Last week Thomas L. Friedman’s most recent book was at the top of WaPo’s nonfiction best sellers list. This week it is number four.
Footnote: EMR got his hands on a nonsanctioned lite book –a LARGE PRINT version – so he went to the Greater Warrenton Borders for one that is easier to read. In these times of financial crisis when citizens really need to understand how the world works, two copies of Friedman’s book were on a shelf in the way-way-back. What was in front piled in great stacks? Fiction, political hack screeds and in-depth reporting on the same insights found in tabloids and Parade: “Daniel Craig is more than a tough guy.”
Friedman’s title, Hot, Flat and Crowed, is provocative, but there are several problems of Vocabulary.
HOT
“HOT” refers to Global Climate Change. It plays to his subtitle” “Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How it Can Renew America.”
There is some debate about whether the earth is really getting hotter – most of the negative assessments come from proponents of Business-As-Usual and from “principled-conservatives” which makes this perspective suspect from the start.
There is even more heated discussion about whether human action is a driver / accelerator of Global Climate Change but Friedman seems to have no doubts.
As EMR has said over and over both the existence of a warming trend and the causes are fine to debate but the larger reality is that does not make any difference.
What ever the trend and whatever the cause, the “alarmists” who have a problem with Global Warming and decry the human impact on Climate Change are calling for actions that for the most part are needed for other very sound economic, social and physical reasons. Jim Bacon and EMR agree on this since he is more of a skeptic on the issue of causation.
Two other thoughts on HOT:
EMR has been carefully watching the well documented melting of glaciers for the past 60-plus years in his home Community – a disaggregated and very Beta Community in the Northern Rocky Mountain Urban Support Region.
Second, one of the biggest non-economic and non-mysterious health problems is that people go to the hospital for a well known cause and come out with an gratuitous infection. Peyton and Kellen had infections in the last few weeks.
EMR spent some time in the Greater Warrenton-Fauquier Community Hospital last week. (“If you want to do great things in your world, spend some time in ours,” US Navy)
It became obvious – while waiting for the medical staff to assembly to carry out a routine exploratory procedure, and while covered with a sheet and pre-warmed double blanket – the special-ops area of the hospital was COLD. The doctors and nurses were wearing two and three (visible) layers. The Hispanic lady who was scrubbing equipment looked like what was once called an “Eskimo” but is now call an “Inuit,” (aka, Aemai – An Earlier North American Immigrant.)
Why so cold in the Hospital? Do infections spread more easily in warmer temperatures? Having spent a month or more in the subtropics for over 30 years – and some time in hospitals on
Tortola and St. Vincent – EMR suspects the answer is “yes.”
Based on direct experience, EMR sees no reason to question the predominance of scientific evidence on both warming and cause but as noted above, that is not the real issue.
So HOT is problematic, However, HOTTER or not, what is important is that what is recommended to stop accelerating Global Warming makes sense to achieve a sustainable trajectory for society. Do we really need to fuss over “HOT” to make better decisions about locations and the allocation of resources?
FLAT
Friedman has ended the lives of thousands of acres of forest in order to tell readers of serial editions an earlier book about FLAT. By FLAT he means “Globality: Competing with Everyone From Everywhere for Everything.” – to use Sirkin, et. al.’s title and explanation – is making the world seem “flat.” As Supercapitalism makes very clear Globality and FLAT is not a good thing from many perspectives.
The fact is, the most important thing is NOT the price of tea in China.
The most important thing for any citizen is the safety, happiness and well being of the other citizens in ones Cluster, the Clusters that make up their Neighborhood, the Neighborhoods that make up their Village…
The complexity of Globality is an excuse for avoiding what is really important. For this reason FLAT is confusing and the analogy is way over-used.
CROWDED
It is with “Crowded” that Friedman goes off the rail.
He fails to understand that “Crowded” is an variable that is dependent upon human settlement patterns. What seems to be “Crowded” is due to a dysfunctional distribution of human activity and the failure to allocate resources equitably.
Six and a half billion people is not beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth.
Six and a half billion citizens is beyond the carrying capacity of Earth if they all were to consume as much per capita as those in the US of A believe to be their birthright.
The primary driver of unsustainable per capita consumption is dysfunctional settlement pattern.
Of course with fewer citizens on Earth, everyone could enjoy more per capita consumption but that is a different issue.
Freedman sees the problem of CROWDED as being due to the expansion of the “middle class.” Never mind that the Middle Class disappeared over the past six decades.
What he means is that there has been an expansion of expectations and consumption of some at the upper levels of the Ziggurat in all the richest nation-states.
It is now quite clear that this level of consumption cannot be sustained even by a super fortunate minority. The cheap resources – natural capital – is becoming more dear and fewer and fewer can afford it.
The critical problem is that a lot of those who are not yet Mass OverConsuming have been told by pandering politicians that they deserve to achieve levels of consumption that they see in ads and in more-real-than-life streaming and screaming images spread around the Globe.
The Business-As-Usual advocates confuse the comfort and consumption of “me and my friends” at the top of the Ziggurat with the welfare and sustainability of an “advanced” technological society.
A green revolution will not solve this problem. It will take a gray-matter revolution.
To make matters worse, driven by Business-As-Usual and MainStream Media, the only interest in “green” that has been discovered outside small, intentional communities has been Green Greed – Buy our product and feel good about consumption.
In a rational world, ads for a “full-size, luxury SUV Hybrid” would be considered pornography.
Energy, technology and meat along with Large, Private Vehicles and Scattered McMansions will never again be cheap.
That is especially true if the there is a delusion that it is possible to fuel, inform, over-feed, provide Mobility, Access and Shelter for six and a half billion citizens with democratic governance and market economies.
EMR
