Book Reviews
Hot, Flat, and Crowded
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman exhorts us to unite to fight global warming and excess consumption.
By Brad Knickerbocker | September 22, 2008 edition
Reading New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s latest book, it’s hard to know how to describe him. A genial Jeremiah, perhaps? Or maybe Thomas Malthus with a clipboard and a 10-point plan for avoiding global catastrophe?
As a professional opiner, Friedman is unusual. He’s not your typical journalistic chin-stroker, content to gin up a few deep thoughts before knocking out 800 words twice a week.
From world capitals to remote villages, Friedman travels around the world, interviewing world leaders, business dynamos, and ground-breaking innovators. (It helps to have a New York Times expense account, I suppose.)
And he does it with an enthusiastic curiosity that’s infectious. He comes across as an intellectual who’s also down-to-earth.
Plus, there are those three Pulitzer Prizes he’s won for his reporting and writing.
Having backpedaled from his initial support of the United States-led invasion of Iraq (as have all but a handful of Americans), Friedman in recent years has tracked and explained how the world has become “flat” – his phrase for economic and social globalization.
Meanwhile, in his twice-weekly syndicated column he’s written more and more about energy and the closely-related issue of global climate change.
In Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need A Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America, Friedman brings it all together, adding in the inexorable growth in world population and consumption because much of the rest of the world is becoming more like the US in levels of wealth and therefore has the ability to buy stuff that depletes natural resources, creates greenhouse gases, and ends up in landfills.
Although he seems always hopeful, Friedman’s message is sobering. Two sentences sum up his warning:
“… global warming, the stunning rise of middle classes all over the world, and rapid population growth have converged in a way that could make our planet dangerously unstable. In particular, the convergence of hot, flat, and crowded is tightening energy supplies, intensifying the extinction of plants and animals, deepening energy poverty, strengthening petrodictatorship, and accelerating climate change.”
(It’s both sly and appropriate that the book jacket is illustrated with “The Garden of Earthly Delights” painted by Hieronymus Bosch in 1500.)
If this “we’re in a heap of trouble” message sounds like Al Gore, it is. But it’s broader – beyond climate science – and it represents the best kind of mainstream media reporting: highly informed analysis with a point of view and a conclusion that make sense.
Friedman loves lists, and he loves phrasemaking. We have now entered the “Energy-Climate Era” or “E.C.E.” We need a “Code Green” revolution in which America leads the way in innovative development of clean energy and “an ethic of conservation toward the natural world.”
Antidemocratic leaders whose coffers swell because of Americans’ appetite for oil he calls “petrodictators.” This is gimmicky, but useful.
And lists: “Three broad trends” in America today. Five key problems “that a hot, flat, and crowded world is dramatically intensifying.” “Four fundamental ways” in which the nation’s oil addiction is changing the international system.
That’s OK, too. Lists help organize thought and form understanding.
Friedman can be a bit windy at times (what columnist isn’t?). And he frequently quotes others at great length, which can be useful to readers while also giving the book its 400 page-plus heft. But he also writes excellent tutorial chapters on climate change, biodiversity, and “energy poverty” in Africa and other parts of the developing world.
As he has in his columns over the past few years, Friedman expresses frustration at the lack of national leadership regarding energy and climate policy. And he sees this as one of the nation’s most important security issues, directly related to the growth in militant Islam.
“President Bush’s refusal to do anything significant after 9/11 to reduce our gasoline consumption really amounted to a policy of ‘No Mullah Left Behind,’ ” he writes.
This is not a book designed to cheer us up but to get us off our backsides. And Friedman doesn’t mean just changing light bulbs and installing low-flow toilets. Saving the world will be a lot harder than that.
But the tone and the innovative ideas reviewed here leave me optimistic and energized. And certainly with a better understanding of the connections between energy, the environment, the economy, and national security.
“The future does not have to be a Malthusian nightmare – if we think strategically about how to mitigate what we can, adapt to what we can’t, and innovate our way to new possibilities that right now seem unimaginable,” he writes.
But, he adds, “The longer we wait to set out on such a strategic path … the deeper the pail out of which we have to climb.”
Brad Knickerbocker is a Monitor staff writer.
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Comments
2. syed salamah ali mahdi | 09.22.08
The punch line or coined quote in his book is “No Mullahs Left Behind”. Why? Because, it is the Mullahs in the Muslim/ Arab World who have not yet accepted the Sovereignty of USA, Israel and ex-Imperial states in Europe over them. They reject performing ‘pilgrimages’ to the Imperial Capital in DC and the Shoa Memorial in Israel. He is no better than Kissinger who recently declared something to the effect that a small Emirate like Abu Dhabi with a population of under 1 million should not have the right to own the crude oil and gas reserves it has. He is again the guy who conned the King of Saudi Arabia in to offering an Arab Peace Initiative, which had it been accepted by Israel would have meant the end of Palestinian rights to the lands which were stolen by Israel in 1948 and the rights of return, for good!He is no better than Krauthammer and the Zionist goons at Fox TV.
3. Steve | 09.22.08
Mike, by no empirical evidence do you mean the absence of an almost perfect correlation between the rise of CO2 and other pollutants in the atmosphere? Like the one observed over the past 200 years (since we started to massively burn fossil fuel) to levels (400ppm) not reached (as in never, not even once) according to the data coming for ice core 4 million years old. Or are you thinking of something else to disprove the theory?
The best source for the next relation, how CO2 level impacts surface and atmospheric temperatures, can be found in any of the presentations given by the resident scientist of the executive office of the president (as in G. W Bush)Philip Decola.
This will explain, in elegant, yet simple terms, the impact of 400ppm of CO2 on temperatures and what’s our carbon budget.
After digesting these pesky scientific facts, not models or projection, your analysis will be welcomed.
4. Chris | 09.22.08
But doesn’t Thomas Friedman argue that even if he is wrong, and global warming isn’t caused by man, that this new energy technology will benefit us anyway? Something that is going to relieve our dependency on oil seems like a good idea to me!
5. biltud | 09.22.08
Chris, Chris, Chris…you’re being so…LOGICAL. Of course new energy technology is dangerous to the status quo, especially the oil barons that have mind-washed half the country for the past eight years! Only the Democrats would believe such a thing could actually exist. What on earth would we do with all that oil dependency, anyway!
6. Mike Higgins | 09.22.08
Steve… CO2 is not a pollutant. It is a necessary gas for all life on Earth. It has been, and continues to be, a vital airborne fertilizer for all forms of plant life, which form a critical part of the food chain of all animals, as well as even humans. The rise of CO2 in our atmosphere has actually expanded the forests, improved the rate of plant growth and reduced the amount of water plants require to grow.
See http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/extinction/mr1ch2.php .
7. Mike Higgins | 09.22.08
Steve… There is nn empirical evidence that shows a causal relationship between the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and dangerous global warming. The great bulk of global warming is caused by natural changes in the weather influenced significantly by the sun and the oceans. As a trace greenhouse gas, CO2 makes up less than 1/2 of 1% of the atmosphere.
Dictionary definition of empirical: “based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory.”
A close look at the ice core data reveals numerous periods of natural warming and cooling. And while it shows a relationship between temperature and CO2, the relationship is the opposite of what you state. Throughout the ice core record, temperatures always rise a few hundred years before the rise of CO2, thereby ruling out CO2 as a cause of rising temperature. Instead, a better theory might be that increases in temperature force the ocean to release more CO2 into the atmosphere. That would be more consistent with the ice core data.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI for an excellent scientific video on this subject.
8. Mike | 09.22.08
Chris… You are correct in assuming that new technologies would of course be of benefit to us. Everyone should be in favor of that. The problem is defining the benefit. Right now, wind and solar energy cost as much as 20 times more what it currently costs to generate electricity from fossil fuels. As promising as these alternatives seem, they will require a great leap in technology to be cost effective with other fuels like coal, oil and natural gas.
So the question becomes, are we willing to pay 10-20 times what it currently costs to produce electricity? This is not an appealing solution to anyone but the already rich. Should the government further tax us to subsidize these industries, which have their own share of lobbyists chomping at the bit to get their share of the fruits of our labor?
Secondly, and maybe just as important. wind and solar require huge, huge amounts of land to set up wind turbines and solar panels. Talk about environmental impact. What’s going to happen to all the ecosystems which will no longer have access to the sun because of the hundreds of thousands of square miles that will need to be covered with solar panels?
Lastly, wind and solar are not dependable sources of electricity because they are dependent upon the weather. When the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, they do not generate electricity. The electricity that they generate can only be used as a supplement to some other form of generation that is more consistently available.
In the end, the real question is whether we let individual companies take the risks to experiment and develop new energy technologies or do we let the clueless bureaucrats in Washington dole out our hard earned money to the companies whose lobbyists are the most effective. I say, let the market do the work. The government has no business interfering in this process. The United States is not the most advanced economy in the world because of government subsidies. We are the most advanced economy because of our mostly free market economic system. Let’s let it work without the government subsidies that mostly waste our taxes.
9. Jim Miles | 09.22.08
No doubt Thomas Friedman writes well, catchy phrases and nice rhetoric. But this is the man who extolls the virtues of greed and acknowledges that the greatness of American business is guarded by the hidden fist of the military. There is nothing great about his writing or his ideas.
10. Ted | 09.26.08
Whom ever would like to respond,
I have not read this book yet, I plan to.
I have a question. Global warming I can except, But have the people on this globe really warmed this globe to the extent that you can throw away all the data that is recorded on nature taking its “normal” course?
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1. Mike | 09.22.08
Unfortunately, Friedman’s most stunning flaw is his inability to question the myth of human-caused global warming, of which there is NO empirical evidence. Man-made global warming is completely based on computer models which have been scientifically shown to be flawed.
The flawed predictions of the global warming computer models that the IPCC relied upon even in their latest Ireport (AR4-2007) have been completely obliterated by the facts, which are indisputably displayed on this chart of reality — http://icecap.us/images/uploads/ipccchart.jpg .
For the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with the legend, the blue line represents the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) satellite data and the green line (HadCRUT) represents the U.K. Hadley Center measurements of combined land and sea surface temperatures. These two measures represent reality. All the rest of the lines represent the predictions of computer models used by the IPCC to support their claims of human-caused global warming.
One can’t help but believe that Friedman’s flawed view of man-made global warming also taints his credibility regarding the other observations in his books, as well as his conclusions.