Hot, Flat, and Crowded

I have just started reading this new book by Thomas Friedman ...an eye opening account of current global environmental crisis. Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the astonishing expansion of the world's middle class through globalization has produced a planet that is 'hot, flat,and crowded'. In just a few years it will be too late to fix things-unless there is a worldwide effort to replace our wasteful, inefficient energy practices with a strategy for clean energy.

He calls for Code Green . The world is getting crowded and hot. More people tapping computers and on the road means more competition for resources, more emissions. It's all "intensifying the extinction of plants and animals, and strengthening of petro-dictatorship." 

Please note that there were just 1 billion people on this planet in the year 1850. The population has gone up by 6.5 times ( to current 6.5 billion) in the year 2008. No other species has seen this kind of growth in numbers. This number is likely to go up further to 9 billion by 2050. This raises the most important question:

-Where will resources to feed these people come from?

I have just read 100 odd pages and I am already convinced, that we need to act now!...or else we do not have a choice.

Most of us unfortunately do not realize the gravity of situation ; its like "you know, if you jump off the top floor of an eighty-storey building, you can actually feel like you're flying for seventy-nine stories.It's the sudden stop at the end that gets you."

To borrow from the book 'we are running an uncontrolled experiment on the only home we have' 

I will post more as I read..