Having listened to the The World is Flat over MANY hours on my bike two years ago, I anticipated an intellectual boatride guided by captain Thomas Friedman in his book: Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America.

The points of the book worth mentioning are as follows:

• Foreign oil dependence supports petro-dictatorships and thus the suppression of democracy, particularly when prices are high.
• The rise of the middle class in developing nations will dramatically increase world energy demands. The continued combustion of non-renewable resources like coal and oil for electricity and transportation is very bad for air quality and its contribution to global warming.
• Deforestation is responsible for 20-25% of total carbon emissions. This is more than the combined emissions of all the world’s cars, trucks, trains and planes.
• America needs a Manhattan project for clean energy. The ability of our country to industrially transform itself during World War II is testament to our potential.
• Cap-and-Trade mechanisms are very helpful. Carbon taxes and floor prices on imported oil will provide funding for R&D and capital investment.
• We as individual citizens and even SMBs cannot affect global climate change. Period. No matter how good we feel driving/flying less, biking/walking more, buying carbon offsets or RECs (renewable energy credits). The problem is systemic, macroeconomic, and political.
• The business model of electricity in America is severely flawed.
• There is no green revolution currently taking place, only small-scale projects and improvements. Revolution implies suffering, overthrow, and radical change. What we’re experiencing is a Party invoked by marketing and mass media, where being ‘green’ is easy and fun. Flowers bloom, butterflies flutter about, and everybody is a winner. Water bottles and recycled PET shopping bags for everyone.

While I enjoyed Friedman’s multiple rounds of investigative and expository journalism bound together in chapters to form a book, I must say that the book dragged on and on. This book would have been a pleasant voyage for me, had Tom decided to cut the book in half by limiting personal reflections, cutting out unnecessary details to support arguments, and moving ALL normative statements into one concise chapter at the very end. 150 pages would have done the trick. Recommendation: If you pick up the book, prepare to skim.

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