Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America
Thomas L. Friedman
 In the book, Friedman addresses America’s surprising loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11 and the global environmental crisis. He advocates that global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the expansion of the global middle class is leading to a convergence of hot, flat, and crowded. The solution to the environmental threat and the best way for America to renew its purpose is linked: take the lead in a worldwide effort to replace wasteful, inefficient energy practices with a strategy for clean energy, energy efficiency, and conservation. This means that the big economic opportunities have shifted from IT (Information Technology) in recent decades to ET (renewable Environmental Technologies). Friedman frequently uses 2050 as a marker for when it will be too late for our world to reverse the harmful effects of climate change. Friedman writes that the needed green revolution of the title would be more ambitious than any project so far undertaken: It will be the biggest innovation project in American history; and it will change everything from transportation to the utilities industry. This project is described in terms of nation-building. The book alleges we've gone from the "Cold War Era" to the "Energy-Climate Era", marked by five major problems: growing demand for scarcer supplies, massive transfer of wealth to petrodictators, disruptive climate change, poor have-nots falling behind, and an accelerating loss of biodiversity. A green strategy is not simply about generating electric power, it is a new way of generating national power. Many of the primary points of the book were built out of his New York Times Magazine essay "The Power of Green" and the "Foreign Policy" article "The First Law of Petropolitics"