Week 1 Part C

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

The four chapters of Hot, Flat, and Crowded we were required to read were very interesting. The author Thomas Friedman is an excellent writer making the book was an easy read for me. It was so intriguing I would like to read the rest of the book in my spare time. In the chapters we read, Friedman explores several ideas of the human population and how it has affected our planet. One section where Friedman looks at the population and how it affects our planet and resources is an example using light bulbs. With the exponential increase in the human population we will soon have another billion people on the planet. If we give each person of this billion one light bulb it doesn’t seem like much. The light bulb doesn’t weigh more than an ounce but all of them together weigh about 20,000 tons. If these billion people each use their light bulb for only four hours a day we would still need 500 new coal powered power plants. Statistics like this are found throughout the chapters we read and some of them blew my mind. I know many of these concepts and had heard them before but when you quantify situations like the light bulb, the staggering numbers are alarming and defiantly make the point much stronger and member able. Throughout the book I feel that Friedman’s opinion is present. Although he does present information from creditable sources. Even though his opinion is there he uses sources and information justifying it.