Book Review: Hot, Flat and Crowded

I just finished Thomas Friedman's newest tome about the wonderful world of the future and how it will crush us all unless we change our ways. It was a fun read, though I admit I skimmed some parts because Friedman tends to repeat himself over and over when driving home a point. Still, I definitely recommend this book to everyone.

The thesis of the book is that the world is rapidly getting heated up due to global warming ("hot"), integrated due to globalization and the technological revolution ("flat"), and full of lots of people ("crowded"). Friedman presents the evidence through a wide variety of anecdotes and historical data. It actually gets a little annoying after a while as Friedman recounts his endless jetsetting and meetings with super smart scientific minds and heads of state, but maybe I'm just jealous because I've yet to get to China or Dubai.

Friedman advocates that the whole world needs to heed the dangers of increasing carbon emissions from development and work to stop them before they contribute to catastrophic global warming. He tries to explain that global warming is more than just the earth getting warmer, that the real danger is droughts, storms, and other terrible climate shifts which result from even a small increase in the Earth's temperatures. I think he could have done more to drive this point home, as its really the point of thinking about global warming as a serious issue. Even many climate change skeptics will conceed that the earth seems to be getting warmer, but that its not really a big deal if the mercury ticks up a degree or two, and so Friedman and others would do well to really drive the point home about the potential consequences of those few degrees.

Where the book really hits home is its description of how businesses, governments, NGOs and even the US military have adapted "green" energy saving and generating techniques, not as part of a fad or a PR campaign, but in order to gain a competitive advantage. Friedman aggressively advocates that the entire US needs to get on board with this movement, and soon, or see its place in the world continue to slip due to inefficiency, wastefulness, competitive disadvantage in costs and technology, and the continued dependence on often hostile "petrodictators" on whom we rely for oil.

This is the most important idea advanced by the this book, the idea that "going green" needs to be more than a fad. It's not about coolness, hippies, tree-hugging, granola, Birkenstocks or any of those "fringe" straw-symbols which often get associated with the environmentalist movement. Its actually about business and innovation and progress. Its about America leading the way into a new technological and economic revolution and keeping our place as the world's premier ass kicking nation. Every dollar sent overseas to a petrodictator is a dollar not spent in America. Every barrel of oil we import hurts our leverage with OPEC nations. Every wasted kilowatt makes America poorer in numerous ways and chips away at our status as the world's lone Superpower.

The brass tacks in this book are... a little lacking. Its a big picture work, a book designed to motivate large scale action. Friedman is advocating that the creative energy of the American people be engaged in this project through business and government incentives, and really that's about as specific as the solution can be at this point. The good news is that the changes advocated by Friedman are likely to find a much more receptive audience under President Obama and his new Congressional allies, though given the slow rate of progress on this front and the lots of other, more visible challenges facing the new administration I'm not entirely optimistic. Still, if its ever going to happen, now is the time. Here's hoping.