Examines America's loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11, and the global environmental crisis, and shows how the solutions to these two problems are linked. Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the astonishing expansion of the worldś middle class through globalization have produced a planet that is "hot, flat, and crowded." Already the earth is being affected in ways that threaten to make it dangerously unstable. In just a few years, it will be too late to fix things--unless the United States steps up now and takes the lead in a worldwide effort to replace our wasteful, inefficient energy practices with a strategy for clean energy, energy efficiency, and conservation that Friedman calls Code Green.