New York Times columnist Tom Friedman will have a new book out in September, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America, that argues "that the convergence of global warming, global flattening (the rise of middle classes all over the world), and global crowding (the population boom) is driving five key trends that will define the 21st century".

According to an article by Danny Shea in the Huffington Post,

"Friedman argues that those five trends — energy and resource supply and demand, petro-dictatorship, biodiversity loss, climate change, and energy poverty — have all been driven past a tipping point such that they have created a new era of history: the energy climate era.

"We're not post-something anymore," Friedman said. "We're not post-war, we're not post-Cold War, we're not post-post Cold War. We're pre-something. And what we're pre-...is the energy climate era, defined by these five problems going over a tipping point. And how we manage these five problems, I believe, is really gonna define the stability or instability of the 21st century."

Friedman talks about an era of strange new weather patterns, which he refers to as "global weirding". "We're gonna get hotter hots, longer droughts, heavier rains, heavier snowfalls." He also warns that we are likely to witness "extinction rates 1,000 times the norm.

Friedman argues that the solution to these problems will require "a serious revolution," and he calls for the development of an "energy internet," which he defines as "basically a smart grid that goes into a smart home that's connected to a smart car, basically, where all your devices are on the internet and can day-trade electrons for you."

"Only if we got abundant, cheap, clean reliable electrons could we deal with climate change, petro-dictatorship, biodiversity loss, energy poverty, and energy resource supply and demand. That is the cure."