'World is Flat' author does it again, focuses on going green

— -- After three Pulitzer Prizes, four best-selling books and a couple of decades as a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, Thomas Friedman has his role down pat. Mixing fact-heavy reporting with a conversational tone, he produces cogent analyses of the most important developments of our time.

In Hot, Flat and Crowded, his newest book, Friedman crafts a timely manifesto from separate intellectual strands on energy, the environment and geopolitics. His main argument: the biggest challenges confronting the U.S. — a debilitating dependence upon foreign sources of carbon-based energy and a battered image abroad — actually represent an enormous opportunity.

On its current path, the U.S. is funneling enormous wealth to oil barons who hate us in return for polluting fuels that are pushing the climate toward disaster. But by going full throttle to develop new "green" energy sources, the U.S. could simultaneously cut off the flow of dollars to oil-rich dictators in Russia, Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia; avert disastrous climate change; boost our competitiveness; grow millions of jobs; and burnish America's tarnished international image.

Whew. It seems like a no-brainer. Others may fret over costly environmental cleanups leading to forgone growth, but Friedman sees nothing but a self-reinforcing spiral of profit and virtue — if only the political will can be mobilized to make it so. To underscore the point, he gives this era the somewhat clunky moniker, the "Energy-Climate Era."

Hot, Flat and Crowded is vintage Friedman: cutting-edge analysis laden with irksome name-dropping and too-clever-by-half catchphrases ("No Mullah Left Behind," "Global Weirding"). By page 12, after both a crown prince and corporate chief executive have been described as personal friends, the reader can be forgiven for wondering whether the author ever speaks with anyone who's not a pal.

Friedman's point also is subtly undermined by something he leaves curiously unaddressed. The last time this author brought us a "big idea" requiring action, he helped lay the intellectual foundation for the 2003 war with Iraq, which most Americans now say was not worth fighting. So the reader can be forgiven for wondering, what might he be overstating this time?