Thomas Friedman’s Green Revolution: The New Book for the Left & Right

Thomas Fried­man’s new book has final­ly hit the stands. Ini­tial­ly, it was going to be titled “Green is the New Red, White and Blue.” But some­how it got released with the far less art­ful — though more descrip­tive — title, Hot, Flat, and Crowd­ed: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew Amer­i­ca. When Fried­man came to Stan­ford last year, he pre­viewed many of his argu­ments in a talk that you can catch on iTunes. But, to boil it down, his argu­ment is that a “green rev­o­lu­tion” makes for smart eco­nom­ic, nation­al secu­ri­ty and envi­ron­men­tal pol­i­cy, and it’s an argu­ment that gets fleshed out in a fair amount of depth in the new work. Despite the unwieldy title, it’s vir­tu­al­ly a giv­en that mil­lions of copies will be sold. And I would­n’t be sur­prised if it brings about a real shift in the nation­al debate — that is, if it helps define what a green rev­o­lu­tion real­ly means and demon­strates how it can make nation­al strate­gic sense on mul­ti­ple lev­els. That’s a gift that Fried­man has. For more on this, check out Fried­man’s talk today on NPR’s Fresh Air, where he goes into more depth and offers some can­did thoughts on the pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates and their envi­ron­men­tal poli­cies. You can lis­ten here: iTunesRSS FeedStream Here.

Here’s a quick quote from the inter­view: The oppo­nents have called Green “lib­er­al, tree hug­ging, girly man, sis­sy, unpa­tri­ot­ic, vague­ly French, and basi­cal­ly what I’m out to do in this book is to rename Green — it’s geopo­lit­i­cal, geostrate­gic, geoe­co­nom­ic, inno­v­a­tive, com­pet­i­tive, patri­ot­ic: Green is the new Red, White, and Blue.” …

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The World is Flat: The #1 Free Pod­cast on iTune­sU


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