Quotes/Statistics/Learnings/Points from the book "Hot, Flat and Crowded"

Some key points that I liked from the book "Hot, Flat and Crowded" by Thomas Friedman

1. A certain connection between work, achievement and accountability has been broken. America thinks it can borrow its way to prosperity.

2. US has been mortgaging its future instead of investing in it.

3. If all Americans could compare Berlin's luxurious central train station today with the grimy overcrowded Penn. st - it looks like US lost World War II

4. De-forestation in Indonesia and Brazil is responsible for more CO2 than all the world's cars, trucks, planes , ships and trains combined. About 20% of the global emissions.

5. Average cow expels 600 litres of methane a day !!! Methane is a deadlier greenhouse gas.

6. Difference between the earth being an ice ball and it being comfortable for living is only 6 degrees. Today our earth has fever.

7. America has invented a system of living on cheap fossil fuel foundation.By 2030 instead of one America and half in Europe there will be 8-9 America's

8. Through oil purchases American is helping strengthen the most intolerant, anti-modern, anti-western, anti women's rights and anti-pluralistic strain of Islam , which is propagated by Saudi Arabia.

9. American oil strategy seems to be - Maximize demand, minimize supply and make up the difference by buying as much as we can from people who hate us the most !

10. 1st Law or Petropolitics - the pace of freedom and price of oil move in different directions.

11. Larry Diamond - Of the 23 nations that derives a clear majority of their export income from oil and gas - not a single one is a democracy.

12. Edward O Wilson - Destroying a tropical forest and other species-rich eco-systems for profit is like burning all the paintings in Louvre to cook dinner

13. We are the only species that no animal or plant in nature depends on for its survival , yet we depend on the whole web of life for our survival.

14. Energy at its most basic is the capacity to do work.

15. The most frequent and difficult question we get from China is "If it is so good, why aren't you doing it?"

16. The green issue particularly the climate change does not pit have-vs-have-nots -it pits present against the future - the unborn grandchildren. The future can't lobby , organize or protest.

17. Oysteins Dahle - Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.