Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America by Thomas Friedman. 

5/5 rating.

Book #138 of 2019. Read December 3, 2019.

In a world that is becoming hotter, flatter (in terms of globalization), and more crowded, this should be required reading for every person.

This book talks about the confluence of three different factors that have led to a dangerous world to live in. This has caused our world to seemingly be on a precipice where climate change can tip one way or the other. Everything that humans have done to pollute, raze nature, and continue to explode in population are leading us to a time when we HAVE to change our ways.

Thomas talks about this being the beginning of a new era, the Energy-Climate Era, where these two factors will be the leading reasons for our success or failure in the future. This may sound like another doom and gloom book about climate change, but it is anything but. I think this is the most powerful and informative book on the environment that I have ever read, and it does a phenomenal job of showing our current time as an amazing opportunity. Never have we been so primed to truly push into new technologies: clean power, energy efficiency, environmental conservancy; these are all almost within grasp.

Go read this book and start a revolution! As Thomas states: “Too often and in too many ways, ‘green’ has become a license to feel good without doing good, to raise awareness without actually changing our behavior.” We have been idle and tolerant of the Dirty-Energy status quo for much too long! Can we fix this? “We have exactly enough time – starting now.“

Quotes:

“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.”

“Premium gasoline in Denmark in 2008 was about $9 a gallon. On top of that, Denmark has a CO2 tax, which it put in place in the mid-1990’s to promote efficiency, even though it had discovered offshore oil by then. ‘When you get your electricity bill you see your CO2 tax [itemized],’ the minister [for climate and energy] said. Surely all of this kills the Danish economy, right? Guess again. ‘Since 1981 our economy has grown 70 percent, while our energy consumption has been kept almost flat all those years,’ she said. Unemployment is a little less than 2 percent. And Denmark’s early emphasis on solar and wind power, which now provide 16 percent of its total energy consumption, spawned a whole new export industry.”

“‘In 1973 we got 99 percent of our energy from the Middle East,’ said Hedegaard. ‘Today it is zero.’ I know: Denmark’s a small country and it is a lot easier to make change there than across a huge economy like ours. Nevertheless, it’s hard to look at Denmark and not see the road not taken.”

“Just go through this mental exercise: What kind of America would you like to see – an America that is addicted to oil and thereby fueling the worst autocracies in the world, or a green America that is building scalable alternatives to crude oil and thereby freeing ourselves from the grip of countries who have drawn a bull’s-eye on our back and whose values we oppose?

What kind of America would you like to see – an America that is steadily outsourcing more and more blue-collar, labor-intensive manufacturing jobs to China, or a green America that is building more and more knowledge-intensive green-collar technology jobs – for making green buildings, vehicles, and power sources – which are more difficult to outsource and will have to be the industry of the future, as fossil-fuel energy supplies dwindle and world population grows?”

“To visualize this process, the California Institute of Technology energy chemist Nate Lewis offers the following analogy: ‘Imagine you are driving in your car and every mile you drive you throw a pound of trash out your window. And everyone else on the freeway in their cars and trucks is doing the exact same thing, and people driving Hummers are throwing two bags out at a time – one out the driver-side window and one out the passenger-side window. How would you feel? Not so good. Well, that is exactly what we are doing; you just can’t see it. Only what we are throwing out is a pound of CO2 – that’s what goes into the atmosphere, on average, every mile we drive.’”

“What it illuminated was that our oil addiction is not just changing the climate system; it is also changing the international system in four fundamental ways. First, and most important, through our energy purchases we are helping to strengthen the most intolerant, antimodern, anti-Western, anti-women’s rights and antipluralistic strain of Islam – the strain propagated by Saudi Arabia.”

“In oil-rich petrolist states, the price of oil and the pace of freedom tend to move in opposite directions. That is, the higher the average global crude oil price rises, the more that free speech, free press, free and fair elections, freedom of assembly, government transparency, judicial independence, rule of law, and the formation of independent political parties and nongovernmental organizations are eroded.”

“When money can be extracted from the ground, people simply don’t develop the DNA of innovation and entrepreneurship.”

“That is why going green is no longer simply a hobby for high-minded environmentalists or some ‘personal virtue,’ as Vice President Dick Cheney once sneered. It is now a national security imperative. Any American strategy for promoting democracy in an oil-rich region that does not include a plan for developing renewable energy alternatives that can eventually bring down the price of oil is doomed to fail.”

“‘Why was Katrina so unnerving?’ Nate rolled this over in his mind for a moment, sipped his strawberry lemonade, a specialty of the house, and finally answered my question about Katrina with questions of his own: ‘Did we do that? Or did God do that?’”

“There are other reasons that we may be underestimating global warming. To begin with, scientists – the good ones – are congenitally afraid of overstating anything. They are punished for overstating and not punished for understating, and this produces caution generally. ‘A charlatan can tell a lie in one sentence that a scientist needs three paragraphs to rebut,’ said Holdren.”

“The scientific consensus most people are familiar with is the IPCC’s ‘Summary for Policymakers’ reports. But those aren’t a majority [scientific] opinion. Government representatives participate in a line-by-line review and revision of these summaries. So China, Saudi Arabia, and that hotbed of denialism – the Bush Administration – get to veto anything they didn’t like. The deniers call this ‘politicized science,’ suggesting the process turns the IPCC summaries into some sort of unscientific exaggeration. In fact, the reverse is true. The net result is unanimous agreement on a conservative or watered-down document. You could argue that rather than majority rules, this is ‘minority rules.’”

“Climate-change deniers are like the person who goes to the doctor for a diagnosis, and when the doctor tells him, ‘If you don’t stop smoking, there is a 90 percent chance you will die of lung cancer,’ the patient replies: ‘Oh, doctor, you mean you are not 100 percent sure? Then I will keep on smoking.’”

“‘The most important conclusions about global climatic disruption – that it’s real, that it’s accelerating, that it’s already doing significant harm, that human activities are responsible for most of it, that tipping points into really catastrophic disruption likely lurk along the “business as usual” trajectory, and that there is much that could be done to reduce the danger at affordable cost if only we would get started – have not been concocted by the Sierra Club or the enemies of capitalism,’ noted John Holdren. ‘They are based on an immense edifice of painstaking studies published in the world’s leading peer-reviewed scientific journals. They have been vetted and documented in excruciating detail by the largest, longest, costliest, most international, most interdisciplinary, and most thorough formal review of a scientific topic ever conducted.’”

“‘Here in Montana we make our living outside,’ said the governor, an agronomist who got his start building farms in Saudi Arabia, ‘and when you do that, you know the climate is changing…So when Exxon Mobil hires someone who calls himself a “scientist” to claim this is not true, you don’t have to get The New York Times to know the guy is blowing smoke.’”

“If ninety-eight doctors say my son is ill and needs medication and two say ‘No, he doesn’t, he is fine,’ I will go with the ninety-eight. It’s common sense – the same with global warming. We go with the majority, the large majority.”

“Destroying a tropical rain forest and other species-rich ecosystems for profit is like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner,”

“As I was pacing around backstage, the school’s president, John Hennessy, went through the standard introduction, but then offered his own framing of the issues, saying that confronting today’s energy-climate challenge is the epitome of what John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, once described as ‘a series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.’”

“There are no cushions left, there’s nowhere to hide; there are no more green fields left to dump your garbage into, no more oceans to overfish, no more endless forests to cut down. We have reached a stage where the effects of our way of life on the earth’s climate and biodiversity can no longer be ‘externalized’ or ignored or confined.”

“Put it all together and what it means is that in the Energy-Climate Era, ‘green’ is no longer a fad, green is no longer a boutique statement, green is no longer something you do to be good, and hope it pays off in ten years. Green is the way you grow, build, design, manufacture, work, and live, ‘because it is just better,’ said Andrew Shapiro. Green becomes the smartest, most efficient, lowest-cost way – when all the true costs are included – to do things. That is the huge transition we are just beginning to see. Green is going from boutique to better, from a choice to a necessity, from a fad to a strategy to win, from an insoluble problem to a great opportunity.”

“Everything America (or any country) can do to go green today will make it stronger, healthier, more secure, more innovative, more competitive, and more respected. What could be more patriotic, capitalistic, and geostrategic than that?”

“Never has so little been asked of so many at such a critical moment.”

“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, and that means changes and costs that our current and would-be leaders seem afraid to discuss. Which is a pity, since Americans are at their best when they’re struggling together, and sometimes with one another, toward difficult goals…Surely we must do the easy things: They slow the damage and themselves become enabling symbols of empathy for future generations. But we cannot permit our leaders to sell us short. 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.”

“People don’t seem to realize, he added, that it is not like we’re on the Titanic and we have to avoid the iceberg. We’ve already hit the iceberg. The water is rushing in down below. But some people just don’t want to leave the dance floor; others don’t want to give up on the buffet. But if we  don’t make the hard choices, nature will make them for us. Right now, that acute awareness of the true scale and speed of this problem remains confined largely to the expert scientific community, but soon enough it will be blindingly obvious to everyone.”

“We haven’t really tried. That’s right, we haven’t really tried. We have not put in place the basic requirement for trying: a coordinated set of policies, tax incentives and disincentives, and regulations that would stimulate the marketplace to produce an Energy Internet, to move the clean power technologies we already have – like wind and solar – down the learning curve much faster, and to spur the massive, no-holds-barred-everybody-in-their-garage-or-laboratory innovation we need for new sources of clean electrons.”

“In what free market would we give billions in permanent or long-term tax incentives to the oil, coal, and gas industries, but stop and start every two or three years – for three decades – the puny tax breaks for wind and solar power, making long-term investing in these areas precarious? Only in a market designed to keep fossil fuels cheap and renewables expensive and elusive. No wonder that, as my New York Times colleague Jad Mouawad wrote (November 9, 2007) when oil was approaching $100 a barrel, ‘even at today’s highs, oil is cheaper than imported bottled water, which would cost $180 a barrel, or milk, at $150 a barrel.’”

“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. If your total investment in R & D is 0.15 percent of revenues, that’s not going to buy you much more than a few subscriptions to Popular Mechanics and Scientific American. In fact, the American pet food industry spends more each year on R & D than the American utilities industry does.”

“When was the last big breakthrough in clean energy production in the United States? Answer: 1957 – with the opening of the world’s first central station commercial nuclear reactor, located in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. That’s right – we have not had a scale breakthrough in clean energy since the days of filterless cigarettes and segregation.”

“The market will give us what we want, but only if we give the market the signals it needs: a carbon tax, a gasoline tax increase, a renewable energy mandate, or a cap-and-trade system that indirectly taxes carbon emitters – or some combination of all these.”

“Big industrial players like GE need some price certainty if they are going to make big long-term bets on clean power, and to those market dogmatists who say that the government should not be in the business of fixing floor prices or other incentives to stimulate clean power, Immelt says: Get real. ‘Don’t worship false idols. The government has its hand in every industry. If we have to have them, I’d prefer they were productive rather than destructive.’”

“Right now, in America, we have a bubble in ‘stories’ about clean energy, but we do not have a clean energy bubble. The amount of venture capital in clean energy in 2007 was less than $5 billion. The amount of venture capital that went into the dot-com boom at its height in 2000: $80 billion. If $5 billion fell off the table in the dot-com bubble, nobody even bothered to pick it up.”

“The government used a combination of taxes and education to get millions of people to stop smoking cigarettes and guzzling alcohol, and it needs to do the same thing to get the economy to stop smoking carbon and guzzling gasoline. Our economic, physical, and geopolitical health depends on it.”

“It is hard to imagine anything with more positive impacts than increasing the gasoline tax in the United States, where gasoline still costs less than half of what it does in Europe – thanks to the heavy taxes there. Gasoline taxes help reduce consumption, shift people to more fuel-efficient vehicles, shrink the amount of money we send to petrodictators, improve the air quality, strengthen the dollar and the balance of payments, help mitigate global warming, and give citizens a feeling they are contributing something to the war on terrorism.”

“Another way of putting it, Porter explained to me, is that pollution is simply waste: wasted resources, wasted energy, wasted materials. Companies that eliminate such waste will be using their capital, technology, and raw materials more productively to generate maximum value and, therefore, will become more competitive. So, properly crafted environmental regulations give a kind of two-for-one kick – they can improve both the environment and the competitiveness of a firm and a nation.”

“President George W. Bush and his administration claimed that they were protecting American companies by not imposing tougher efficiency standards, such as those proposed for more efficient cooling by air conditioners or better mileage performance by American cars. It was an understandable reflex from an administration that considers itself business friendly. It was also dumb. When you are the most innovative country, with the best research universities, the best national laboratories, and the highest technological base, you should want higher standards – because your companies can meet them while weaker ones cannot. Why would an American air conditioner company lobby to weaken our standards, which would only enable lower-efficiency, lowest-cost Chinese air conditioners to better compete in America?”

“This is not idle speculation. After the 1973-74 oil price shock, California began instituting the highest efficiency standards of any state in the country for buildings and appliances, like refrigerators and air conditioners. The net result: Per capita electricity consumption in California has stayed almost flat for the past thirty years, even though the state’s economy had vastly expanded. The per capita electricity consumption in the rest of the country during this same period is up 50 percent, according to a study by NRDC.”

“each Californian produces less than half the greenhouse-gas emissions as his or her fellow American. This is due in large part to state policies encouraging the use of natural gas and renewable resources over coal, as well as the aggressive promotion of energy efficiency. The state’s per capita emissions have dropped nearly one-third since 1975, while the nation’s per capita emissions have stayed flat. The study notes that each Californian typically saved about $1,000 per year between 1975 and 1995 [on electricity bills], just through efficiency standards for buildings and appliances.”

“Volunteerism doesn’t work. I’ve said this about 85,000 times. It’s about as effective as voluntary speed limits. No cops, no judged: road carnage. No rules, no fines: greenhouse gases. We’re going to triple or quadruple the CO2 in the atmosphere with no policy.”

“We can’t ask utilities to sell something – efficiency – that in the current business model only cuts into their profits, any more than we could ask Nike to go out and urge people not to buy tennis shoes. We have to make selling energy efficiency how a utility gets rich, not poor.”

“Nevertheless the plan was not implemented. That is such a common refrain when it comes to preservation of species, coral reefs, fish, mangroves, and our tropical forests.”

“That is, global treaties and financing mechanisms are necessary, but by themselves, they won’t even come close to solving the problem. You need coalitions on the ground bound together by an interlocking web of self-interests to preserve a certain pristine region or forest. We need to spend as much time and effort helping developing countries nurture these ecosystems on the ground as we do negotiating what treaty provisions should stipulate.”

“Rather than coming in and lecturing the villagers on how and why they should save the orangutan – which wasn’t going to make a big impression on people so poor they could barely save themselves – Supriatna started by working with them to make their village a better place to live and to see the forest around them as something they had a collective interest in preserving. Saving the orangutan was a by-product of that.”

“Supriatna said that lately his academic colleagues have started to ask him, ‘Are you becoming a political ecologist?’ ‘They are worried that I am going away from hard-nosed biology,’ he said. ‘But I believe that conservation is not just about protecting the tigers and just looking at how they behave and their food and their predators. Conservation is also about dealing with people. We are the ones disturbing nature. You need to know the biology, but you can’t stop with that and assume that it is all going to be fine.’”

“If you want to save the forests, you have to save the people first, and in today’s world the only way to do that is with an education through which people can learn service or manufacturing skills that do not involve plundering the forest. At a minimum, you want people to leave the tropical forest alone, and at a maximum you want them actively protecting it, either for touristic or medicinal or sustainable agriculture purposes.”

“Clean electrons are necessary. Dramatic improvements in energy efficiency are necessary. But the preservation of nature can’t be asked to compete with them on purely economic grounds (although it actually can when you add up all the services that nature provides that aren’t valued in the marketplace). It must be appreciated, revered, and preserved as a value apart and above all things economic and practical. If we do not nurture this green value in our children, then the cleaner our economies get, and the more energy efficient they become, the more effectively and efficiently we will rape the natural world. There will be no hard walls to stop it. People don’t preserve what they don’t respect or revere.”

“At the end of the day, no amount of investing, no amount of clean electrons, no amount of energy efficiency will save the natural world of we are not paying attention to it – if we are not paying attention to all the things that nature gives us for free: clean air, clean water, breathtaking vistas, mountains for skiing, rivers for fishing, oceans for sailing, sunsets for poets, and landscapes for painters. What good is it to have wind-powered lights to brighten the night if you can’t see anything green in the day? Just because we can’t sell shares in nature doesn’t mean it has no value.”

“That’s why it drives me nuts to hear companies or institutions talking about becoming ‘carbon neutral.’ That’s crazy. In a world that is hot, flat, and crowded, why would anyone want to settle for being just carbon neutral, when there is so much to be gained from having a ‘carbon advantage’? Is you company striving to be ‘information neutral’? Do half your employees use computers and half use paper, pencils, and abacuses?”

“The greatest thing that America could do today for itself, China, and the world is become an example of a country that grows prosperous, secure, innovative, and respected by becoming the greenest, most energy-efficient, and most energy productive country there is.”

“No matter how ‘cap ‘n trade’ schemes pan out in the distant future for coal-fired plants, strip mining and underground coal mining remain the dirtiest and most destructive ways of making energy. Coal ain’t clean. Coal is deadly.”

“At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us how to behave in the world. You teach us: not to fight with others, to work things out, to respect others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share – not be greedy. Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do? Do not forget why you’re attending these conferences, who you’re doing this for – we are your own children. You are deciding what kind of world we are growing up in. Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying ‘everything’s going to be all right,’ ‘it’s not the end of the world,’ and ‘we’re doing the best we can.’ But I don’t think you can say that to us anymore. Are we even on your list of priorities?

My dad always says, ‘You are what you do, not what you say.’ Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grown-ups say you love us, but I challenge you. Please make your actions reflect your words.” – Severn Suzuki, 12 y.o. speaking to 92 Rio climate summit

“It is about what we do in response to the truly massive challenge that we face to preserve the natural world that has been bequeathed to us. Somewhere along the way, that larger purpose has gotten lost. Too often and in too many ways, ‘green’ has become a license to feel good without doing good, to raise awareness without actually changing our behavior.”.

“The greatest environmental problem confronting us isn’t melting ice, faltering rain, or flattening oil supplies and rising gasoline prices. Rather, it’s that when Americans ask, ‘What can I do to make a difference?’ we’re treated like children by environmental elites and political leaders too timid to call forth the best in us or too blind to that which had made us a great nation.”

“Up to now, too much of the leadership of the green movement has focused only on the problems and not the opportunities. But the interesting thing about the Energy-Climate Era is that while the problems are just beginning to affect us, the opportunities are already here. Even if the world isn’t that hot yet, the meeting of flat and crowded already requires new energy tools and so opens up vast new opportunities for clean power and energy efficiency. We are now discovering just how much rising energy, food, and natural resource costs will force us to change. To miss the opportunity to lead this change is as reckless as to ignore these problems.”

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