The world’s interlinked troubles

HOT, FLAT AND CROWDED: Why the World Needs a Green Revolution – And How We Can Renew Our Global Future, by Thomas L Friedman. Penguin. 2009. 516 pp

Reviewed by Chris Chatteris SJ

This is quite a title and subtitle! Incidentally the “flat” refers to a previous volume in which multi-Pulitzer Prize winner Friedman argued that the Internet is levelling the global playground of access to information and therefore opportunity.

In this latest volume he tries to put it all together and show how globalisation, population increase and climate change combine to create a perfect storm which can only be averted by a global green revolution. Everything is connected to everything else, he argues, like a good ecologist. Hence he warns us that the recent global depression is the planet’s “warning heart-attack”, ominously telling us something very serious about the lack of sustainability of our present way of inhabiting the planet.

What to do? Friedman argues that the United States should have acted in 2001 after 9/11. By moving the US economy decisively out of oil and coal towards renewable energy, President George W Bush could have killed two birds with one stone — to tackle the looming climate crisis and choked off funding to al Qaeda by what he calls “petrodictatorships”.

Friedman believes that Americans would have gladly paid a “patriot” tax on petrol to pay for this radical reorganisation of the American economy. 9/11 would then have become like Pearl Harbour, galavanising the US into action, and rapidly put the country on a war-footing. Now that the “Pearl Harbour moment” has passed, a major problem is how to get the the lobby-dominated, election-obsessed American political system to make the necessary painful changes.

Friedman’s book is a remarkable attempt to stitch pretty much everything together, and in the process the reader gets richly informed about stories that the media hasn’t the space or interest to elaborate. How did the entire country of Iceland default during the 2008 meltdown? How China’s building project for the next 20 years will construct the equivalent of two Americas. How a new “smart” electricity grid would operate and how the consumer would actually experience this. How the US is “outgreening” al Qaeda in Afghanistan (No kidding!). The meaning of an “Americum”. And in what sense is America in danger of becoming a banana republic.

Friedman also enjoys introducing us to an extensive dramatis personae of activists, politicians, lobbyists, scientists and of course journalists, all with an interest in what he argues convincingly is the central issue of our time. Some of these people and their work are fascinatingly forward-looking.

By contrast Friedman is clearly deeply frustrated by the idle inertia of his country and tries transparently to goad it into action by holding up the bogeyman of a China, which is becoming technologically dominant, like a new gigantic Japan.

However he manages to keep his touching patriotic faith and his optimism. He thinks, for example, that it is only a matter of time before someone (preferably an American) discovers a source of abundant, clean, renewable energy. The techno-frontier is still limitless apparently. And he hopes against hope that the American people will eventually do the right thing and tell their politicians that they are ready to accept the hard choices that have to be made in the temporary absence of this abundant energy-source.

He fails to ask whether, if we do find such a source of abundant energy, we will be able to keep our expansionist instinct under control or whether we will just destroy what’s left of the natural world. He does not broach the obvious contradiction of a theory of endless growth in a world of finite resources. Growth is a sacrosanct value for him, but it can be smarter, more efficient and less damaging.

Friedman believes that we are living on a “hinge of history”. His sober hope is that we will swing history in the direction of “managing the unavoidable and avoiding the unmanageable”. But he warns us that time is not on our side.