Hot, Flat, and Crowded

By Dan Danbom, Special to the Rocky

Published September 11, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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* Nonfiction. By Thomas L. Friedman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27.95. Grade: B+

Book in a nutshell: Global warming is real, energy use is rising, the global economy is here, and a lot more people are contributing to all three. That spells big trouble for all of us, says Friedman, unless we immediately take steps that will fundamentally change the way we live our lives, consume our energy, protect our biodiversity, enhance cross-global collaboration and improve education throughout the world.

This cooperative, global effort - which Friedman argues America must lead, restoring our moral and technological leadership in the process - will make putting a man on the moon look like riding your bike to the bus stop. Let no one suggest that Tom Friedman doesn't have ambitious goals. But the strength of Hot, Flat, and Crowded is that he is convincing that we must achieve these goals, and he backs up his arguments with reams of statistics, anecdotes and interviews with experts from around the world. (Cynics might point out Friedman probably didn't ride a bike to these interviews.)

One of Friedman's most provocative arguments is that ". . . America no longer can afford the luxury of allowing old-fashioned, non-innovative capitalism to be at the heart of its industrial system, distorting and threatening the system as a whole." Nowhere is this more true than in energy, where companies explore and use fossil fuels ("fuels from hell") to sustain a carbon-based economy.

Friedman calls for a mixture of incentives and regulations to change that, arguing that we must find ways to create cheap, reliable, renewable electrons (through global collaboration enabled by the Internet). America has "privatized our will," Friedman writes, and we must change that or suffer nature's consequences.

Best tidbit: Central to Friedman's thesis is that we need clean, renewable energy sources, yet "the American pet food industry spends more each year on R&D than the American utilities industry does."

Pros: This is a sobering assessment of the state of the world, particularly world energy use. Contrasting Friedman's book with political ads about gasoline prices will give your outlook a refreshing shot of absurdity. Friedman is persuasive about our need to change.

Cons: He's also awfully wordy about our need to change.

Final word: Friedman may have tried to do too much - but much needs to be done.

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