Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America | Thomas L. Friedman | Paints the picture perfectly

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Hot, Flat, and Cro...

	Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 149 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Hopefully Just In Time

As a hybrid-driving non-parent working in educational technology, I worried that Thomas Friedman's "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" would...for each point in his title...simply tell me things I already knew. Fortunately, there is much more between the covers.

One of Friedman's conceptual threads gave me especially important insight: how our foreign policy over the past three decades has systematically engendered the terrorism that haunts us. Holy oil slick, Bat Man...some of the chief perpetrators are regimes recent U.S. Administrations have deemed "friendly". Another eye-opening section considered the impact that "huge numbers" (for example, per capital energy utilization multiplied by a huge number of people) have on the management of existing infrastructure and the planning of new infrastructure.

"Hot, Flat, and Crowded" is a well-written, fact-filled (almost overly fact-filled) broadside that manages to be at once emphatic and hopeful. Considering how depressing some of these statistics are, the hopeful tone of the book is quite welcome. So where is hope in the face of impending global eco-disaster? Friedman contends it's in our collective hearts and hands.

Since the publication of this book, a lot has happened in the realms of politics and economics. At the moment, the embryonic trend lines seem to be heading in the direction Friedman has predicted. Time will tell and history hangs in the balance. This is an important book.

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Paints the picture perfectly

Friedman hits the nail on the head. He asks the pertinent question: what kind of world do you want to live in? One where we continue our status quo with heads firmly buried in the sand to ignore all the cultural, social, economic, and environmental problems, only to keep applying bandaids as the wounds get worse? Or one where we wake up, open our eyes to the problems facing us, and get real? He slaps us across the face with the facts and figures as well as his exploration of those things we don't normally think about, like how little our solar industry can do to offset the unchecked growth in places like Dubai and parts of China. And then he tells us what to do to make things better and leave the world a better place for our children.

I wonder what kind of world we'll have in 40 years if everyone were to read this book. And then I think of what kind of world we'll have in 40 years if Friedman hadn't written this book. He is a world changer, and I appreciate and respect him for it.

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Petro Politics and Alternatives

This book extensively deals with the science and politics of energy. It describes the doomsday scenarios of staying with the current energy sources and the urgent need to go towards the alternate energies.

It is well known that oil price determines the politics of energy. Friedman describes in detail how the oil prices enrich the petro dictators in the OPEC countries and how it is funding the terrorist activities thru the Islamic fundamentalist schools in Pakistan. How Saudi Arabia is influencing the culture in the middle east thru its petro dollars. How the low oil prices enfeebles the power of the dictators while higher price makes them wag their tails. The role played by the former Saudi oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani in 1985 to stop protecting the oil prices and thereby caused the fall of Soviet Union. It is a surprising conclusion that the drastic drop in oil prices led to the collapse of Soviet Union.

Yamani strategized that the oil prices should not increase too much in a short period of time. Doing so will cause innovations in West in the areas of alternative energy. To bolster his point, Yamani says that the stone age did not end because the world ran out of stones, but because bronze and iron came into use.

Friedman portrays in detail about how the support for energy efficiency and alternative sources of energy in US has vacillated from time to time. Precious opportunities were squandered to build upon this strategy. Regan rolled back the average auto mileage from 27.5 to 26 and got the solar panels removed from top of the white house, in guise of giving the auto and oil Industries a boost. Clinton raised the efficiency of appliances from 10 to 13, only to be rolled back by Bush to 12. Which was later rolled back by the Courts to 12, but precious time was lost in the meantime.

The utilities spend 0.15% of their earnings on R&D. GE spends very little on innovations in the energy sector. Mainly because there is no incentive to do so. As soon as the prices at the pump come down, America forgets about the past crisis. The energy companies truly care about the floor of the oil price, not the ceiling. He cites the story of the largest Solar panel company inUS, First Solar. It tottered on the brink of bankruptcy. The company survives today because of a major German market for solar panels.

There is a big need to invest in alternative sources of energies. To lower the damage caused by carbon dioxide emissions and the consequent global warming. He maintains that the scientific evidence is beyond any doubt that the warming is being caused by our excessive fossil fuel consumption. It cannot be explained by any of the natural cycles of Earth or the Sun. When Oceans are warmed up, they release the disolved carbon dioxide. When rain forests are chopped down, it results in the same effect. This results in a positive feedback loop for more warming. A powerful quotation "Destroying a rain forest and other species rich ecosystems for profit is like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner". Another one "The biodiversity of the planet is a uniquely valuable library that we have been steadily burning down-one wing at a time-before we even cataloged all the books, let alone read them".

Along with the clean sources, we also need a smart electric grid. The current grid is a dumb grid, a hotch potch of regional grids built without the big picture in mind. A smart grid will interact with the sensors in a smart home and make efficient usage of power. A smart grid will also raise the price of power at peak times and lower it during off peak times. The third part of the three pronged strategy is conservation of energy. We need Japan's obsession with conservation which stems from an acute sense of insecurity due to most of its imports coming from middle east.

A word of caution about alternate fuels. Corn based ethanol has been politically appealing recently, but does no good in the long run. Due to the spike in food prices it causes, along with more green house gases. He further quotes that EU has declared that the bio for biofuels should not come from tropical forests, nature reserves, wetlands, or grasslands with high biodiversity.

It was revealing to me as to why the hybrids give significantly more mileage. It is mainly because the idling engine consumes 20-30 times more fuel than when it is moving. I had my own doubts about plug-in hybrids, which got cleared by this book. It says that although the plug-in hybrids draw power from an outlet, it is still more efficient to generate power at a remote coal plant than in a car engine.

Europe has been seeing the writing on the wall more clearly. Iceland relies on hydro ad geothermal energy. Denmark has significant wind energy, Germany has solar energy, and France has nuclear energy. Even Australia, which initially did not sign the Kyoto protocol, did so when Kevin Rudd won the election by making environmentalism as a major election issue.

There have been pockets of hope in US. For example, in 2007, Mayor Bloomberg, the most environmentally conscientious mayors in America, passed a law requiring all cabs in New York City to be hybrids in the next five years. The state of California has been in forefront of conservation and alternate fuels. Its per capita energy consumption has remained flat in the last 40 years, the rest of the country has more than doubled. Hopefully, the incoming new administration will take cues !

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Hot on Hot

This is another excellent book by Thomas Friedman. I was interested in finding out how he would tie together hot and crowed with flat. I had read his book about the flat world. I found this book provided an excellent analysis of how global warming and the increased world population interact and how they both interact with the flat world. I think it is a book that every concerned citizen should read. Although all will not agree with his arguments, they need to be addressed. Every reader will come away with some increase in knowledge on these subjects.

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Thomas Friedman ties globalization and the environment together perfectly

Following The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat, this new volume from the witty and articulate pen of Thomas Friedman brings us up to date on the state of inter-connectedness of the entire world. So many of the world's poor are rising to the point of wanting to become "Americans" and with it consume resources at the same rate as Americans. Friedman points toward possible solutions to this problem. Excellent book, particularly in this time of world economic and environmental crisis.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, page 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

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