That almost all critics acknowledge Thomas Friedman can write well is no surprise. Friedman won three Pulitzer Prizes, and his book From Beirut to Jerusalem won the National Book Award. His book The Lexus and the Olive Tree won the 2000 Overseas Press Club Award for best foreign policy book. Given Friedman's prominence (President Obama mentioned reading Hot, Flat, and Crowded in 2009), it is no wonder that this book has been widely discussed. Critics of Hot, Flat, and Crowded all acknowledge that Friedman has woven a gripping and at times frightening tale of the world's possible future. What critics do with the book beyond that, though, differs.

For example, business publications acknowledge the threats to both the American economy and current practices inherent, but then they treat it as a challenge to be met (as Friedman would no doubt desire, given his rhetoric throughout the volume). For example, writing for the HR journal People and Strategy, David Miller positions the book mainly for its challenge to existing paradigms. He labels it as a "must read," and praises Friedman for his ability to articulate complex trends but also mentions that some have tagged Friedman as an "extraordinary self-aggrandizer" who oversimplifies and picks his evidence selectively. Annabell Beerel, writing for the New Hampshire Business Review, makes her review of the book into a kind of call-and-response editorial, crying out for a "new paradigm" in which we all have a more holistic and humanistic focus.

Anita McAnear, writing for Learning and Leading With Technology, uses the book as a kind of tool to drive creativity and innovation in education—and education for the goals of creativity and innovation. In an extended review in Business Ethics Quarterly, Dennis Collins provides a lengthy summary of Friedman's points, using them as a springboard to discuss a broad spectrum, holistic ethics of stewardship. Writing for Christian Century, Cindy Crosby makes a similar move, linking Friedman's call for a green revolution to Christian ethics.

One of the few critics to address the sloppiness of Friedman's style is Andrew Ferguson, who reviewed the book for Commentary. Ferguson finds the writing padded, vulgar, and egotistical, and, worse for those who are persuaded by Friedman, he finds Friedman's reasoning "sloppy." Though Tom Prugh (in his essay for World Watch) finds Friedman's reasoning in general much more persuasive than does Ferguson, he finds a crucial flaw at the heart of Friedman's argument: the idea that technology can solve this problem. Pat Choate, writing for the American Conservative, identifies both a focused/specific problem with Friedman's argument and a general/ideological one. The specific problem is that for these technological innovations to reach the market, they must pass through the American patent system, which Choate identifies as a bottleneck slowing down progress. The ideological issue is Friedman's commitment to globalization and his mislabeling (or misunderstanding) of what constitutes free trade. Choate too finds issue with Friedman's verbose style. But he does what few other reviews do: he places Hot, Flat, and Crowded in a lineage providing historical context. Choate sees Hot, Flat, and Crowded as parallel to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which kicked off the public environmental movement in America. In the end, this might be the best summation of Friedman's work: it might do for carbon-based fuels (those driving the greenhouse effect) what Silent Spring did for pesticides. It might change both policy and practice. Given the varied responses to Hot, Flat, and Crowded, one might see Friedman's repetitive style as an attempt to define the debate. By hammering those three terms home, he focuses reader response, which, in a debate as wild and shifting as that over global warming, is no small achievement.