Hot, Flat, and Crowded

I recently finished Thomas Friedman's latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America, a sort of a sequel to his 2005 book The World Is Flat. He hopes to spark Code Green, an initiative for Americans to lead the world in clean energy production, higher efficiency standards, and reduced waste among other related things. He's working on an additional chapter, to be released in the next edition and is seeking input from readers. I submitted the below on his website.

I just finished reading HFC and previously read TWIF and have enjoyed them both. And while I appreciate Mr Friedman's zeal and practical advice for fixing our energy-climate mess, I feel it doesn't come within an order of magnitude of saving us. His recommendation to use less and become more efficient is akin to telling a family with massive debt and no job to spend less. Sure, it beats spending more, but they need to get a new job, pay down all the debt, and build up savings if they want to have any hope of a future. After the gains in efficiency are realized and alternative clean energy sources distributed, we still need to replant our forests, clean our water and air, and cool our planet.

A better analogy is pushing a ball down a hill. Imagine our environment is the stone ball that chased Indiana Jones when he took the Idol. We've been steadily pushing that ball for a couple hundred years down a slight hill. After tremendous effort, we finally got it to start rolling on its own, but we've only pushed harder every year. We've cut down forests, burned our finite fossil fuels, and eaten and used our planet's resources with unrelenting frenzy, dumping and spewing our waste where ever convenient. And now we're told we need to push that ball a little less. Meanwhile, the damage we've done is continuing on its own. The carbon we've already released will continue to heat the planet for centuries or more, the mines we've exhausted will continue to poison rivers, the species we've pushed to extinction will never return. We need to stop pushing altogether, and with singular purpose as a human species move to the other side of the rock and commit to the largest single endeavor man has ever begun and slow this rock down. After that Herculean feat is accomplished and we've managed to stop it, we need to redouble our efforts and redouble them again to push that rock back up the hill. We'll never get our environment back to where it was, but any state above our current one gives us a better chance of survival. The bottom of the hill is not a place where we want to end up. Easter Island holds a glimpse of that for us. There, the islanders wiped out all 17 species of trees to the very last one. Their population crashed from 20,000 to 2,000 once they exhausted everything exhaustible. There's no getting the ball back up the hill there. And if we don't get in front of this thing, if we don't undo the damage we've done, we'll end up at the bottom of the hill.

In addition to the plans for new clean energy, higher standards of efficiency, etc, we need to address how we're going to undo the damage already done to ensure this biosphere remains habitable. We can pepper the seas with iron to induce an algal bloom, we can spray water vapor in the air to seed clouds and increase our albedo, we can rebuild our forests tree by tree if need be, or better yet all of the above and more. But unless plans like these are incorporated into Code Green, we're doing little more than spending less on our children's credit cards.