Part 1: Hot Flat & Crowded - Thomas Friedman

Part 1: Hot Flat & Crowded - Thomas Friedman
(The parts are not based on the parts in the book but roughly based on my reading and review of the book)

It is a comprehensive book that covers aspects of climate change and the connections to US oil consumption, Terrorism, China, and India and back to the US. I had bits and pieces of information from the media. This book kind of connected the dots for me. A must read as an environment literacy for a common man.

He starts with where we are now, explains what he means by Hot, Flat and Crowded.
Hot – Not a brain teaser – global warming
Flat – Rise of the middle class. The rise of American carbon copies all over the world
Crowded - The growth of the world population

He dedicates an entire chapter on American lifestyles and how it is changing the world. The discussion on how America’s oil consumption feeds the terrorists and creating petro-dollars/dictatorship is fascinating. The graph on Freedom Vs crude oil prices is a new piece of information that caught my eye. A phenomenon diagnosed as ‘resource curse’ or the ‘Dutch disease’


Few Excerpts from the book with my comments embedded:

I was still living in the post 9/11 world until this book came along. ‘I don’t think we’re post anything anymore – I think we’re pre-something totally new “, said David Rothkopf, the energy consultant, in the book and I agree. I think we are pre to a staggering disaster the mankind has every encountered. I think we are pre to finding a way out of the monumental environmental challenge that lies ahead of us

Friedman talks about what happens if everybody lives like the materialistic, consumption based American lifestyle (calling them ‘carbon copies’ in the book). What happens if the current 1 billion population living the American lifestyle increase to 2 billion or 3 billion? Simple answer – the planet will get hot !

In a world that is hot – a world that is more and more affected by global warming – guess who among us is going to suffer the most? It will be the people who caused it the least – the poorest people in the world, who have no electricity, no cars and no power plants and virtually no factories to emit CO2 into the atmosphere. The developing and the underdeveloped will be hardest hit

An Egyptian Cabinet minister remarked ‘It is like the developed world ate all the hors d’oeuvres, all the entrees and all the desserts and then invited the developing world for a little coffee” and asked us to split the whole bill. With US being 5% of the world’s population emits 25% of world’s green house gas emissions. When the time comes (it is already here) all will have to spilt the bill and this will muddy the international waters further more.

‘We Americans are in no position to lecture anyone’ says Friedman ‘ But we are in a position to know better…..if we Americans do not redefine what an American middle class lifestyle is , we will need to colonize three more planets. Because we are going to make this planet so hot and strip it so bare of resources that, nobody including us will be able to live like Americans one day‘ America is on the driver’s seat of the environmental pollution bus. Will it be in the driver’s seat of the environmental solution bus? So far it doesn’t seem like it.


To be continued in Part II