Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America. Thomas L. Friedman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Is there a green revolution underway, now that we are replacing our light bulbs and schlepping reusable shopping bags to the supermarket? Not yet, according to the Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman. In his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, he does indeed call for a green revolution, and explains why merely recycling and turning down the thermostat, while positive moves, are not enough to get us there.

As an example, he describes the county in Maryland where he lives as “chock-full of people who identify themselves as green and recycle and do all the other good things.” But the zoning laws did not allow him to install solar equipment in his side yard – “too unsightly” – only in the back, where there wasn’t enough sun. With some difficulty, he got the law changed. “We have willed the ends but not the means,” he writes (p.206-207).

Friedman says we need a systemic approach to enable, and even require, clean energy solutions. He offers Toyota’s Prius hybrid as “a perfect example of a new system replacing an old one and creating a whole new function that is greater than the sum of its parts. … Toyota went from a problem fix (how to make a car get better gas mileage) to a transformational innovation (how to make a car that produces energy as well as consumes less of it).” (p.185) Friedman challenges us to keep developing such enabling systems, and through them to create a genuine green revolution.

Bonnie Figgatt