When flat meets crowded

I listened to a talk Thomas Friedman gave late last year at the London School of Economics on his new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded. It's thought-provoking stuff. Friedman predicts that energy and natural resources supply and demand will be the defining issue of the 21st century. He believes the nation that first succeeds in effecting an ET (energy technology) revolution will be well positioned geopolitically and economically. He hopes that nation will be the good ol' USA. In his view we've gotten tunnel vision in the wake of 9/11. We've become the United States of Fighting Terrorism. As he puts it, he's willing to walk through 20 metal detectors at Dulles Airport if on the other side of the last metal detector is a great project worthy of American inspiration and ingenuity.

Friedman told the following statistical anecdote to illustrate the coming energy crunch. There will be one billion additional people on the planet by 2020. Let's imagine we give each new person a 60-watt incandescent light bulb. Each bulb weighs .7 ounces. Put them all together and they weigh a total of 20,000 metric tons, or about the same as 15,000 Toyota Prius's. Let's assume that each person burns their light bulb an average of four hours a day. That will use 10,000 megawatts of electricity at any given moment. So in order for the next billion people to burn their single light bulb for only four hours a day will require somewhere around 20 new 500-megawatt coal burning power plants.

One of Friedman's think tank friends has come up with a new unit of measure -- the Americom. An Americom is any 300 million people who consume at the same rate as the typical American. In the 1950s there were two and a half Americoms (USA, Western Europe and Japan). Today there are nine Americoms (USA, Western Europe, Japan & East Asia, Latin America, Russia, two in India, and two in China). Friedman doesn't think the planet can sustain this many Americoms without a "Code Green" mobilization that rivals the response to the Soviet threat. Not the trendy "green revolution" of today in which no one gets hurt, as he describes it, but a real revolution. He quotes the mantra of the IT revolution -- "change or die." In that case, major corporations that couldn't adapt simply ceased to exist. Is Friedman being too apocalyptic? Most of us will live long enough to find out.