The American Spectator

p> strong> Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America br> By Thomas L. Friedman br> (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 438 pages, $27.95) /strong> /p>

Poor Thomas Friedman, he tries so hard. He wants to explain everything — energy, poverty, world climate catastrophes — and offer a comprehensive solution as well. The only problem he doesn’t much know what he is talking about.

Hot, Flat and Crowded is the latest of Friedman’s reports from his globetrotting for the New York Times. The “hot,” of course, means global warming. Friedman is a devotee and does present some pretty convincing research that we are setting off changes in the earth’s climate that may be hard to undo. The “flat” is a reference to Friedman’s previous book, The World Is Flat, in which he tried to convince liberals that globalization isn’t such a bad thing after all. “Crowded” is warmed-over Paul Ehrlich in which Friedman frets about world overpopulation. (In fact, the numbers are generally expected to level off at around 8-10 billion in 2050. Europe and Japan are already depopulating.)

These concerns don’t really hang together but no matter, Friedman has the solution to them all — America must “go green.” We should develop wind, solar and other “renewable” technologies, promote conservation and a build a “smart grid.” “[T]he best way to re-energize America, rebuild its self-confidence and moral authority, and propel it forward as a society is by focusing on the green agenda….Green is the new red, white and blue!”

p>Now don’t get upset, Friedman is not one of those coercive utopians such as Al Gore who want people to take to the streets shutting down coal plants. He actually likes “markets” — or thinks he does, at least. Having made numerous processions through Silicon Valley, Friedman acknowledges that free enterprise has its virtues. br> /p>

Code Green…is a “quintessential American opportunity.”…It requires enormous amounts of experimentation — the kind you find in our great research universities and national laboratories; it requires lots of start-up companies that are not afraid to try, risk fail, and try again;… it requires thousand of people working in their garages, trying thousands of things.

br> All this is in quest of the Holy Grail — “Clean Electrons” — and like some Huey Long of the Age of Facebook, Friedman is ready to tie his solution to everything: