Thomas Friedman— Hot Flat and Crowded

Core argument: America has a problem and the world has a problem. America’s problem is that it has lost its way in recent years— partly because of 9/11 and partly because of the bad habits that we have let build up over the last three decades, bad habits that have weakened our society’s ability and willingness to take on big challenges.

The world also has a problem: It 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.
— tightening energy supplies
— intensifying the extinction of plants and animals
— deepening energy poverty
— strengthening petro-dictatorships
— accelerating climate change

The best way for America to solve its big problem is for us to take the lead in solving the world’s big problems. (5)

America is always at its most powerful and most influential when it is combining innovation and inspiration, wealth-building and dignity-building, the quest for big profits and the tackling of big problems.

Just coasting along and doing the same old things is not an option any longer. (6)
America has shifted from a country that always exported its hopes (and so imported the hopes of millions of others) to one that is seen as exporting its fears.
“dumb as we wanna be”, “
We’ll get to it when we feel like getting to it and it will never catch up with us, because we’re America.”
We’ve become a sub-prime nation that thinks it can just borrow its way to prosperity. (8)
When you’re afraid you’re not yourself. (10)

France gets 78% of its electricity from nuclear plants and much of the waste is reprocessed and turned into energy again. Today, between Brazil’s domestic oil production and its ethanol industry, it doesn’t need to import crude oil. (14)

While the Reagan administration was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union, it as also instrumental in building our dependence on Saudi Arabia. (15)
— slashed environmental regulation
— moved back fuel efficiency and appliance standards
o In 2003, even China leaped ahead of the United States.
According to Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, if the US had continued to conserve oil into the 1990s the way it did between 1976 and 1985, thanks in large part due to increased fuel efficiency standards, we would no longer have needed Persian Gulf Oil after 1985. (17)

With Democrats supporting the auto companies and their unions and Republicans supporting the oil companies= no fuel efficiency standards.

George W. Bush came to office bound and determined not to ask the American people to do anything hard when it came to energy. (21)

Green is not simply a new form of generating electric power, it’s a new form of generating national power. (23)

When the wind changes direction, there are those who build walls and those who build sails.
—Chinese proverb

Flat:
— a combination of technological, market, and geopolitical events at the end of the 20th century had leveled the global economic playing field in a way that was enabling more people than ever, from more places than ever, to take part in the global economy— and in the best of cases, to enter the middle class.
— personal computer
— the Internet
— software and transmission protocols (“work flow revolution”)
— collapse of Soviet Union, Berlin Wall, Communism
= seamless, unobstructed global marketplace
— 200 million people lifted out of abject poverty in the 1980s and 1990s in China and India alone
— tens of millions of others moved into the middle class (30)
= huge demand for “things”, all of which devour lots of energy, natural resources, land, water and emit lots of climate-changing greenhouse gases from the time they are produced to when they are discarded.

Hot:
—“fuels from heaven”: wind, hydroelectric, tidal, solar, biomass
vs.
— “fuels from hell”: coal, oil, natural gas (32)
• deforestation in places like Indonesia and Brazil is responsible for more CO2 than all the world’s cars, trucks, airplanes, ships, and trains combined (34)
• methane released by livestock is one of the chief global sources of the gas (35)
• the global consumption of all forms of all forms of energy will double between 2008 and 2050 due to population growth and greater wealth driven by globalization
—2004: world’s first demand-led energy shock due to China sudden leap in consumption (39)

In 2007, according to the World Bank, the governments of India, China, and the Middle East alone spent $50 billion subsidizing gasoline for their motorists, and cooking and heating oil and electricity for homes and factories; Indonesia spent 30% of its budget on energy subsidies and only 6% on education; at the same time, Western nations spent roughly $270 billion subsidizing agriculture, so their farmers got rich, their consumers got cheap food, and Third wrodl farmers had a hard time competing. (41)

Petrodictatorship: massive transfer of wealth— hundreds of billions of dollars— from energy-consuming countries to energy producing countries; strengthening non-democratic actors. (42)

Energy Poverty: If you don’t have electricity you cannot go online and you cannot compete, connect, and collaborate globally, and increasingly, even locally. Those who have electricity, and whose aspirations have increased with every kilowatt, suddenly losing it could become politically explosive. (45)

Biodiversity Loss: As a result of climate change,
—one acre per second of rainforest is lost
— 90% of large predator fish are gone
— 20% of corals are gone
— species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal. (46)

Growth is not negotiable especially in a flat world where everyone can see how everyone else is living. To tell people they can’t grow is to tell them they have to remain poor forever. (55)

Both Europe and Japan have demonstrated that is possible to live a middle-class lifestyle with much less consumption. (55)

It took all of human history to build a seven-trillion dollar world economy of 1950; today economic activity grows by that amount every decade. At current rates of growth, the world economy will double in size in fourteen years. (56)

Our prosperity is now threatened by the very foundation of that prosperity— the nature of American capitalism. (57)

Chinese developers are laying more than 52,700 miles of new highways; some 14,000 cars hit China’s roads each day; by 2040 or 2050, China is expected to have even more cars than the U.S. (59) After China, the Arab nations and Iran have the highest rate of growth in energy usage in the developing world. China uses 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year, or 1.66 million cubic meters of timber= millions of full-grown trees.

However, for all the talk about their rising energy usages, the U.S. is still the world’s greatest energy hogs by far. The average American consumes:
— enough energy to meet the biological needs of 100 people
— China and India consume approx. 9-30 times less energy per person than the U.S.(72)
If all the world lived like Americans, it would be a climate and biodiversity disaster.

Every previous economic spurt and takeoff in history by one country or a region was nurtured by an unexploited commons… the bad news for today’s rising powers and new capitalists is that there are few virgin commons left to fuel their takeoff into capitalism. (69)

All it takes is knowledge. Innovation around sustainable energy and resource productivity is our only way out of this problem…”Cradle to cradle”— close all the cycles so we don’t send things to landfills and incinerators, we put them into closed cycles so that we can use them over and over again. (70)

Europe has managed to rein in iol consumption through a combination of high gasoline taxes, small cars and efficient public transportation, but American have not. (73)

Petropolitics: Our energy policy is not just changing the climate system, it is also changing the international system in fundamental ways:
— 1) our energy purchases are helping to strengthen the most intolerant, antimodern, anti-western, anti-women’s rights, and anti-pluralistic strain of Islam— that which is propagated by Saudi Arabia
o S.A. has set out to evangelize the entire Islamic world; it constitutes only 1% of the world’s Muslims but it supports 90% of the expenses of the entire faith, overriding other traditions of Islam. (82) [compared to Three Cups of Tea, 86]
• Wahhabi teachings and al Qaeda are essentially the same (hostility to Shiites, Jews, homosexuals, apostates, and non-traditional women); what separates them is their means of achieving their objectives (86)
• Saudi citizens provided the majority of financing for al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, in order to prevent Shiites from dominating the Baghdad government (90)
o In addition, Muslim youth are pushing back against globalization and Westernization— 2/3 of the Middle East’s population in under 25 and than ¼ of them are unemployed.
— 2) our oil addiction is helping to finance a reversal of the democratic trends in Russia, Latin America, and elsewhere that were set in motion by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism.
o the First Law of Petropolitics: as the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down (and vice versa ?)
o “Dutch disease“ —abundance of resources is bad for a country’s economy (98)
• 1) value of currency rises because of all the investment pouring into the country
• 2) imports become cheaper, exports more expensive on world markets
• 3) citizens, flush with petro-cash start buying up cheaper imported goods
• 4) domestic manufacturing sector gets wiped out = deindustrialization (99)
o resource curse impedes the growth of democracy (101)
• ‘taxation effect’ = “no taxation, so no representation either”
• everything revolves around those resources; ‘patronage spending’ = dependence on the state
• ‘group formation effect’ = intentional prevention of groups forming that are independent of the state
• ‘repression effect’ = police, internal security
• women are underrepresented in the workforce because jobs women traditionally attain at the entry level— garment and textile work— disappear from pertodictatorships because people spend money on cheaper imports rather than domestically produced goods — reduced political influence(103)
— 3) our growing dependence on oil is fueling an ugly global energy scramble that brings out the worst in nations
o of the 23 nations which derive a clear majority of their export income from oil and gas, not a single one is a democracy (105)
o warping diplomacy— forcing China and India to go into remote places to find the supply for their oil needs (eg. Darfur)
— 4) through our energy purchases we are funding both sides of the war on terror (our military and the enemies they must fight with weapons purchased with oil proceeds)


“American energy policy can be summed up as ‘Maximize demand, minimize supply, and make up the difference by buying as much as we can from the people who hate us the most.’” (80)

—When money can be extracted from the ground, people simply don’t develop the DNA of innovation and entrepreneurship.
— there is not a single world-class university or scientific research center in the entire Arab world or Iran today. (104)

Fall of the Soviet Union: Reagan or $10 a barrel oil?
— actually, it was $70 a barrel oil followed by $10 a barrel oil (108)
— 1973 Arab oil embargo propped up Soviet economy in the short term
— 1985—Saudi Arabia stops protecting oil prices, production increases fourfold, oil price collapses, Soviet Union’s economy becomes insolvent (parallel to modern day Iran)

“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.” (110)

• Climate change:
— deniers come in three varieties:
o 1) those paid by the fossil fuel companies
o 2) those scientists, small minority, who look at the same data and conclude for different reasons that global warming is not a major threat to the planet’s livability
• 6° C change in global temperatures cannot be accounted for simply changes in sunlight due to variability in the Earth’s orbit
• IPCC reports with 90% confidence that climate change caused by CO2, other greenhouse gases, and deforestation (120)
o 3) those conservatives who simply refuse to accept reality of climate change because they hate the solution— more government regulation and intervention. (114)
— You’re wrong. Okay, you’re right, but it doesn’t matter. Okay, it matters, but it’s too late to do anything about it.”

• Biodiversity loss:
— Conservation International
o Loss of one species every twenty minutes
o Loss of 1,200 acres of forests in same amount of time
— loss of ecosystem services (143) [especially crucial for people in poor communities]
o supply fresh water
o filter pollutants from streams
o provide breeding grounds for fisheries
o control erosion
o buffer human communities from natural disasters
o harbor insects
o take CO2 out of the atmosphere
We are the only species in this vast web of life that no animal or plant in nature depends on for its survival— yet we depend on this whole web of life for our survival (and we are destroying it). (152)

The upside of globalization is that it’s bringing more and more people out of poverty faster than ever before in the history of the world. The downside is that rising standards of living are making much higher levels of production and consumption by many more people. (147)

• Energy poverty:
— at the village level:
o can’t pump water regularly
o no communications
o minimal education opportunities
o no computers
o substandard health care
o minimal economic expansion
We need to create an ecosystem of sustainable energy plus education plus connectivity plus investment. (168)
— maintain traditions, dress, food, family ties rather than moving into a city

Green opportunity:
—eventually everyone 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

“a series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.” (170)

countries, communities, and companies that invent and deploy clean power technologies most effectively will have a dominant place in tomorrow’s global economy.

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.

It is not pay now or pay later. It is pay now or there will be no later. (171)

…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 that is pays off in ten years. Green is the way you grow, build, design, manufacture, work, and live…Green becomes the smartest, most efficient, lowest-cost way— when all the true costs are included— to do things. (172)

We also have a moral responsibility— because we consume the greatest portion per capita of the world’s resources, because we have more resources for innovation than any other country, b/c we have the standing to affect more people on the planet than any other country, and b/c giving more people around the world the clean power tools they need is totally consistent with America’s mission to expand the frontiers of freedom for everyone. (175)

Emulation is always more effective than compulsion. (176)

We need American capitalism applied to this problem. If the Americans are going green, the whole rest of the world is going green. (177)

The goal is also to use American power to bring the world’s most disadvantaged populations the energy to improve their lives and realize more of their aspirations as well. (178)

Believing this doesn't mean we should give up acting in our own self-interest— never. But it is precisely in our self-interest, at times, to behave more selflessly— to let people know that there are some problems we will approach as Americans and others that we can only address together as a species, and that we want to do both. (180)

Plan A: A Code Green

Dirty Fuels System: based on three key elements:
1) fossil fuels that were dirty, cheap, and abundant
2) wasteful use of those fuels for many years as if they could never run out
3) unbridled exploitation of out other natural resources— air, water, land, rivers, forests, and ocean fisheries— as if they too were infinite
As long as we are trying to
—protect biodiversity, promote Middle East democracy, combat pverty within a system that is encouraging people to use food to power cars rather than to drive less— we are never going to be successful within a Dirty Fuels System. (182-3)

The first rules of systems is that everything is interconnected…If you don't scrap the old system and put a new system in place, ultimately everything you do will be constrained. But if you put in a new system, and you do it right, everything starts to get better. (185)

If you don’t have a system, you don't have a solution. (186)

Clean Electrons

We as a global society need more growth because without it there is no human development and those in poverty will never escape it. (186)

Job number one of a Clean energy System is to stimulate innovation. (187)
— generous tax incentives, regulatory incentives, renewable energy mandates, and other market shaping mechanisms that create durable demand for these existing clean power technologies

An Ethic of Conservation

One thing we know from a dirty Fuels System is that when things are free or cheap— air, water, land, forests, fisheries, gasoline, electrons— people abuse and overuse them. (192)

‘even at $100 a barrel, oil is cheaper than imported bottled water (which would cost $180 a barrel) or milk ($150 a barrel)’ (245)

An ethic of conservation requires both stewardship and trusteeship— habits of restraint that express respect for the earth that we inhabit and respect for future generations. (192)

We have to develop new habits and attitudes toward consumption.

Conservation is not the opposite of consumption…We need to consume to live and grow our economies. But we can consume more and conserve more at the same time…Too many environmentalists oppose any growth, a position that locks the poor into poverty. (194)

We need a Clean Energy System that is always trying to optimize three things:
1) innovation and generation of the cleanest and cheapest electrons
2) the mostn efficient and productive use of those electrons and other natural resources
3) constant attention to protecting and conserving our natural systems and educating people about their material, spiritual, and aesthetic value. (195)

a renewable energy ecosystem for innovating, generating, and deploying clean power, energy, efficiency, resource productivity, and conservation < the true cost of burning coal, oil and gas (198) We need to look at fundamental change in our energy, transportation and agricultural systems rather than technological tweaking at the margins (208)…to really make a difference there are three issues: 1) there is the scale of demand 2) the scale of the investment needed to produce alternatives at scale 3) the scale of time it takes to produce alternatives (210) meeting the energy challenge will require shared sacrifice and political will… ‘you cannot solve a problem from the same level of thinking that created it.’ (215) The Energy Internet: When It Meets ET What we need most now are integrated government policies— laws and standards, taxes and credits, incentives and mandates, minimums and maximums— to guide and stimulate the marketplace to drive the innovations further, to commercialize these new ideas faster, and to bring this revolution to life sooner. (217) Roughly 40% of America’s total CO2 emissions come from the production of electricity used in homes, offices, and factories. Another 30% of American emissions come from the transportation sector— primarily cars, trucks, boats, trains, and airplanes… supply this whole 70% with clean, abundant, cheap, reliable electrons through a smart grid— that would be a revolution. (224) 224-236— smart grid of the future The Stone Age Didn’t End Because We Ran Out of Stones Clean power is going to be the global standard over the next decade, and clean power tools are going to be the next great global industry, and the countries whi make more of them and sell more of them will have a competitive advantage. (242) Incremental breakthroughs are all we’ve had, but exponential is what we desperately need. …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. (243) There is only one thing bigger than Mother Nature and that is Father Profit. We need a market for clean energy. Only the market can generate and allocate enough capital fast enough and efficiently enough to inventors and companies working in garages and laboratories to drive transformational breakthroughs, only the market can then commercialize the best of them and improve on the existing ones at the scope, speed, and scale we need. (244) The American pet food industry spends more money on R & D than the American utilities do. (247) ‘disruptive technologies”: that new technologies replace existing ones because they are cheaper and more consumer-friendly. (249) No matter how much you tell the market what you want it to do, it is the price signal that markets respond to… you have to have a price signal. (250) 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. (251) …if we want to get both forms of innovation at a large scale— breakthroughs that lead to a whole new way of generating clean electrons and breakthroughs that come by getting the clean power technologies we already have down the learning curve faster— we need the government to level the playing field by taxing what we don’t want (electricity from carbon-emitting sources) and subsidizing what we do want (clean power innovation). (252) If inventors and venture capitalists believe that the price of their new clean energy invention can always be undercut by the dirty old alternative, we are not going to get new innovation at the scale we need… the lingering uncertainty about the long-term price of oil is why some of our biggest energy companies, the kind you want to be “all in” on clean-tech innovation, are not all-in. (254) What will make them go all-in would be a floor price on crude oil or carbon content that would tell them and their investors that the price of these fossil fuels will never again fall below a certain level. (255) Bottom line: America needs an energy technology bubble just like the information technology bubble. In order to get that the government needs to make it an absolute no-brainer to invest in renewable energy. (258) This bubble is going to attract so much new capital…that it is going to drive innovation faster and faster. (258) “Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.” (259) an externality is any cost or benefit resulting from a commercial transaction that is borne by or received by parties not directly involved in the transaction. That which is not priced is not valued, and if our open lands, clean air, clean water, and healthy forests are not valued, the earth, when it is this flat and this crowded, will become a very hot, no-cost landfill very fast. (260) Roughly 30% of our greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation sector…American actually produces twice as much nuclear power as France but with our much bigger economy it represents a smaller share of our total. (290) Electrifying transportation… an electricity-powered system has far fewer energy losses along the way than a gasoline-fueled system, when you include all the losses in the gasoline system from oil extraction, transportation, refining, and distribution of the gas— plus the lower efficiency of an internal combustion energy. (291) Change or die— only if government uses its power to set prices, regulations, and standards to reshape the energy market and force utilities and other big players to either innovate or die. (294) Indonesia is now losing rain forests the size of Maryland every year…a forest area the size of three hundred soccer fields is cut down in Indonesia every hour. (299) Ninety percent of the people living in extreme poverty around the world today are directly dependent upon forests for their food, fuel, shelter, freshwater, and fiber…(313) REDD— Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation— wealthy developed countries would pay poor developing countries to keep their forests intact. (313) It takes an ecosystem of the right government policies, the right investments, and the right actors to save an ecosystem of plants, animals, and forests. (302) All conservation is local. (303) Conservation is also about dealing with people. (309) An ethic of conservation declares that maintaining our natural world is a value that is impossible to quantify but also impossible to ignore, because of the sheer beauty, wonder, joy, and magic that nature brings to being alive. (314) ‘outgreening’ is going to be a competitive advantage…grean as a value will increasingly be something everyone (young people especially) will want to associate with, and therefore the greenest companies, countries, schools, and cities will attract the most talent. (326) Most corporate responsibility is defensive…you could make a lot more money by being more corporately responsible. (334) The people who likely will be most affected by energy and natural resource supply/demand, climate change, petrodictatorship, biodiversity loss, energy poverty don’t get to vote— because they haven’t been born yet. (403) Machiavelli, The Prince: “It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilously to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents— who have the laws on their side— and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in the new things until they have had a long experience on them.” (264)