Author News and Book Reports
Thomas Friedman calls for a 'real' green revolution
The room was indeed hot, flat, and pretty crowded when New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas Friedman took the floor at the 2008 BookExpo America booksellers convention to introduce what was then his soon-to-be published new book Hot, Flat, And Crowded, which is now available in an expanded and updated trade paperback edition (Picador; November, 2009). Reading a passage called Where Birds Don't Fly from the beginning of his book, Friedman identified the mega trends in energy, climate change, petro dictatorships, bio diversity loss and energy poverty that are driving the world to become a very hot, flat, and crowded planet. Friedman next described a near-future world with too many Americans living 'carbon copy lives' and went on to read a passage from the book in which he surveys the problems inherent in a hot, flat and crowded world, and asks 'who will lead' the quest for clean power solutions? Calling for a 'real' green revolution, not just fundraising cocktail parties, with real and potentially painful change in America's corporate environmental responsibilities, Friedman closed his BEA presentation with a reading from the end of the book in which he questions the world's committment to a greener planet.
