Hot, flat and crowded

There are very few authors whose books I would dare buy or read without first having read a number of book reviews about them. But apart from economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, Thomas L. Friedman definitely ranks among these selected few.

He has a finger on the pulse of change and the innovation process, of foreign affairs and globalisation issues and, in more recent years, of the ICT world and now... The Green Revolution.

When he wrote about the Middle East in From Beirut To Jerusalem you could feel and imagine the blood flowing in the Lebanese and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.

In his The Lexus And The Olive Tree he brought the challenges of high tech and high finances bang into our personal libraries while in The World Is Flat, which to my mind was somewhat pretentiously subtitled as A Brief History Of The 21st Century, he resorted to a demystifying approach that enabled us to understand better the convergence between a number of countries across various continents as the global supply chain for services and manufacturing developed faster than anyone would have imagined or realised. He not only argued how the world became flat, but also appraised this so called "flat world" of his from an American perspective, from that of developing countries, companies and even the geopolitical dimension.

It takes some imagination to write a chapter titled Infosys (the Indian ICT Corporation) Versus Al-Qaeda. But that is what he did indeed, arguing that Al-Qaeda has learned to use many of the instruments for global collaboration that Infosys uses but, instead of producing products and profits with them, it has produced mayhem and murder.

With our ever-growing interdependence and convergence, he feels that the flat world unfortunately is a "friend" of both Infosys and Al-Qaeda. He even had the daring imagination to contrast 11/9 (when the Berlin Wall was dismantled) Versus 9/11; doing so by claiming that these two dates represent the two competing forms of imagination at work in the world today: The creative imagination of 11/9 and the destructive imagination of 9/11.

After writing such an impressive extended essay called The Power Of Green last year for The New York Times, where he serves as the foreign affairs correspondent, it was only natural and inevitable that he would shortly turn to the so-called Green Revolution. And this is exactly what he did in his recent and latest best-seller Hot, Flat & Crowded.

I was once taken to task by a local columnist for warming to an advocate of globalisation when I happen to be a liberal-oriented social democrat. Quite frankly, I think the two go hand in hand. Those socialists who think that they can neutralise globalisation by merely rubbishing or treating it as if it does not exist must be living in a state of denial.

But I am sure that this time round after reading Mr Friedman's latest book this local "critic", who is a journalist who I respect a lot, will definitely change his perception.

It is true that Mr Friedman has been accused of merely updating Teddy Goldsmith's Blueprint For Survival, which goes back some 40 years in time, but his recent book is an authoritative analysis as to why business-as-usual capitalism is dead in the water. Interestingly the book hit the US bookstalls before the financial and economic meltdown.

Well before the US Presidential campaign, he argued that the US will lead the rest of the world into an ultra-low carbon, totally sustainable future. Whether it will succeed in doing so or not remains arguable and debatable. But it is far from a strange coincidence that Barack Obama's victory has been considered to have signalled the rebirth of US environmental policy. So much so that the election result itself was greeted with optimism by leading American and European environmental groups.

When we think of China we instantly tend to think of environmental damage and pollution.

Little do we realise that it is bound to become one of the leading exporters of renewable as well as that it is starting to address very seriously many of its environmental challenges, particularly in terms of massive new investments in environmental technologies.

Where I fully agree with the author is when he claims that even when he looks at this surprising development, he still believes that China's "environmental revolution" will not really come to anything unless the US blinks first.

What is not clear yet is whether the Chinese will be doing what they are doing for their own sustainability; purely to boost their own exports further or else for both reasons.

There are times when the flaws in Mr Friedman's writing give an added sense of urgency and immediacy to his writing, rendering it even more human through its imperfection. So no one should be surprised if books will soon be written to offer a counter perspective to his theories on the Green Revolution as they did on his previous theories on globalisation.

Mr Brincat is a Labour member of Parliament.

brincat.leo@gmail.com