HOT, FLAT, AND CROWDED
January 5th, 2009I was recently forwarded this book review. I have not yet read the book, but plan on picking it up soon. Interesting reading and I can’t help but wonder – if all of this is true, how many green roofs and living walls will be installed in 2009?
HOT, FLAT, AND CROWDED
Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America
By Thomas L. Friedman
438 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.95
By JONATHAN FREEDLAND
Published: October 3, 2008
The environmental movement reserves a hallowed place for those books or films that have stirred people from their slumber and awoken them to the fragility of the planet: Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Bill McKibben’s “End of Nature” and, most recently, Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Thomas L. Friedman’s new book, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” may lack the soaring, elegiac qualities of those others. But it conceivably just might goad America’s wealthiest to face the threat of climate change and do something about it.
Skip to next paragraph Friedman, the thrice-Pulitzered foreign affairs columnist of The New York Times, has built a following beyond readers with an interest in international relations. His last book, “The World Is Flat,” made him a best-selling author in business class, the kind of writer that those who turn left when boarding a plane feel they ought to be seen reading. Friedman does not shy away from this audience; indeed he sometimes seems to be writing especially for it. “Do half your employees use computers and half use paper, pencils and abacuses?” he asks in one passage, apparently confident that he is addressing a chief executive.
For that very reason, Friedman could perhaps touch those who have so far eluded the green movement’s reach: the hardheaded executives more worried by projections of receding profits than retreating glaciers. That constituency listened to Friedman on globalization and they might be ready to listen to him again on global warming.
The form of “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” is trademark Friedman: a series of arguments, often distilled into mnemonic formulations, some snappier than others — it’s not A.D. 2008, but “1 E.C.E.,” the first year of the “Energy-Climate Era” — all based on extensive, far-flung reporting, most of it consisting of interviews with experts, professors and, of course, C.E.O.s.
What will appeal to can-do business types is that Friedman’s book does not dwell, as, say, Gore’s movie did, on describing the problem, but concentrates most on sketching possible solutions. It is in these passages that Friedman’s argument really takes off, allowing him to give vent to his enthusiasm and unabashed idealism. Non-Americans might find his wide-eyed patriotism a touch saccharine if not naïve, but it’s hard not to be carried along by his evident passion.
To be sure, the book begins with a diagnosis of “where we are” and “how we got here” that is short on good cheer. We live, Friedman explains with reference to his previous work, in a world that is flat — a level economic playing field with fewer barriers between countries and individuals — but that is now also becoming crowded, thanks to rising population. And the problem is not just that the raw number of people is increasing, it’s that many more are gaining access to an American level of consumerism. With the world’s population of “Americans” heading toward two or three billion — all desiring the middle-class comforts of a car, a fridge and an air-conditioner — the global demand for energy is soaring to new heights. That, Friedman says, is unsustainable.
This hunger for energy is dangerous not only because it means belching more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so pushing the temperature to dangerously high levels, but also because it is robbing the world of precious, and beautiful, biodiversity, destroying a unique species every 20 minutes. It also means we’re lining the pockets of the autocrats who tend to control the world’s reserves of fossil fuel, the “petrodictators.” And we are opening an ever wider gap between the energy haves and the energy have-nots, those who cannot take part in the “flat” world because they cannot switch on a light bulb, let alone a laptop.
Friedman knows what is to be done. The United States needs to set an example for the world to follow, by starting over and constructing an entirely new Clean Energy System, one that will send “clean electrons” into its homes, offices and cars — generated not by dirty old oil or coal, but by solar, wind and nuclear power — and that will use many fewer of those electrons, thanks to greater efficiency. In the book’s most arresting passage, Friedman plays futurist and looks ahead — to “20 E.C.E.” — imagining a world where an Energy Internet puts each one of your home appliances in touch with the power company, drawing out only the minimal power it needs to function and at the cheapest, off-peak times. Even your car, by now a plug-in hybrid that gets the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon, can charge its battery with solar power, which it then sells back to the grid.
All this would, of course, require the most profound shift. As Friedman explains, utility companies were established at a time when the sources of power to generate electricity were assumed to be limitless. The utilities’ responsibility was, and remains, to supply a constant flow of electrons to every household; they have a direct financial stake in keeping demand high. These companies need to be fundamentally rewired so that their rewards come from persuading us all to use less, not more, of their product.
The way to do that, Friedman explains, is by “reshaping the market,” not only to make us use less electricity, but to make the power companies buy energy from cleaner sources. It will take an entirely new regime of taxes, incentives and price signals, all set by the federal government. Oh, says the ideological free marketeer, we couldn’t possibly meddle in the market like that. But guess what, Friedman replies: we already do. Washington has tilted the energy playing field for years — subsidizing oil, gas and coal and giving only puny, halting help to wind and solar power. It is, Friedman writes, “a market designed to keep fossil fuels cheap and renewables expensive and elusive.”
What’s needed is the presidential leadership of an Abraham Lincoln or a Franklin Roosevelt to command enough authority to face down the fossil fuel lobbies and create a single, national system that would instantly release the pent-up innovation and creativity that is ready to get to work, cleaning up America’s energy supply and reducing its demand. Once the United States has done that, and shown that there’s money to be made from the new industry of “greening,” the rest of the world will, as a matter of self-interest, follow suit. In the process, America will have discovered a national mission for itself once more.
Readers of Friedman’s earlier books may well pause at this point and wonder what has happened to their favorite evangelist for globalization. For it’s hard not to detect a slight shift leftward in this conversion to radical, government-led action to save the planet.
Friedman is at pains to insist that there’s nothing leftie about caring for the environment: it’s no longer “yoga mats, Birkenstock sandals, tofu.” Indeed, in a fascinating section, he meets United States Army officers who have gone green, converted by the realization that the need to transport oil to generators in the Iraqi desert left their men needlessly exposed to enemy attack. They understood that if they could use less energy, or even generate their own, they would be safer.
Nevertheless, Friedman inevitably finds himself making arguments — urging a muscular federal government to push aside the selfish interests of the big corporate lobbies — that were once confined to the left. It can lead him into contradictory terrain. Thus, he is committed to praising the globalizing forces that have flattened the world, but he despairs at their consequences. He mourns, for example, the burning of rain forests, quoting the noted entomologist Edward O. Wilson that it is “like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner.” Yet he does not address the fact that multinational companies are able to come in and lay waste to these forests only because of the global trading rules Friedman once so admired.
He deplores the nationalization of companies, seeing privatization as an index of freedom on a par with a free press and democratic elections — yet he also looks longingly at the well-resourced mass transit systems of Europe, which keep cars off the road and emit less carbon dioxide, and which are only possible thanks either to state ownership or to enormous, taxpayer-supported subsidies. He knows that we cannot simply consume more and more from a finite planet; he understands that prosperity is threatened by the very “nature of American capitalism”; he quotes approvingly the Norwegian oil executive who warns, “Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.”
But Friedman does not surrender to these dark thoughts; he pulls himself together and recovers his faith in the American economic model. The free market will be fine, he says, so long as it’s tweaked to start telling the truth, reflecting the true cost to the earth of all that we consume.
These intellectual tensions are not the only flaws in “Hot, Flat, and Crowded.” Scholarly types will doubtless find the first-person examples excessive: they will surely want to remind Friedman that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” General readers, too, may wish for a slightly leaner manuscript, lighter on complex technical detail, which can be overwhelming. Some of the interviewee quotations are either too baggy or too dense, as if Friedman has moved large sections of transcript into his text. The writing style, with constant new coinages and shorthand phrases — “I call this the ‘Naked Gun 2 1/2 rule’ ” — while winning in a column, can grate over the distance of a book. Whole sentences are repeated or italicized for emphasis, in the style of a spoken lecture. And there are some horribly mixed metaphors: “The demise of the Soviet Union and its iron curtain was like the elimination of a huge physical and political roadblock on the global economic playing field.”
But these are minor infelicities when set against a book that will be accessible outside the eco-converted, is grounded in detailed research and repeatedly hits its target. It contains some killer facts — the American pet food industry spends more on research and development than the country’s power companies; Ronald Reagan stripped from the White House the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had installed as a symbolic step toward energy independence. Above all, it is fundamentally right on the biggest question of our age. If Friedman’s profile and verve take his message where it needs to be heard, into the boardrooms of America and beyond, that can only be good — for all our sakes.