Having listened to the The World is Flat over MANY hours on my bike two years ago, I anticipated an intellectual boat ride guided by captain Thomas Friedman in his book: Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America.
The points of the book worth mentioning are as follows:
- Foreign oil dependence supports petro-dictatorships and thus the suppression of democracy, particularly when prices are high.
- The rise of the middle class in developing nations will dramatically increase world energy demands. The continued combustion of non-renewable resources like coal and oil for electricity and transportation is very bad for air quality and its contribution to global warming.
- Deforestation is responsible for 20-25% of total carbon emissions. This is more than the combined emissions of all the world’s cars, trucks, trains and planes.
- America needs a Manhattan project for clean energy. The ability of our country to industrially transform itself during World War II is testament to our potential.
- Cap-and-Trade mechanisms are helpful, but carbon taxes and floor prices on imported oil will provide funding for R&D and capital investment.
- We as individual citizens and even SMBs cannot affect global climate change. Period. No matter how good we feel driving/flying less, biking/walking more, buying carbon offsets or RECs (renewable energy credits). The problem is systemic, macroeconomic, and political.
- The business model of electricity in America is severely flawed.
- There is no green revolution currently taking place, only small-scale projects and improvements. Revolution implies suffering, overthrow, and radical change. What we’re experiencing is a Party invoked by marketing and mass media, where being ‘green’ is easy and fun. Flowers bloom, butterflies flutter about, and everybody is a winner. Water bottles and recycled PET shopping bags for everyone.
While I enjoyed Friedman’s multiple rounds of investigative and expository journalism bound together in chapters to form a book, I must say that the book dragged on and on. This book would have been a pleasant voyage for me, had Tom decided to cut the book in half by limiting personal reflections, cutting out unnecessary details to support arguments, and moving ALL normative statements into one concise chapter at the very end. 150 pages would have done the trick.
Recommendation
If you pick up the book, prepare to skim.
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the review, Mario. Sounds interesting, but I think I will stick to your review and read something else in full
Ha! Well I’m happy to have spared precious hours of friends’ lives.
Mario: thanks — I’m a Friedman fan, but not of this latest venture. Clean tech is great and will continue to play a role, albiet a small one, in energy generation. Thinking we’ll wean ourselves off oil is just dreaming. Developed nations use energy. That’s what it means to be ‘developed.’ Solar doesn’t pay for itself and wind has more problems (and higher net prices) than they let on.
Take a stab at “Gusher of Lies” when you have a moment.
Regards.
@Stephen - Thanks for dropping by. I see us using coal and oil for as long as possible, because the ‘invested powers that be’ will desire it so, no matter that cost to our environment. The only savior is a systemic economic business case.
I like Friedman. Read him all the time. But the pulpit role needs to be scaled back a little.
Good post and even better summary. First time at your site, which I found because my mag recently posted a piece about Friedman’s musings (an objective piece).
great site, will be returning.
@Seth - He definitely needed to cut back the preachy factor here. I understand the passion he may have about this topic, but the writing deserved better.
Thanks for the kind remarks.
Thanks, Mario:
Bottom line: I totally agree with your final paragraph.
That said, I feel an urge to point out that 3 of the 8 points you cite as his main messages seem inaccurate to me, as it could be argued that TF actually argued more against at least parts of these ideas than he did for them:
-Manhattan project for clean energy,
-role of individuals and SMBs [if the rules to guide the market are instituted, he says we need 100,000 of these, rather than a government-led Manhattan project], and
-cap-and-trade: this is the policy option he discussed least-barely at all - and he specifically noted that he leaned toward the other policy options and discussed them a lot more (carbon tax, floor price for oil, production targets].
Cap-and-trade is a halfway theoretical solution that in practice on this kind of problem will be inefficient both biophysically and economically. Unfortunately, this is part of what makes it more politically acceptable, because the true costs are masked, not direct. C&T is more likely than the other options to help entrenched interests PREVENT the revolution, by allowing them to trade conserving other people’s trees for real change in the energy/agriculture systems, buy “rights” to pollute and thereby keep new market entrants out, or if auctioned instead, cause more price volatility, not less (something he notes gets in the way of the revolution); and lastly, due to inefficiency, cause the carbon bubble he advocates to get too big, more like the mortgage bubble than the dot-com bubble…
Though I agree with his overall theses (and gave a talk at the US Chamber of Commerce 19 years ago saying much the same - and got laughed at), and he has some great up-to-8-months-ago anecdotes, as you say he is way too long-winded and repetitive, He also occassionally tries to make insightful conclusions based on anecdotes sound more cut-and-dried scientific than they are (like his oil price-democracy graphs).
Otherwise, thanks for an excellent summary!
Hi Mike,
- By Manhattan project I believe he meant metaphorically to mean heavy government funding for private sector or academic research into clean energy.
- The role individuals and SMBs can play now is small; through good public policies, standards, and market mechanisms, their collective contribution to averting climate change will increase.
- Cap and trade was barely mentioned; I should have placed that at the end of the sentence so to give greater prominence to Friedman’s continued propounding of a oil floor price and carbon tax.
Thanks for stopping by and for your views on cap and trade. It indeed is a murky field, and not the best one IMO, but at least it’s something.