Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America is a book by New York Times Foreign Affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, proposing that the solutions to global warming and the best method to regain the United States' economic and political stature in the world are to embrace the clean energy and green technology industries.

[citation needed] In the book, Friedman addresses what he sees as America's loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11 and the global environmental crisis.

The book alleges we've gone from the "Cold War Era" to the "Energy-Climate Era", marked by five major problems: growing demand for scarcer supplies, massive transfer of wealth to dictators, disruptive climate change, the lower class falling behind, and an accelerating loss of biodiversity.

[2] Many of the primary points of the book were built out of Friedman's New York Times Magazine essay, "The Power of Green",[3] and the Foreign Policy article, "The First Law of Petropolitics".

[4] The book has been criticized for ignoring overpopulation as the root cause of the problems it analyzes, as Friedman writes extensively about resource scarcity, but does not address excessive demand.