RG Radio: Hot, Flat and Crowded

Michigan Now’s Chris McCarus and Rapid Growth’s Ivy Hughes tracked followed Tom Friedman to Ypsilanti, where he was promoting his new book, Hot Flat and Crowded. In this RG Radio segment, Friedmen argues that government should play a hand in developing alternative energy.  

The premise behind New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, is dark enough to be called Bleak, Dying and Hopeless, Friedman predicts an overcrowded and environmentally unstable global economy that is faced with paying the bill on a huge and unsustainable environmental and ecnomic debt.

“In particular, the convergence of hot, flat, and crowded is tightening energy supplies, intensifying the extinction of plants and animals, deepening energy poverty, strengthening petrodictatorship, and accelerating climate change,” he writes. “How we address these interwoven global trends will determine a lot about the quality of life on earth in the 21st Century.”

“We’ve lost our groove as a country,” he said at a recent presentation at Eastern Michigan University, arguing that during the Cold War, the U.S. raced to be at the forefront of innovation, but once it lost its largest competitor, slacked off. “We fell into the mood of we can be as dumb as we want to be.”
 
We are the country that won the space race and spearheaded the IT explosion. We’re not complete slackers, he says, but we’re coasting toward a dangerously high cliff. That same infrastructure of innovation could be used for advances in alternative energy and alternative fuel that could help prevent the convergence of the human race into a hot, flat and crowded earth.

“The innovative capacity in this country that’s exploding from below is enormous,” he said. 

Friedman is not talking about recycling, installing energy efficient light bulbs or buying hybrid vehicles. He’s talking about changing the way we live on a massive scale. We need to completely refuel how we power cars, houses and businesses and stop relying on easy green methods (See “writing on recycled paper”) and feel the pain of massive change.

Some of these painful choices, according to Freidman’s book, could include “doubling the fuel efficiently of two billon cars…replacing 1,400 large coal-fire electric plants with natural gas powered facilities…increasing wind power eightfold…and driving two billion cars on ethanol, using one-sixth of the world’s cropland to grow the needed corn.”

After Friedman finished his speech, University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman asked Friedman what he would do if he were the governor of Michigan.

“Let me focus on two things,” he says. “One would be my message and one would be method. My message sure as heck wouldn’t be drill baby drill. My motto — I would put this on the license plate of every Michigander — would be invent baby invent.”