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Hot Flat And Crowded Summary

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Hot, Flat, and Crowded written by Thomas L. Friedman examines our need to become a sustainable country in not just the environment, but also in our financial markets. Friedman argues that the world is getting hot as a result of global warming (8). Our planet’s average temperature is rising. The increase can be attributed to humans and their use of large scale manufacturing that began with the Industrial Revolution when manual labor was starting to be replaced by machinery (68). Friedman’s next argues that world is getting flat due to the increase in high consuming middle classes brought on by technological, market and geopolitical events (8; 66). The combination of several factors including the invention of personal computers and the Internet, changes in transmission protocols, collapse of Communism, the Berlin Wall, and the Soviet Union led to …show more content…

When flat and crowded intersect you get the energy supply and demand problem. David Douglas, a chief sustainability officer for a corporation used this analogy: if you give 1 billion people a 60 watt incandescent light bulb and they all use their light bulbs four hours a day, that’s 10,000 watts at any given moment. You would still need about twenty new 500 megawatt coal burning plants just so the next 1 billion people can turn on their lights (68). We also have to keep in mind that burning coal releases CO2 and other pollutants into the air which then effects global warming. We have now brought in the concept of hot. Friedman also gives the example of the cities Doha and Dalian who have rapidly grown sprouting a “mini Manhattan” leading to much higher energy consumptions. He called this high consumption an “America lifestyle” saying that affluenza, the “unsustainable addition to economic growth was spreading all over the world

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