I recommend Thomas L. Friedman’s recent book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America. Friedman has done his homework for this book, talking with dozens of scientists, business leaders, policy analysts, and environmentalists. He argues that we face five major problems that have reached a crisis point today. As he writes, “The convergence of global warming, global flattening, and global crowding is driving those five big problems – energy supply and demand, petrodictatorship, climate change, energy poverty, and biodiversity loss – well past their tipping points into new realms we’ve never seen before, as a planet or as a species” (p. 37).

Friedman deserves special praise for highlighting the problems of biodiversity loss, or the extinction of species. Based on my reading of science sources over my years of doing test development work, this is a problem that our leaders have not dealt with effectively, and it is being accelerated by climate change.

The strengths of this book are its detail and its wide-ranging inquiry. It does have some weaknesses: Friedman’s tendency to personalize his analysis, as when we learn about his many visits with the global elite at posh spots throughout the world; occasional overly specific detail, as in the section on the future “Energy Internet” or “smart grid”; and his nearly exclusive focus on technological and business-oriented solutions, a focus that many environmentalists criticize.

I did appreciate the fact that he calls for the development of an “ethic of conservation,” even if he has doubts about whether major lifestyle changes are required in the new “energy-climate era.” Here is an excerpt related to this issue:

To become good stewards and good trustees, [according to MIchael J. Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard], “we will need to rein in our tendency to regard the earth and its natural resources as wholly at our disposal for present needs, wants, and desires. We have to develop new habits and attitudes towards consumption.”

Otherwise, whatever technologies we devise will simply be used to extend our current habits of profligate consumption to the huge, burgeoning middle classes of a hot, flat, and crowded world…. Does [this] mean that we, as individuals, have to edit our lifestyles down to a bare minimum, or get by with much less than the average American upper- or middle-class family consumes today? There is an anticapitalist, anticonsumerist, back-to-nature wing of the environmental movement that believes we should and almost delights in advocating that. By the way, that may be right, and should not be dismissed. My point is that we don’t know yet, because we have not tried even the obvious stuff that we do know would have real effects and would not involve fundamental changes in our lifestyle.

Telling every individual on the planet who wants or can afford a car that they cannot have one would be changing our lifestyle. But banning cars over a certain weight or engine size, or bringing maximum speed limits back down to 55 miles per hour, or banning taxis that are not hybrids – such efforts do not strike me as fundamentally cramping anyone’s lifestyle…. Forcing everyone to ride a bike to work would involve changing our lifestyle. But requiring municipalities to set aside bike lanes running from suburbs to inner cities doesn’t strike me as cramping anyone’s lifestyle (and might make our whole society healthier). [And Friedman goes through a list of many other examples] (pp. 192-193)

We have a new bicycle advocacy organization in Minnesota, the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota (BAM). Thanks to the hard work of many volunteers and generous donations from the Minnesota-based bike businesses Quality Bicyle Products, Erik’s Bike Shop, Penn Cycle, Park Tool, and Dero Bike Racks, the new organization is under way and has hired two staff members: Dorian Grilley, executive director, and Rita Ann Youngs, Director of Events, Marketing, and Promotions. Dorian was very successful as the executive director of the Parks and Trails Council of Minnesota.

Planning for the new organization picked up steam at last year’s Minnesota Bike Summit. While attending that event and hearing about the good work of the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin, I learned how effective an advocacy organization can be. The Wisconsin group works closely with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation and has employees working on a contract basis at DOT offices, staffing Safe Routes to Schools and bike education projects. There are so many policy, education, and advocacy issues to work on, and state-level coordination is needed, particularly since the bulk of transportation funding is managed by the states.

Any new organization or business will have its challenges when starting up, and BAM is no exception. They can use your membership now as they get going, particularly given our current economic downturn. So please go to their web site (still very much under construction), download a membership form, and mail it in with a check. If you can’t do that, consider volunteering some of your time. And put this date on your calendar: the 2009 Minnesota Bicycle Summit will coincide with the BAM annual meeting and will be on April 25 at Quality Bicycle Products in Bloomington. Contact me if you want to carpool from Northfield.

In my interactions with people who live in different parts of the United States, including people from my wife’s side of the family who live in warmer climates, I’m often struck by their visceral reaction at the mention of parts of our world that experience cold temperatures. They shiver when a name such as “Minnesota” is mentioned and say “Cold!” or something like that. Think of the reaction you have when you hear the names “Siberia” “Alaska,” or “Antarctica.” The reaction is milder for a place such as Minnesota, but it is there nonetheless.

Now, I’ve been thinking about the importance of this reaction here in the U.S., where a growing share of the population lives in warmer climates. Demographic shifts have moved the center of the U.S. population in a southwesterly shift for decades now, and it seems unlikely there will be northward shift any time soon (although climate change may affect that). All those people are accustomed to a warm climate and unfamiliar with a cold one. In fact, I would say they have a certain amount of what I call “cold intolerance.”

“Cold intolerance” is a medical term used for a symptom of some illnesses. It’s a severe bodily reaction to cold temperatures. However, I’m using the term here in a cultural sense to describe people’s negative attitude toward cold-climate places.

People who are cold intolerant will not be likely to visit a cold place–certainly not in the winter–nor will they likely want to move there to take a job or attend school. Nor will they be likely to move a company’s headquarters there, nor would they hold a convention there unless it is during a warm time of the year.

I think you see where I’m going with this: in a country (and world?) in which economic and political power is increasingly located in warmer climates, cold-climate regions will likely suffer from more and more cold intolerance, from decisions that are impacted by a lack of experience with living in a cold climate.

I’ve thought about this with regard to the recent merger of Northwest Airlines with Delta Airlines. The former was headquartered in Minneapolis, the latter in Atlanta. There was little discussion of locating the new headquarters in Minneapolis; it seemed to be largely assumed that it would be in Atlanta. To be sure, Delta is larger than Northwest and Atlanta is larger than Minneapolis-St. Paul, but neither are tremendously larger. High-paying jobs will be lost in Minneapolis-St. Paul and gained in Atlanta.

How is this cold intolerance affecting the Snowbelt? I’m open to your insights, particularly if you have facts and figures to back them up.

One further conclusion: I feel that cold intolerance means that northern areas will be more reliant on nurturing their own talent from within, because they will be less likely to import it from outside. Thus strong public education systems and strong government will be needed there. I realize there is currently a lot of migration from impoverished areas of the world to cold-climate regions, so my thesis is less accurate on a global scale than it is on a national scale.