If You Read Just One Book This Year...
This book should be
required reading for everyone in the developed world.
That’s a strong statement and I’ll
preface it with the fact that I often find that
three-times Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas
Friedman’s New York Times writings
sensationalist.
Hot, Flat &
Crowded, (winner of
Washington Post, Chicago Tribune & Business
Week Book of the Year) is different. It’s
visionary, well researched and page-turningly well
written. It offers a new path away from the
growing consequences of our increasingly hot
(climate change), flat (rapidly expanding global
middle class), and crowded planet.
To begin with, the book demonstrates there is simply
not enough energy to fuel a 10x growth of the
world’s consumptive middle class driven by
China & India if this middle class consumes as
much resources (energy, water, land) as we do today.
If you buy this thesis (and it’s hard not to,
based on the evidence we saw in the summer of 2008
with skyrocketing commodity prices, record pollution
and temperatures) the question Friedman begs is: now
what?
Here is the visionary part: Friedman creates a
wholistic (and fact-based) perspective of how an
resource-efficient, economic, clean and sustainable
low/no carbon economy can be built with existing and
maturing technologies. And it offers a path to return
the United States to the forefront of its historical
leadership: exporting new technologies - something we
have lost in the past 15 years.
If this all sounds horrendously dull, it’s not.
The inspired vision is matched by inspired
writing. Get it here. To save some
paper and energy,
read it on your Kindle 2 or get
it from your
library.