The Earth: Hot Flat, and Crowded

In Tom Friedman's book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, there are three major areas of concern in the world that are named in the title. The world is getting hot, flat, and crowded. Specifically, the world is getting hot from global warming, the world is getting flat from the rise and growth of the middle class and the world is getting crowded from the increased population.

As John Holdren, environmental policy professor at Harvard says, when your body temperature surpasses 102 degrees Fahrenheit, it tells you something is wrong. Similarly, the world is telling us there is something wrong by the melting of polar ice caps from the increasing temperature. Objects that release greenhouse gases, such as cars, stay inside the ozone layer which creates a climate change of increased temperature. With the number of people living on this planet and the number of items that are dangerous to the world's environment that those people use, the world's climate has been changing and will keep changing drastically. Ted Turner, founder of CNN, keeps and plain simple saying, "We are too many people- that's why we have global warming. Too many people are using too much stuff." That's just the thing, we should stop producing so many things that cannot be recycled and the processes of producing these things warms the planet up because of the factories that dig up non-renewable sources, like coal, which comes out as mostly carbon dioxide and other harmful gases. To prevent this temperature rise, we should alter the way we produce items and package items in recyclable packaging.

As the middle classes rises, the thought of more people consuming sounds like a great thing. However, the world becoming "economically equal" which means there are more people who have the chance to become part of the middle class and that percent that are not able to move up become upset. Those people who are upset can join groups where they can try and hurt the people who are part of the country whose middle class did not accept them. Also, this equality can be dangerous because the more people there are to consume, the more products companies will produce. The increase in production uses a lot of energy, natural resources, land, and water and in exchange emits greenhouse gases that can harm the environment. It is apparent that there is a set amount of energy, minerals, water, and forests in the world that can easily be used up, so there could be competition between developed countries for these necessities for production. One unpopular way of stunting the growth of the middle class is to decrease the importance of education, but the more practical idea would increase the prices of products so people would not buy more and companies would not produce more.

One last serious problem to be dealt with is the rapidly increasing population. There are about 6.7 billion people living in the world today and it is estimated by the United Nations that there will be more than 9 billion by the year 2050. The population explosion is obviously due to improvements in health care, disease extermination, and economic development, but these are part of our daily lives that we are thankful for. But not everyone enjoys these in improvements like the U.S. In fact, in a lot of poor countries such as Afghanistan, Liberia, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, their populations will sky rocket. And if all the young people that live there don’t get their basic freedom and needs met they will demonstrate their feelings with violence, civil unrest, and extremism. This can be helped by passing a law that governs how many children a woman can have, have free birth control available, and instead of giving welfare checks to people for each baby they, have the government pay people for not having babies or adopting children.