according to Friedman, who said that making green energy feasible to the rapidly growing economies of India and China is a must.

“We could have all the rules in this country to have clean air, no CO2, but if there’s no rules in China, and China is the second largest CO2 emitter in the world, on its way to being number one, what have we done?” he said. “Our challenge is to get green down to the China price.”

Friedman expressed skepticism about ethanol as a viable solution, despite the growing number of prominent politicians singing its praises.

“How do we get industry at scale? We don’t do it by farming ethanol in Iowa,” he said. “It absolutely makes zero economic sense.”

But Friedman did not single out the federal government as the sole culprit for the United States’ slow response to the threat posed by climate change.

“Where’s the million person march for a green America?” he asked.

For their part, the students behind the Energy Crossroads conference said that Stanford should play a significant role in the push for green energy. Energy Crossroads, they said, was to be the first shot in an ongoing battle against America’s dependence on fossil fuels.

“We really want Stanford to be a leader,” said Tyler Huebner, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering. “This is a call from students to the University.”

The conference’s organizers expressed optimism that Energy Crossroads will become an annual meeting of the world’s best minds on global energy issues.

“We think this is the future,” said Management Science and Engineering Prof. John Weyant, director of Stanford’s Energy Modeling Forum, who moderated a Friday panel on the economics of energy efficiency.

The Energy Crossroads promoters can take solace, then, in having friends in high places. President John Hennessy gave the introductory remarks for Friedman’s address, and said that climate change posed “a formidable challenge.”

“The challenge of global warming,” he said, “could not only destroy our world but also destroy the environment of all known to live here.”