Buy Cheap Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why The World Needs A Green Revolution - and How We Can Renew Our Global Future
Thomas L. Friedman's phenomenal number-one bestseller The World is Flat has helped millions of readers see the world in a new way. In this essential new book, Friedman takes a fresh and provocative look at two of the biggest challenges we face today: the global environmental crisis and America's surprising loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11. It is a groundbreaking account of where we stand now, and he shows us how the solutions to these two big problems are linked - how we can restore the world and revive America at the same time. Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the astonishing expansion of the world's middle class through globalization have 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, energy efficiency, and conservation that Friedman calls Code Green. This is a great challenge, Friedman explains, but also a great opportunity, and one that we cannot afford to miss. He argues that this cannot happen without American commitment and leadership. In vivid, entertaining chapters, Friedman makes it clear that the green revolution we need is like no revolution the world has seen. It will be the biggest innovation project in history; it will be hard, not easy; and it will change everything, from what you put into your car to what you see on your electric bill. But the payoff will be more than just cleaner air. It will inspire us to summon all the intelligence, creativity, boldness and concern for the common good that are our greatest human resources.Hot, Flat, and Crowded is classic Thomas L. Friedman: fearless, incisive, forward-looking, and rich in surprising common sense about the challenge - and the promise - of the future........
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Sunday, January 15, 2012
hot, flat, and crowded: why the world needs a green revolution - and how we can renew our global future
Saturday, January 14, 2012
common wealth: economics for a crowded planet
Buy Cheap Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
From one of the world's greatest economic minds, author of The New York Times bestseller The End of Poverty, a clear and vivid map of the road to sustainable and equitable global prosperity and an augury of the global economic collapse that lies ahead if we don't follow it
The global economic system now faces a sustainability crisis, Jeffrey Sachs argues, one that will overturn many of our basic assumptions about economic life. The changes will be deeper than a rebalancing of economics and politics among different parts of the world; the very idea of competing nation-states scrambling for power, resources, and markets will in some crucial respects become passŽ. The only question is how bad it will have to get before we face the unavoidable. We will have to learn on a global scale some of the hard lessons that successful societies have gradually and grudgingly learned within national borders: that there must be common ground between rich and poor, among competing ethnic groups, and between society and nature.
The central theme of Jeffrey Sachs's new book is that we need a new economic paradigm-global, inclusive, cooperative, environmentally aware, science-based-because we are running up against the realities of a crowded planet. The alternative is a worldwide economic collapse of unprecedented severity. Prosperity will have to be sustained through more cooperative processes, relying as much on public policy as on market forces to spread technology, address the needs of the poor, and to husband threatened resources of water, air, energy, land, and biodiversity. The "soft issues" of the environment, public health, and population will become the hard issues of geopolitics. New forms of global politics will in important ways replace capital-city-dominated national diplomacy and intrigue. National governments, even the U.S., will become much weaker actors as scientific networks and socially responsible investors and foundations become the more powerful actors.
If we do the right things, there is room for all on the planet. We can achieve the four key goals of a global society: prosperity for all, the end of extreme poverty, stabilization of the global population, and environmental sustainability. These are not utopian goals or pipedreams, yet they are far from automatic. Indeed, we are not on a successful trajectory now to achieve these goals. Common Wealth points the way to the course correction we must embrace for the sake of our common future........
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