Thomas Freidman has won three different Pulitzer prizes (the only person to do so). His earlier books, The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat, helped us understand the ever-growing scope of a globalized world. And now, in his latest New York Times bestseller, he challenges us all to go green because green is the new red, white, and blue.

This book makes two simple and powerful arguments. #1: Global warming is real, a true danger, and we need to get seriously busy about tackling this problem. #2: Even if global warming was not real, we need to get just as seriously busy, because we need to develop clean energy as the new economic engine for our own economy (and, to free us from dependence on foreign oil).

Freidman's great gift is to put in understandable terms just what is happening in some big picture areas. This book delivers on this promise.

Quotes from the book

German engineering, Swiss innovation, American nothing. (Advertising slogan used on a billboard in South Africa by Daimler to promote its Smart "forfour" compact car) (p. 3).

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 years - partly 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 petro-dictatorship, and accelerating climate change. (p. 5).

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 heroes - there'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 lose - big.

The simple name for the new project I am proposing is "Code Green."

II would be less than truthful if I said I think America, as it operates today, is ready for this mission. We are not. Right now, we don't have the focus and persistence to take on something really big, where the benefits play out over the long term. If we want things to stay as they are - that is, if we want to maintain our technological, economic, and moral leadership and a habitable planet, rich with flora and fauna, leopards and lions, and human communities that can grow in a sustainable way - things will have to change around here, and fast. (pp. 6 & 7).

There is a trend that gives me hope. This is the trend toward what I call "nation building at home" - to restore and revitalize something they (the American people) cherish but feel is being degraded. (p. 9).

We have been living for far too long on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We need to get back to work on our country and on our planet. The hour is late, the stakes couldn't be higher, the project couldn't be harder, the payoff couldn't be greater. (p. 25).

The broad scientific understanding today is that our planet is experiencing a warming trend - over and above natural and normal variations - that is almost certainly due to human activities associated with large-scale manufacturing. The process began in the late 1700's with the Industrial Revolution... The Industrial Revolution was at heart a revolution in the use of energy and power. All the coal, oil and natural gas inputs for this new economic model seemed relatively cheap, relatively inexhaustible, and relatively harmless - or at least relatively easy to clean up afterward. So there wasn't much to stop the juggernaut of more people and more development and more concrete and more buildings and more cars and more coal, oil, and gas needed to build and power them. Summing it all up, Andy Karsner, the Department of Energy's assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, once said to me: "We built a really inefficient environment with the greatest efficiency ever known to man." (pp. 31 & 32 & 33).

We now understand that these fossil fuels are exhaustible, increasingly expensive, and politically, ecologically, and climatically toxic. That's the line we've crossed. What changed? The simple answer is that flat met crowded. So many more people were suddenly able to improve their standards of living so much faster. And when the crowding of the world and the flattening of the world converged around the year 2000, the world went into a track where global demand for energy, natural resources, and food all started to grow at a much accelerated pace - as the Western industrialized countries still consumed considerable amounts of energy and natural resources and big emerging countries got to join them at the middle-class dinner table. (p. 38).

Green is the new red, white, and blue because it is a strategy that can help to ease global warming, biodiversity loss, energy poverty, petrodictatorship, and energy supply shortages - and make America stronger at the same time. We solve our own problems by helping the world solve its problems. We help the world solve its problems by solving our own problems. If climate change is a hoax, it is the most wonderful hoax ever perpetrated on the United States of America. Because transforming our economy to clean power and energy efficiency to mitigate global warming and the other challenges of the Energy-Climate Era is the equivalent of training for the Olympic triathlon: If you make it to the Olympics, you have a better chance of winning because you've developed every muscle. If you don't make it to the Olympics, you're still healthier, stronger, fitter, and more likely to live longer and win every other race in life. And as with the triathlon, you don't just improve one muscle or skill, but many, which become mutually reinforcing and improve the health of your whole system. (p. 173).

We need a whole new system for powering our economy. This is a systems problem, and the only answer is a new system. (p. 181).

"Obsessing over recycling and installing a few special light bulbs won't cut it... We need to be looking at fundamental change in our energy, transportation and agricultural systems rather than technological tweaking on the margins... To stop at "easy" is to say that the best we can do is accept an uninspired politics of guilt around a parade of uncoordinated individual action..." (Michael Maniates, Washington Post, November 22, 2007). (p. 208).

It is not like we're on the Titanic and we have to avoid the iceberg. We've already hit the iceberg... (p. 216).

"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." (Henry Ford). (p. 241).

The green revolution is similar to the civil rights movement in that it is about personal virtue but does not stop at personal virtue. (The civil rights movement) was ultimately about changing laws, so that no one had an option to discriminate, and it was those laws that ultimately changed the behavior and consciousness of tens of millions of people. But the civil rights movement started with citizen activism. (p. 398).

This green issue "doesn't pit haves versus have-nots. It pits the present versus the future - today's generation versus its kids and unborn grandchildren. The problem is, the future can't organize." (Michael Mandelbaum, Johns Hopkins professor). (p. 403).

The key concepts

Remember the space race...

1.  The world is crowded.

• 1950 - 2.55 billion people on the planet (152 million people in the United States)

• 2008 - 6.72 billion people on the planet (305 million people in the United States)

• By 2050 - a projected 9 billion people on the planet

 2.  The world is flat.

•  A seamless, unobstructed, global marketplace (note: for the list of "flatteners," revisit The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman).

 3. The world is hot.

• the planet is getting hotter as the inevitable result of the Industrial Revolution, which is continuing all over the world as more and more people rise to the lifestyle which accompanies being part of the middle class. .
  

From the book:

1. Today's Date: 1 E.C.E. Today's Weather: Hot, Flat, And Crowded

• E.C.E. - "Energy Climate Era"
  
• Fossil fuels are exhaustible - we will run out (at least of usable supply). It is not a matter of if, but when...
  
• Petrodictatorship
  • there has been a massive transfer of wealth...
    
• Climate Change
• Energy Poverty - those without access to energy remain terribly poor
• Biodiversity Loss - the decline of open lands, coral reefs, tropical forests, etc.
  

2. Our Carbon Copies (Or, Too Many Americans)

• Energy and resource supply and demand
  
• So many people are becoming "Americans" ("Economic growth has become the prerogative of most people on the planet")
  
• Can the world afford the middle class?
  

3. Global Weirding

• Does Al Gore owe us an apology: (Friedman recommended to Gore that Gore offer an apology - for underestimating global warming!)
  

4. Energy Poverty

• 1.6 billion people do not have access to the electricity grid (1.4 billion will still not have access in 2030)
  
• No electricity + no technology = no access to the world's knowledge (the internet)
  

5. Green Is The New Red, White, And Blue

• American is the imagination/innovation champion of the world - it is time to step up!
  
• Energy efficiency (clean electrons), resource productivity, conservation
  

6. The Energy Internet: When IT Meets ET

• We need to create and use the "Energy Internet"
• TheThe formula that is needed: clean power + energy efficiency + conservation

7. The Stone Age Didn't End Because We Ran Out Of Stones (stated by Saudi Arabian oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani in the late 1970's)

• The winning (competitive) formula for world economic preeminence: REEFIGDCPEERPC < TTCOBCOG - a renewable energy ecosystem for innovating, generating, and deploying clean power, energy efficiency, resource productivity, and conservation < the true cost of burning coal, oil, and gas.
• "The total investment in research and development by electric utilities in the United States in 2007 was about 0.15 percent of total revenues. In most competitive industries, the figure is 8 to 10 percent." (p. 247). (The last big breakthrough in the United States in clean energy production was in 1957).
• BUT - the problem: we already have energy; it is affordable; who wants to pay for innovation? (but - it isn't affordable. We aren't paying for the true costs).
• "When we leave Iraq, it will be the biggest transfer of air conditioners ever known to mankind." (Dan Nolan, energy consultant to the U. S. Army). (p. 317).
• Alternative energy in Iraq for our soldiers is a survival necessity (the more you move fuel around, the more attacks on our troops occur)

Reflections and Observations

I am not a scientist, or an economist. But I read. And I know this: even if there was no truth to the problem of human causes behind global warming, the day is coming when there will be too many cars on the planet to run on the gasoline we will have available (the current best estimate as to when that will happen is somewhere between 2020 and 2040). New technologies, on a mass scale, really is needed. This book raises the need, and calls us to action. As a country that is, among many other things, a collection of business ideas and practices, this books sets a new, bold, agenda. I think the conversation is worth having - and action is needed, like, real soon!