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Hot, Flat, and Confused
Posted Mar 8, 2009 by Asher Miller
I was invited to a small gathering (about 150 people) on Friday afternoon to hear a presentation by Tom Friedman, based on his latest book Hot, Flat, and Crowded. The hosts—very kind, very generous, and very engaged—are family friends. Apparently, they recalled that I work on energy and environmental issues and so included me in a pretty select group of successful members of the Bay Area technology community, including people like John Doerr and Larry Brilliant.
Friedman is a lightning rod for a lot of people, but I'm not going to comment on his positions on globalization or the Iraqi invasion, other than to say it hasn't taken history long to prove him wrong on both counts. Oops, maybe I did say something.
The truth is that—good or bad—he's very influential with business leaders, policy makers, D.C. talking heads, and the New York Times crowd. What he says, right or wrong, is important, and so I was curious to hear his thinking on energy, globalization, and climate change—particularly in the context of the economic collapse. And I wanted to ask him a couple of questions.
I got there early and so was introduced by the host to Friedman, who was busy signing copies of his book before the crowd arrived. I asked him if he was familiar with Peak Oil. His short response was namely that, no, he wasn't too familiar with it other than to say he expects we'll run out of oil sometime. Since I can't read the man's mind, this may be unfair, but the look on his face gave me the decided feeling that he thought I was a crackpot. So I asked if he was familiar with the work of Paul Roberts, a fellow journalist turned author, who wrote The End of Oil. Friedman told me he's heard of him, but never read his work.
I'm used to getting blank faces or fleeting glances looking for my tinfoil hat when I mention Peak Oil. But I'll admit I was stunned to think that Friedman hadn't explored the issue. I'd honestly rather believe he's looked into it and decided it was bunk than think he dismissed it out of hand or was too lazy to look into it.
Friedman's presentation was very good. He has a skilled way of communicating complex issues with powerful metaphors and anecdotes. He covered a broad and frightening range of issues with humor and creative storytelling. And he covered far more ground than I had expected (honest admission: I have not read Hot, Flat, and Crowded). The theme of the book was three main challenges:
- Hot: the climate crisis
- Flat: the rise of the global middle class (with consumptive behaviors paralleling those in the US)
- Crowded: the population explosion
And Friedman also covered the issues of energy poverty around the world (showing this powerful picture of students in Guinea studying at night by the light of the airport), biodiversity loss, the plight of "petrodictators," and other related challenges. I was puzzled to see that energy decline was not on the list.
More troubling was Friedman's seeming belief that what he calls Energy Technology can fix all these problems. Never mind the assumption that we have the time, capital, supply chains, and natural resources to quickly deploy these technologies (some of which don't yet exist). I wrestled with this question, which I wanted to ask Friedman:
"Let's assume that energy technology can solve the hot part of the equation. [BIG ASSUMPTION.] How does ET solve flat and crowded?"
Friedman himself talked about the loss of biodiversity. That's just one in an array of environmental collapses our population and consumption have caused. Energy technology doesn't solve fresh water depletion, soil erosion, the loss of arable land, depletion of fish stocks, etc.
And he ended his book—and his presentation—with the eulogy given by Amory Lovins when Donella Meadows passed away:
When asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she'd always say that we have exactly enough time — starting now.
Meadows was the author of Limits to Growth, a report that explored the consequences of exponential growth in population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion on the earth’s ecosystems.
I tried, in vain, to ask about this inconsistency at the end of his talk. I can understand the desire to throw red meat at your audience (the red meat in this case is the promise of technology). And I can certainly see why some—maybe including Friedman—would believe that it's better to inspire people with hope than with fear. But I left the event bemoaning the disconnect between Friedman's apparent understanding of the scope of our challenges and the reality of their solutions. There is simply no way lifestyles as we know them can be maintained. That's true even if you don't believe in or understand Peak Oil. And it's true even if you believe in the promise of human ingenuity and technological advancement.
And then Friedman published this today:
Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”
We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...
We can’t do this anymore.
So, I'm confused. But when people like Friedman, Ballmers, and Bill Maher are all talking about the end of growth, now that gives me some hope.
image credit: Rebecca Blackwell/The Associated Press
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8 comments
Tom Friedman
From: Michael Harris, Apr 1, 2009 02:38 AM
Just an acknowledgment of Gwilym's willingness to drill down to what feels like the truth of the dynamic in play with regard to Mr. Friedman. Post Carbon Institute does a great job of articulating core issues - thank you for that. But I think there is a role, as pointed out by Gwilym, for being willing to shine light on the lack of courage among so many leaders, including Friedman. This lack of courage stems from a misconception that their ideas and words need to be carefully couched in the vernacular and at the level of those hearing the message. But the truth is, we should be very wary of this fear-based approach to progress as it simply reflects our inability to solve problems created by our current level of consciousness without moving to a new consciousness.
I do think it is cynical to think Friedman is simply co-opting the issue of day as suggested by the subsequent comment. Yet we do need to remove the myopic from the pedestal - or at least stop listening to them. Ironically, it is not the view from the pedestal that will help, it is the view within.
I too read the Lexus and the Olive Tree and loved it at the time. In retrospect, it was a phase of my life, like all phases, that represented an opening of a door through which I've been able to move into new realms. Let's optimistically think that this too is what Thomas Friedman is doing as he recognizes the limits to growth. There may be time left for his transformation to do some good, particularly if it can help foster an understanding of what is happening and the opportunity to seek a more spiritual orientation instead of a condition of heightened fear and violence.
re: Friedman
From: Anonymous, Mar 31, 2009 05:34 PM
You know, I read Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree, in which he unabashedly extols the virtues of globalized market capitalism. In that book, he patronizingly uses the term, turtle, to describe those who didn't want to or couldn't join the globalization bandwagon. Of course, globalized market capitalism is part of what got us into this current mess in the first place but, now, he doesn't acknowledge that. Nor does he address why he made the switch from globalization cheerleader to naysayer and self-made journalistic prophet for the movement to halt climate change. He may be a good writer and an engaging storyteller, but I fear Mr. Friedman is merely practicing what he preached early on and is capitalizing on the issue of the day.
Why all the hushed
From: Rhisiart Gwilym, Mar 11, 2009 06:11 PM
Why all the hushed pussyfooting around Friedman? He, and many other 'distinguished journalists' of the USuk mainstream media, are excellent examples of the sort of hacks, acceptable to power-holders because they have the 'right' attitudes and opinions, who have gained reputations out of all proportion to their actual abilities, or their severely limited breadth of knowledge and understanding.
As Chomsky and Herman detail in their Propaganda Model of Western media functioning, described in their famous classic 'Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media', good-thinkers such as Friedman are filtered-in to the corporate media, and are allowed to rise, and in many cases to gain ludicrously ill-conceived ideas of their own competence and influence, simply because they're useful to, and adulatory of, power, and because without prompting they know naturally how to say the 'right' things, and not to rock the corporate/imperial boat. They're selected and lavishly rewarded precisely for those anodyne qualities, not because of any virtuoso gifts of journalism.
It seems to me that a right description of the many Friedman-clones of the corporate media would have to include of necessity such words as 'delusional', 'laughably ill-informed', 'self-regarding', 'mediocre', 'blinkered' 'intellectually-inadequate', 'morally-null' and 'useful idiots'.
And now as the Titanic upends and begins its death-plunge, he and his ilk, and the ruling gangsters whom they serve, can no longer manage to go on refusing obdurately to notice that all is not well with things, and that we could be about to see a little protracted difficulty.
Even so, in their late catching up they're still not up to speed with the sort of detailed understanding of what's happening that the derided dissidents have been facing, discussing and refining amongst themselves, well beyond the range of the incorrigible, wilful myopia of such as Tom Friedman.
I find it difficult to see how you can take him seriously: on over-rated hack who's now about to be swept away into history's dumpster along with a lot of other such serviceable hacks who have been overtaken by events beyond their foreseeing or their understanding.
When the monument for the
From: Al, Mar 11, 2009 10:09 AM
When the monument for the New World Order is erected, Mr. Friedman
will be one of the 4 horsemen. At one time I respected his views,
but now I have come to see him as a 21st century reincarnation of
Manifest Destiny. Everything has it's limits!
Where do we go, next, though?
From: Ashwani Vasishth, Mar 11, 2009 08:32 AM
Other than the pique about peak oil being (potentially) dissed by Friedman, show me where to go, after I buy peak oil (which I do, by the way). Show me a place that is fundamentally different from the place Friedman would have us go. I take his fundamental message to be, we can't carry on this way. We can debate what is to be done, but show me what IS to be done!
Cheers,
Ashwani Vasishth
Light at the End of the Abyss?
From: Bloomer, Mar 10, 2009 10:00 PM
To be fair, Mr. Freidman in his book "Hot Flat and Crowded" does recognize the huge environmental challenges of our time. He also writes about the hard choices between environmental degradation and global growth. Compared to his previous books, I found this one much less optimistic of our planets' ability to sustain unlimited global growth. In his NY Times article that you quote his predictions are even more dire. Goes to show you, those who believe in climate change, peak oil and can see the irreversible environmental devastation of our planet, aren't always the stereotypical lazy, leftist-commie, lunatic that the main-stream press constantly portrays.