After reading the first chapter of Thomas Friedman’s new book, we’re eager to read the rest.
Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America
“[The world] 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. How we address the interwoven global trends will determine a lot about the quality of life on earth in the twenty-first century.”
We often use the current financial crisis as a metaphor for how we’ve managed our energy, food, and general economic security. So does Friedman.
“In some ways, the subprime mortgage mess and housing crisis are metaphors for what has come over America in recent years: A certain connection between hard work, achievement, and accountability has been broken. We’ve become a subprime nation that thinks it can just borrow its way to prosperity–putting nothing down and making no payments for two years. Subprime lenders told us that we could have the American dream–a home of our own–without the discipline or sacrifice that home ownership requires. When the whole pyramid scheme, operated by some of our best financial institutions, collapsed, everyone from simple homeowners to unscrupulous lenders looked to the government for a bailout.”
If we weren’t already leaning toward Obama in the primary, Clinton and McCain sealed our decision with the following supreme act of pandering, and it didn’t go unnoticed by Friedman.
“During the 2008 presidential primary campaign, Senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton both actually proposed suspending the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for the summer’s travel season, to give American drivers ‘a break,’ even though they knew–because every expert in the country said so–that it would only increase demand for summer driving and therefore keep gasoline prices high and further contribute to the global warming that both senators claimed to have plans to mitigate. That proposal was the epitome of ‘dumb as we wanna be’ politics.”
We recently wrote about the pending American automotive industry bailout, which can be traced back to the Regan administration and Michigan Democratic caucus.
“When I asked Rick Wagoner, the chairman and CEO of General Motors, why his company didn’t make more fuel-efficient cars, he gave me the standard answer: that GM has never succeeded in telling Americans what cars they should buy. ‘We build what the market wants,’ he said. If people want SUVs and Hummers, you have to give them what they want.
But what the Detroit executives never tell you is that one big reason the public wanted SUVs and Hummers all those years was that Detroit and the oil industry consistently lobbied Congress against raising gasoline taxes, which would have shaped public demand for something different. Big Oil and Big Auto used their leverage in Washington to shape the market so people would ask for those cars that consumed the most oil and earned their companies the most profits–and our Congress never got in the way. It was bought off.”
What Friedman omits is that the taxpayers actually subsidize the price of oil, partly by funding its external costs, which make it considerably cheaper than it would otherwise be in a more open, free-market environment.
Friedman often writes about 9/11 as an historical pivot point, and this book is no different. It’s a coincidence that Hot, Flat and Crowded arrived and we started reading it on the seventh anniversary of 9/11. As tragic as that day was, it presented immense opportunities for America to make our country stronger and safer in so many ways. Looking back on the past seven years, it’s tough to think of anything that has actually improved from the way things were on 9/10/2001. On the contrary, we are less secure and more at risk in every sense of those terms, and it’s a direct result of Bush’s failed leadership.
“After 9/11, I and others argued that we needed to institute a $1 per gallon gasoline tax–a “Patriot Tax”–in order to weaken the very forces who perpetrated that mass murder and to rebuild America’s transport and energy infrastructure. It would have been George W. Bush’s equivalent of Richard Nixon’s going to China–the Texas oilman weaning America off its dependence on Middle East oil. The price of gasoline would have gone up at the pump, but that would have stimulated the American economy to get a jump on the world in moving toward more fuel-efficient vehicles and renewable energy, which would have reduced our exposure to the massive oil-price spike in 2008. Instead, he summoned the nation for massive tax cut, simultaneously making us more dependent on China to finacne our deficit and on Saudi Arabia to fill up our gas tanks.”
We’ll be sure to update this with the more poignant passages. Feel free to leave a quote or two in the comments. In the meantime, we leave you with this insightful bit of dialog from the film The Leopard:
“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
3 responses so far ↓
1 PamelaMartin // Sep 12, 2008 at 5:17 am
Great blog and thanks for highighting what seems to be a great book- I’ll have to check it out.
America has a hard time breaking out the “business as usual” mentality. We continue to buy non- fuel efficient cars, continue to want cheap gas to power them and continue to depend on the automobile as our only viable means of transportation. It’s not our dependance on foreign oil that America needs to wean itself from- it’s its dependence on the automobile as the icon of the American Way of Life.
2 Tal Ater // Sep 12, 2008 at 4:58 pm
As Friedman puts it: “There has been way too little vision for an America of 9/12 and way too much 9/11 – over and over and over.”
3 David // Sep 16, 2008 at 10:06 pm
I am going to pick this book up tomorrow, thanks for the teaser – looks good.
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