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Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America (Hardcover)
by Thomas L. Friedman
| Category:
Global warming, Environmental conservation, Public policy, American society |
| Market price: ¥ 280.00
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¥ 228.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Well researched and very perceptive, this book is a must read an interesting read, full of compelling facts and common sensical solutions. |
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Author: Thomas L. Friedman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. in: September, 2008
ISBN: 0374166854
Pages: 448
Measurements: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01537
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0374166854
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- Awards & Credential -
A nonfiction bestseller on Amazon.com. |
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- MSL Picks -
Mr. Friedman's book is an eye opener for Americans. It is very easy right now to say that things are out of whack- the economy, the environment and America's security issues, especially in our relationships with middle eastern countries where we obtain much of our energy. Mr. Freidman, beyond just citing these obvious problems, has travelled the world to see first hand how America is fitting into 21st century economic realities. Are we being a team player as geopolitical trends shift and climate change accelerates? The first portion of the book discusses the imbalance between how we consume energy and our interest in living in harmony with our environment. Many examples of our shortsightness are discussed- Mr. Friedman articulates how unintentionally we are funding both sides of armed conflicts. We obvisously fund our military (and allies such as Israel). Also through our energy purchases we indirectly fund middle eastern regimes that openly or covertly support islamic extremism. And how a shortsighted Congress underinvests in solar energy research while giving extra funds to petroleum based entities.
The United States of America, Mr. Freidman reminds us, is the biggest energy hog in the world, by far. But now other emerging countries like India & China are ramping up, also wanting to enjoy the consumer lifestyle as well. These events drive up energy prices worldwide and accelerate climate change. In the book Mr. Freidman quotes a politician he spoke with from a poor country who summed up our casual attention to the climate problems we have created- 'It's as if you (Americans)have a fine meal of hor'dovueres, entrees and desserts. Then you invite us over for a little Coffee afterwards and now you want us to split the bill.' In the 2nd half of the book Mr. Freidman, articulates how we must reinvent ourselves, become world leaders in green energy policies, green manufacturing & green housing. People and companies are patting themselves on the back for being green now. This according to Mr. Freidman rings false. He asserts that we are having a 'green party' where it's all fun and enjoyable and everyone goes home happy(and no one has to clean up). No one has to give up anything. What is needed however is a 'green revolution' where we fundamentally change how we govern ourselves, nationally and locally, how we consume energy, how we live. And that is going to take sacrifices by all of us. Mr. Friedman spoke with many energy experts around the world who all articulate new technology that could drastically reduce our use of fossils fuels(he refers to it as 'dirty fuels'). One expert says that the 'future is already here, it's just not in wide distribution.' We already have plenty of technology that can create fuel efficient vehicles, smart appliances and truly integrated power grids which we could employ to reduce our 'carbon footprint.' But who has the political will to put forward an energy plan that can move these innovations from promising experiments to widely adopted practices?
After reading the book I have become convinced that the world is moving much faster than I or most Americans realize. We must be proactive. We can start with ending the war in Iraq. Cancel our two billion dollar a week commitment to that country. Thus far we have given them enough money to rebuild five countries. It's time to move on. That money should be reallocated to important projects here in the USA. Additionally we need to make the political leaders give us some real straight talk about their future plans, their ideas for reinvigorating our country, the sacrifices that will be needed. So far, I believe that neither major candidate has done that. The whole world is looking to us for leadership. But on this issue we have no moral high ground. And both candidates are sugar coating it, giving us soundbites, telling us how bad the other candidate would be. That should not be good enough anymore.
(From quoting a guest reviewer)
Target readers:
Anyone who cares about global warming and other environmental protection-related issues.
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Thomas L. Friedman, a world-renowned author and journalist, joined The New York Times in 1981 as a financial reporter specializing in OPEC- and oil-related news and later served as the chief diplomatic, chief White House, and international economics correspondents. A three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles reporting the Middle East conflict, the end of the cold war, U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy, international economics, and the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat. His foreign affairs column, which appears twice a week in the Times, is syndicated to seven hundred other newspapers worldwide.
Friedman is the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem (FSG, 1989), which won both the National Book Award and the Overseas Press Club Award in 1989 and was on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly twelve months. From Beirut to Jerusalem has been published in more than twenty-seven languages, including Chinese and Japanese, and is now used as a basic textbook on the Middle East in many high schools and universities. Friedman also wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree (FSG, 1999), one of the best selling business books in 1999, and the winner of the 2000 Overseas Press Club Award for best nonfiction book on foreign policy. It is now available in twenty languages. His last book, Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, issued by FSG in 2002, consists of columns Friedman published about September 11 as well as a diary of his private experiences and reflections during his reporting on the post-September world as he traveled from Afghanistan to Israel to Europe to Indonesia to Saudi Arabia. In 2005, The World Is Flat was given the first Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and Friedman was named one of America's Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report.
Friedman graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University with a degree in Mediterranean studies and received a master's degree in modern Middle East studies from Oxford. He has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University and has been awarded honorary degrees from several U.S. universities. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Ann, and their two daughters.
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From Publisher
Thomas L. Friedman’s phenomenal number-one bestseller The World Is Flat has helped millions of readers to see the world in a new way. In his brilliant, essential new book, Friedman takes a fresh and provocative look at two of the biggest challenges we face today: America’s surprising loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11; and the global environmental crisis, which is affecting everything from food to fuel to forests. In this groundbreaking account of where we stand now, he shows us how the solutions to these two big problems are linked - how we can restore the world and revive America at the same time.
Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the astonishing expansion of the world’s middle class through globalization have produced a planet that is “hot, flat, and crowded.” Already the earth is being affected in ways that threaten to make it dangerously unstable. In just a few years, it will be too late to fix things - unless the United States steps up now and takes the lead in a worldwide effort to replace our wasteful, inefficient energy practices with a strategy for clean energy, energy efficiency, and conservation that Friedman calls Code Green.
This is a great challenge, Friedman explains, but also a great opportunity, and one that America cannot afford to miss. Not only is American leadership the key to the healing of the earth; it is also our best strategy for the renewal of America.
In vivid, entertaining chapters, Friedman makes it clear that the green revolution we need is like no revolution the world has seen. It will be the biggest innovation project in American history; it will be hard, not easy; and it will change everything from what you put into your car to what you see on your electric bill. But the payoff for America will be more than just cleaner air. It will inspire Americans to something we haven’t seen in a long time - nation-building in America - by summoning the intelligence, creativity, boldness, and concern for the common good that are our nation’s greatest natural resources.
Hot, Flat, and Crowded is classic Thomas L. Friedman: fearless, incisive, forward-looking, and rich in surprising common sense about the challenge - and the promise - of the future.
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ONE
Where Birds Don’t Fly "German engineering, Swiss innovation, American nothing."
Advertising slogan used on a billboard in South Africa by Daimler to promote its Smart "forfour" compact car
In June 2004, I was visiting London with my daughter Orly, and one evening we went to see the play Billy Elliot at a theater near Victoria Station. During intermission, I was standing up, stretching my legs in the aisle next to my seat, when a stranger approached and asked me, “Are you Mr. Friedman?” When I nodded yes, he introduced himself: “My name is Emad Tinawi. I am a Syrian-American working for Booz Allen," the consulting firm. Tinawi said that while he disagreed with some of the columns I had written, particularly on the Middle East, there was one column he especially liked and still kept.
“Which one?” I asked with great curiosity.
“The one called ‘Where Birds Don’t Fly,’" he said. For a moment, I was stumped. I remembered writing that headline, but I couldn’t remember the column or the dateline. Then he reminded me: It was about the newpost-9/11U.S. consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. For years, the U.S. consulate in Istanbul was headquartered in the Palazzo Corpi, a grand and distinctive old building in the heart of the city’s bustling business district, jammed between the bazaars, the domed mosques, and the jumble of Ottoman and modern architecture. Built in 1882, and bought by the U.S. government twenty-five years later, Palazzo Corpi was bordered on three sides by narrow streets and was thoroughly woven into the fabric of Istanbul life. It was an easy place for Turks to get a visa, to peruse the library, or to engage with an American diplomat.
But as part of the general security upgrade for U.S. embassies and consulates in the post-9/11 world, it was decided to close the consulate at Palazzo Corpi, and in June 2003 a new U.S. consulate was opened in
Istinye, an outlying district about twelve miles away from the center of the city. “The new 22-acre facilitynearly 15 times as big as the old consulatewas built on a solid rock hill,” a Federal Times article reported (April 25, 2005), adding that “State now requires buildings to have protective walls that are at least 100 feet away from embassies and consulates. Those walls and barriers also must protect against explosions and ramming attacks from vehicles, and they must be difficult to climb. Guard booths are placed at the perimeter of facilities, and windows and doors are bulletproof and resist forced entries. The new buildings are also strong enough to resist most earthquakes and bombs.”
They are also strong enough to deter most visitors, friends, and allies. In fact, when I first set eyes on the new consulate in 2005, what struck me most was how much it looked like a maximum-security prisonwithout the charm. All that was missing was a moat filled with alligators and a sign that said in big red letters: “Attention! You are now approaching the U.S. consulate in Istanbul. Any sudden movements and you will be shot without warning. all visitors welcome.”
They could have filmed the Turkish prison movie Midnight Express there.
But here’s a hard truth: Some U.S. diplomats are probably alive today thanks to this fortress. Because on November 20, 2003, as President George W. Bush was in London meeting with then prime minister Tony Blair, and about six months after the new U.S. consulate in Istanbul had been opened, Turkish Muslim terrorists detonated truck bombs at the HSBC bank and the British consulate in Istanbul, killing thirty people, including Britain’s consul general, and wounding at least four hundred others. The bomb-ravaged British mission was just a short walk from the Palazzo Corpi.
One of the terrorists captured after the attack reportedly told Turkish police that his group had wanted to blow up the new U.S. consulate, but when they checked out the facility in Istinye, they found it impregnable. A senior U.S. diplomat in Istanbul told me more of the story: According to Turkish security officials, the terrorist said the new U.S. consulate was so secure, “they don’t let birds fly” there. I never forgot that image: It was so well guarded they don’t even let birds fly there... (That point was reinforced on July 9, 2008, when Turkish police outside the consulate killed three terrorists apparently trying to breach its walls.)
Tinawi and I swapped impressions about the corrosive impact such security restrictions were having on foreigners’ perceptions of America and on America’s perceptions of itself. As an Arab-American, he was clearly bothered by this, and he could tell from my column that I was too. Because a place where birds don’t fly is a place where people don’t mix, ideas don’t get sparked, friendships don’t get forged, stereotypes don’t get broken, collaboration doesn’t happen, trust doesn’t get built, and freedom doesn’t ring. That is not the kind of place we want America to be. That is not the kind of place we can afford America to be. An America living in a defensive crouch cannot fully tap the vast rivers of
idealism, innovation, volunteerism, and philanthropy that still flow through our nation. And it cannot play the vital role it has long played for the rest of the worldas a beacon of hope and the country that can always be counted on to lead the world in response to whatever is the most important challenge of the day. We need that Americaand we need to be that America - more than ever today.
This is a book about why.
The core argument is very simple: America has a problem and the world has a problem. America’s problem is that it has lost its way in recent yearspartly because of 9/11 and partly because of the bad habits that we have let build up over the last three decades, bad habits that have weakened our society’s ability and willingness to take on big challenges. The world also has a problem: It is getting hot, flat, and crowded. That is, 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. How we address these interwoven global trends will determine a lot about the quality of life on earth in the twenty-first century.
I am convinced that the best way for America to solve its big problem the best way for America to get its “groove” back is for us to take the lead in solving the world’s big problem. In a world that is getting hot, flat, and crowded, the task of creating the tools, systems, energy sources, and ethics that will allow the planet to grow in cleaner, more sustainable ways is going to be the biggest challenge of our lifetime. But this challenge is actually an opportunity for America. If we take it on, it will revive America at home, reconnect America abroad, and retool America for tomorrow. America is always at its most powerful and most influential when it is combining innovation and inspiration, wealth-building and dignity-building, the quest for big profits and the tackling of big problems. When we do just one, we are less than the sum of our parts.
When we do both, we are greater than the sum of our partsmuch greater.
But it’s not just an opportunity, either: it’s also a test. It’s a test of whether we are able and willing to lead. Whether you love us or hate us, whether you believe in American power or you don’t, the convergence of hot, flat, and crowded has created a challenge so daunting that it is impossible to imagine a meaningful solution without America really stepping up. “We are either going to be losers or heroesthere’s no room anymore for anything in between,” says Rob Watson, CEO of EcoTech International and one of the best environmental minds in America.
Yes, either we are going to rise to the level of leadership, innovation, and collaboration that is required, or everybody is going to losebig. Just coasting along and doing the same old things is not an option any longer. We need a whole new approach. As they say in Texas: “If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.”The simple name for the new project I am proposing is “Code Green.” What “red” was to America in the 1950s and 1960sa symbol of the overarching Communist threat, the symbol that was used to mobilize our country to build up its military, its industrial base, its highways, its railroads, ports, and airports, its educational institutions, and its scientific capabilities to lead the world in defense of freedom we need "green” to be for today’s America... |
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Norma Lehmeierhartie (MSL quote), USA
<2008-11-03 00:00>
In Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America, Thomas Friedman presents an irresistible opportunity for Americans - one that can save the planet and increase our wealth.
The world is flat because of globalization - which is good, as ideas and practices can spread effectively. What is not so good is that our world population is exploding and countries like India and China are seeing an increase in wealth and subsequent buying power, which puts more strain on the world's resources and increases global warming.
Friedman begins the book with a discussion of how America has changed post 9/11. He uses the example of the US consulate built in 1882 in Istanbul. The consulate was built in the heart of the city: "it was an easy place for Turks to get a VISA, to peruse the library or to engage with an American diplomat."
Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the building was closed and a nearly impenetrable consulate was built. This all but stopped visitors from visiting. Although the new building does protect against attacks, it isolates Americans and impacts on how we are viewed and how we see ourselves.
Friedman writes that he wrote the book because: "An American living in a defensive crouch cannot fully tap the vast rivers of idealism, innovation, volunteerism, and philanthropy that still flow through our nation. And it cannot play the vital role it has long played for the rest of the world - as a beacon of hope and the country that we can always be counted on to lead the world in response to whatever is the most important challenge of the day."
That challenge is global warming. He proposes we begin a massive project called "code green."
Friedman identifies three broad trends in our society:
1. The post 9/11 building of walls around us to protect Americans from foreigners.
2. Since the 1980's, politicians acting "dumb as we wanna be," meaning we will get to fixing the roads, global warming and other issues when we get around to it. This includes politicians like Bush "protecting us" from gas taxes and other unpleasantries to keep our standard of living, or the fact that we are in war and don't have to make any sacrifices (save the soldier's lives.)
3. Nation building at home. This is the one good trend Friedman sees and he writes about the plethora of innovative, imaginative souls who devote their energy to finding green solutions.
Friedman considers what is now called the green movement to be more like a green party. He cites several "green" books that include the words "easy" or "lazy" in the titles. The authors write books where: "everyone is a winner, nobody gets hurt and nobody has to do anything hard." I have read several of these books and agree - much of the advice is fluff.
However, I do see the recent deluge of books and articles on sustainability as changing the consciousness and buying habits of the country. Many people who begin by making "painless changes" get serious about the environment and one or two of them may be the next inventor of the solar-run car. I also believe that when millions cut down on the use of plastic and other nonrenewable resources, that it does make an environmental difference.
The increase in population and wealth and buying power all tax our already limited supply of petroleum, coal and gas - all substances that cause global warming and pollute our planet. Even if you didn't "believe" in global warming, it is a fact that petroleum - now needed in unprecedented amounts - is rapidly becoming an increasingly difficult product to procure. If you think spending $5.00 a gallon for gas for your car is a hardship, that price will be considered nothing in a few years. Folks, we are running out of time and oil.
Friedman gets that Americans can use the diminishing supply of nonrenewable resources as a means for an economic boom, for bridging the widening gap between Americans and the rest of the world and for drawing us together as a nation. Americans are an innovative and smart bunch of people and we need to get working on devising clean alternatives to fossil fuels. This will create more jobs, strong economic times and raised spirits.
Friedman presents a doable, win-win plan to raise wealth and to save the planet. A must-read. |
Mark Bergethon (MSL quote), USA
<2008-11-03 00:00>
Over the years Thomas Friedman's books (such as The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization and The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century) have provided keen observations about the state of the world and amazingly prescient insights into what was to come. His ability to synthesize widely divergent but telling anecdotal experiences and practical, non-ideological, common sense analyses have made his works both fascinating and instructive. His newest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How it Can Renew America, is his most important yet. Friedman illuminates how energy supply and demand, petrodictatorship, climate change, energy poverty, and biodiversity loss all interrelate and have reached critical mass in a way that is presenting both the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity we have ever faced. Additionally, he shows how we as Americans can revitalize our country and our economy, regain our competitive advantage and moral authority, raise our standing and influence in the world, and improve our overall legacy to future generations by rising to the occasion and showing leadership in the new "Energy-Climate Era." Hot, Flat, and Crowded is not only interesting, informative, and enlightening, it is an effective and persuasive call to collective action in meeting the greatest challenges and opportunities of our lifetime. Personally, I'm calling on each of you to take an important first action step: Read this book. |
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