New Book Not Hot or Original

The title of Thomas Friedman’s latest book, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America” recycles the title of his earlier bestseller, “The World is Flat.” Unfortunately, the rest of the material also seems reused.

Friedman’s fifth book attempts a rousing reveille to the Energy Climate Era, where global warming, world-wide middle class expansion, and population growth led to the titular characteristics: hot, flat, and crowded. The book tells a five-part story, à la Shakespeare, but it’s clear that the author neglected to borrow from the literary greats the necessary ingredients of creativity, sophistication, and substance. Reading the book means slogging through a wearing morass of self-aggrandizing anecdotes, utopian musings, and kitschy catchphrases, none used more liberally than “hot, flat, and crowded,” which appears in Friedman’s sermon so many times that it could give John McCain’s “maverick” a run for its money in the race of overuse.

And, while the world may actually be as hot, flat, and crowded as the Minnesota State Fair, Friedman’s readership should be forewarned that his latest book is not hot (in the Paris Hilton sense of the word), that it’s uneven, and that it’s empty.

Friedman’s argument is ice cold because his call-to-arms is rather unoriginal, as is the way he argues it. His thesis is something we’ve heard many times before: “everybody, in time, is going to be forced to pay the true cost of the energy they are using, the true cost of the climate change they are causing, the true cost of the biodiversity loss they are triggering, the true cost of the petrodictatorship they are funding, and the true cost of the energy poverty they are sustaining... The ability to develop clean power and energy-efficient technologies is going to become the defining measure of a country’s economic standing.” This argument may be forward-looking, but it has already gone mainstream. If Friedman is trying to become the Energy Climate Era’s Rachel Carson, Garrett Hardin, and Thomas Malthus all in one, he seems to have forgotten that figureheads like Al Gore have already made his arguments accessible to the masses and, perhaps, in an even more appealing fashion.

Friedman’s knowledge of the science behind a hot, flat, and crowded world is relatively deep, and he expresses moving concern about America’s role in fostering responsible economic growth in emerging markets. But all of this becomes diluted in Friedman’s attempt to make his message user-friendly. His chapters feature a preponderance of italicized, monosyllabic words, saccharine metaphors (“we are all sailing on the Mayflower anew”) and a cut-and-paste frenzy of recent news articles that make some of the chapters read like a LexisNexis power search.

The book is uneven because it is riddled with hypocrisies about how to confront the problems we face in an Energy Climate Era. Friedman creates unanswered contradictions between surburbanization and urbanization, market incentives and government incentives, constructivism and neoliberalism, and protectionism and multilateralism. Even his metaphors contradict one another. At one point he says that the solution is “a million Noahs in a million arks,” and yet, throughout the book, he’s asking his readership to acknowledge that we are all in the same boat.

Friedman’s argument is empty because his finest points become obscured by abstract digressions that don’t project a clear message of how to find solutions. He has an impressively broad perspective on the state of global development and makes a compelling argument that America’s economic well-being and global standing depend on investing more in energy leadership. He also draws attention to the implications of energy poverty in emerging markets and the potential power of nations who control supply. But he only provides two, broad suggestions to households: lead a personally sustainable life (Friedman, incidentally, lives in an 11,400 square-foot home) and work to change national leadership. On this latter point, Friedman argues the obvious, that we need innovation, clear leadership signals, and fully-functioning markets, but fails to truly discuss the political process that can get us there. Furthermore, his more interesting observations are discredited by silly chapter titles such as “We’re Not in Kansas Anymore” and a 12-page utopian foray into a dream-world where politicians win elections with the slogan, “Price the road, clear the traffic.”

Friedman’s book is an essentially painless read, because the picture he paints of a hot, flat, and crowded world is a vivid one, but his call to action is ultimately uninspiring because it isn’t fresh. The title of one chapter, “The really scary stuff we already know,” would have been better suited on the cover than on page 117.

—Staff writer Erin F. Riley can be reached at eriley@fas.harvard.edu.