Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman

Let’s say you’re a famous journalist that writes for The New York Times. You’ve written several books (The Lexus and the Olive Tree, The World is Flat, etc.) that have become best sellers and now you want to write your next book. Thanks to your contacts, your experience, and you’re fame, you have unprecedented access to top-level government officials and experts on all kinds of subjects from around the world. And as you try to figure out what the topic for your next book should be, you finally settle on the topic you think is the most important and most urgent.

Your next book, you realize, could help turn the tide when it comes to global warming and the energy crisis in this country.

Your next book could save the world.

And as you’re putting together your notes and all your research, you have to figure out what the best way to make your argument is. Will be by showing the world the startling numbers you’ve uncovered that show we are on a collision course with—literally—the end of the world? Or do you play on people’s emotions to get them to really feel how urgent this whole situation is? I mean, don’t pictures of starving children work better than statistics of how many kids die every day from starvation?

(By the way, the answer to that question is yes)

That’s the position Thomas Friedman must’ve found himself as he was writing his latest book: Hot, Flat, and Crowded. It’s about global warming, it’s about politics, and it’s about the role the United States will or will not play in the world.

Which is interesting, because as we learned from How We Decide, the struggle between the rational and the emotional is a complicated one. Friedman decides to appeal to both (a smart choice)—although this duplicity gives the book a kind of duality that at times makes you feel like you’re reading a call to arms. Most of the time, however, you feel like you’re reading a textbook for a college class that—while it’s very interesting—can get a little dry.

The Emotional Argument

Friedman goes after our emotions right off the bat in the first chapter. Which gives you a false sense of how the rest of the book is going to go.

After I finished the first chapter I was telling my wife how great my book was and how I couldn’t wait to get an hour or two to read as much as I could. It’s filled with compelling storylines: the United States is in a lot of trouble and there’s only one way to fix it. There are good guys and there are bad guys. But fear not! There is a way to fix all of it—and not only is it going to save the world, it’s going to make the US the country every person in the world admires and holds up as a shining example.

Remember those days?

The beginning of the book gets you all hyped up, which is great, but he Friedman knows he can’t just get by on rhetoric. He has to deliver the facts, and there are lots of them in this book.

The Facts & Numbers

There’s a lot of ground to cover here (we are talking about the end of the world as we know it), so Friedman decides to break all his data down into five major problems:

Increasing demand for scarce energy supplies: There isn’t enough energy to go around without killing the planet
Tons of money going to oil-rich countries or “petrodicatorships:” Do we want to be at the mercy of whatever country has oil, regardless of their policies?
Climate change: CO2 levels are at a point where we don’t know what will happen
Energy poverty: Too many people don’t have electricity
Biodiversity loss: Species are dying out

There is lots to cover here, and I’m not going to go into a bunch of details on each one—I’ll save that for those of you who will want to read the book. But among all the facts and figures Friedman drops in here (which is the majority of the book), here are some interesting nuggets that’ll give you an idea of how he presents his case.

Cattle Belching: Friedman gets into so much detail that he even discusses the environmental effects of cattle belching. According to Friedman, “A herd of cattle belching can be worse than a highway full of Hummers.” Yikes!

China and India (and everyone else) finally are getting to live like Americans. This one is especially interesting to me. Developing countries are starting to live the lives of Americans—A/C whenever they want it, computers, TVs, big cars, etc. The problem is that if China and India adopt the American lifestyle, the planet is doomed. Seriously. So we have to make sure they don’t live the lives we’re currently living right now—it’s too dirty. Is that fair?

Chop sticks! I love eating Thai food with chopsticks, but check this stat out: “China itself uses 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year, or 1.66 million cubic meters of timber.” Sorry China, time to eat with your hands from now on.

Connection between oil price and freedom. This one is kind of freaky. Friedman gets a hold of some strange indicators that somehow measure the freedom within a country. They look at rule of law, political parties formed, newspaper activities, etc. And then he charted that against the price of oil and found a directly inverse relationship. As the price of oil went up in oil-rich countries, the level of freedom came down. Why? Because these countries become so powerful when oil prices go up that they don’t have to play ball. They can be jerks but the rest of the world is at their mercy—it’s like having a real jerk as your drug dealer. You still want the product so you’ll deal with whatever you have to to get your fix.

The Bahrain Case study. That last one got you thinking, didn’t it? What if an oil rich country ran out of oil—how would they behave then? Well, probably like Bahrain did. They overhauled their educational system and changed the laws to make it easier for outsiders to invest in the country. They had themselves a little revolution because they knew those fat oil checks weren’t going to be there for long. So they had to do something about it. They had to play ball with the rest of the world. Iran and Saudi Arabia don’t have to do that. Yet.

Weathermen and politics. A lot of people still see global warming and the “green movement” as a political thing. I like to talk about the science part of it, not the politics. But apparently weather people around the country that have tried to discuss the effects of global warming are getting lambasted from their viewers for injecting their political point of view into their forecasts. People are upset because they just want the weather, not “politics.” But who else can tap people on the shoulders and say “that huge flood last week? That was because of increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere”? No one, that’s who. These weather people are damned if they do and damned if they do.

Biodiversity isn’t just about “saving species.” Look at this from a practical point of view. How would you “sell” people on the idea of species conservation? Telling them how beautiful a gold-encrusted flapping duck is won’t cut it. But biodiversity has a very real, very practical side: it’s about giving ourselves the tools to adapt to whatever comes at us in the future. We’re not sure how current CO2 levels will affect us, but we’ll need all the biodiversity we can get in order to try to find cures and medicines to deal with what’s to come. The less diversity there is, the fewer cures we will find.

It may already be too late. This is the scary part. Sometimes you’ll read a paragraph and feel like it’s too late. This call to action is a few years too late—we’re headed for the abyss and even if he hit the brakes right now (which isn’t likely), we’d still fall off the cliff. Scary.

If you take one thing from this book. I love it when authors make it this easy on readers. Here is what Friedman wants you to take from his book:

We are not going to regulate our way out of the problems of the Energy-Climate Era. We can only innovate our way out, and the only way to do that is to mobilize the most effective and prolific system for transformational innovation and commercialization of new products ever created on the face of the earth—the U.S. marketplace.

This gives you a glimpse into how practical and sober Friedman’s argument is. He doesn’t think that we should all do this for the goodness of the planet—that sell would never work. But if we make it about profits and making money—that is what can cause the kind of change and innovation he’s talking about. Sad, but true.

Regulation works: China as an example. China is often seen as a totalitarian government with little for the US to imitate. But there’s actually one thing we should take from them, and that’s regulation. China can (and has) laid down the law about certain things—like car efficiency standards. They pass laws in the snap of a finger and just like that cars are more efficient. Plastic bags get outlawed at supermarkets and boom—1.3 billion people are no longer using plastic bags. The US government is used to telling us and giving us what we want instead of what is right for us and the environment. We need to be a little bit more like China.

What Works Best?

It may seem odd that I’m focusing on this whole issue of numbers vs. emotions when it comes to this book—so let me explain why. There are a lot of people out there that don’t think global warming is a problem. There are people that think it’s a problem but that little things like changing light bulbs and recycling are enough for us to do. Then there are people that agree with Friedman on the severity of this problem but don’t know what to do or how to spread this message of urgency.

That, to me, is at the most important part of this book. As Friedman says, the only way we’re going to navigate through this problem and arrive at solutions that will actually matter is by pushing our leaders and our government to act. So the biggest lesson to take from this book, once you confront the unmistakable fact that the planet will be fundamentally different (and not in a good way) if we don’t do something drastic as soon as possible, is finding the answer to one question: what can I do?

Once we realize that all we can do is affect our leadership so they do what they need to do to set up laws and price signals and other strategies like them, then we come to the conclusion that we need to find a way to pass this sense of urgency on to others. To as many people as possible. Because this green revolution won’t happen from the top down, it’s going to have to start from the bottom up, and that means citizens like you and I demanding change.

Sound corny? It is. But that’s only because I haven’t found a way to get this across without being corny or preachy (which I refuse to do). All I can say for now is this: if someone you know isn’t buying into the urgency behind climate crisis, give them this book and tell them to read it.

They’ll thank you once we’re done. We all will.

Images by Jim Linwood, the_toe_stubber, Ambuj Saxena, FreeWine, Harold Laudeus, auburnxc, babasteve.

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