Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It

by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Max Wilbert

“This disturbing but very important book makes clear we must dig deeper than the normal solutions we are offered.”―Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia Works

" Bright Green Lies exposes the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of leading environmental groups and their most prominent cheerleaders. The best-known environmentalists are not in the business of speaking truth, or even holding up rational solutions to blunt the impending ecocide, but instead indulge in a mendacious and self-serving delusion that provides comfort at the expense of reality. They fail to state the We cannot continue to wallow in hedonistic consumption and industrial expansion and survive as a species. The environmental debate, Derrick Jensen and his coauthors argue, has been distorted by hubris and the childish desire by those in industrialized nations to sustain the unsustainable. All debates about environmental policy need to begin with honoring and protecting, not the desires of the human species, but with the sanctity of the Earth itself. We refuse to ask the right questions because these questions expose a stark truth―we cannot continue to live as we are living. To do so is suicidal folly. ‘Tell me how you seek, and I will tell you what you are seeking,’ the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said. This is the power of Bright Green It asks the questions most refuse to ask, and in that questioning, that seeking, uncovers profound truths we ignore at our peril.”― Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Farewell Tour

Genres: Nonfiction, Environment, Climate Change, Politics, Science, Ecology, Economics

478 pages, Paperback

First published March 16, 2021

About the author

Derrick Jensen is an American author and environmental activist living in Crescent City, California. He has published several books questioning and critiquing contemporary society and its values, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. He holds a B.S. in Mineral Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. He has also taught creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison and Eastern Washington University.

Reviews

[David Wineberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

True environmentalists don’t buy into The Green New Deal. They think all the encouraging words from other environmentalists are bright green lies. Because at bottom, all the positive noises are simply a sop to industrialized society and the giant industries that run it. And according to Bright Green Lies, the book, it’s all about maintaining the current opulent lifestyle, and continuing to destroy the planet. No sacrifices will be made that might slow the consumer economy.

This dramatic, sane and passionate book lays out the lies with evidence like simple math and direct observation. It is a straightforward deconstruction of things like “renewable” energy, “sustainable” agriculture and pointless optimism that it is not too late if mankind would just take any kind of action right now. The book is wide-ranging and constantly challenging of common knowledge and perceptions. From hydropower to soil remediation, everything gets its moment to fail.

It is only not too late if mankind is willing to back away from 21st century luxuries. That means abandoning capitalism, because capitalism cannot stand retrenching. It is all about digging up resources without payment, while obtaining huge subsidies for doing it. And more. Always more.

Sadly, environmentalists are all about the subsidies too. Like all capitalists, they want government to foot the bill so they can succeed, financially. It is not about saving the planet at all, the authors have found. Lifestyle over ecology is the operating manifesto, whether they admit it or not say Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert, the three authors of Bright Green Lies.

These three are clearly on the side of the planet. They even use the pronoun who for any animal, bird or insect, as if they were on the same plane as humans, a very nice touch in a relentless book of destructive practices bent on eliminating every other species and burning every bit of carbon:
-Extinctions have gone from just over a hundred a day to more than two hundred every day, just in our lifetime.
-Topsoil on the prairies has gone from 12 feet deep in the late 1800s, to inches today, requiring constant input of artificial fertilizers on what was once the most fertile land on the continent.
-“If your culture trashes your environment and destroys almost all the old growth forest in a couple of centuries, then your civilization is not sustainable.”
-Agriculture, the biggest crime of all, is “biotic cleansing”.
-Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron.
-A green industrial facility is an impossibility.

A lot of the book is dedicated to debunking renewable systems. Solar, wind, tidal and geoengineering projects all require gigantic convoys of tax dollars, while providing no real reduction in greenhouse gases over fossil fuels. For one thing, all the mining, manufacturing, transporting, assembling and maintaining of these systems add tremendously to the environmental toll. Wind and solar are not dependable sources. And environmentalists lie about how they are taking over in some economies. Their math is bogus, cherry-picking short periods of otherwise slack demand on a sunny or windy off-day to report that renewables carried the burden almost entirely on their own. They then attribute dominance of renewables to the entire country. This, the book says, is how Germany got its reputation in wind and solar. The truth is much more pathetic. Environmentalists have learned to game the system.

There is an entire chapter on dams and hydropower, long considered the poster child for renewables and sustainables. The authors show how the dams (they say there are two million in the USA alone) wreak havoc with animals, birds, fish and insects as well as topsoil and air. The interruption of water flows prevents fish from doing what they must to contribute to the balance, with hundreds of other creatures dependent on them. Silts no longer flow downstream. Flooding no longer feeds the forests, meadows and plains. Species like the huge variety of salmon all over the world, now face extinction thanks to dams. The huge amount of natural resources commandeered to build and maintain the dams makes them far from benign players in the carbon buildup. Not to mention that they are responsible for nearly a quarter of the methane that escapes into the atmosphere from manmade sources. As with every method and means they explore, the chapter ends with the question – call this sustainable?

The same story applies in the chapters on wind and solar. It’s hard to tell which one is worse. They consume vast amounts of concrete, steel and rare earths. They are hugely expensive and are only competitive thanks to massive subsidies at every step. They kill endangered species. They are dependent on weather and so are not at all dependable sources of energy. There are scary stats to ponder: Scotland cleared 17,000 acres of 14 million trees to install wind energy systems. Was this a good trade?

Not for the first time, the authors show that mathematically, there just isn’t enough space, money or resources to make the whole civilization run on renewables. They say it would take 80 billion metric tons of extraction to effect the switch. The planet would basically have to devote everything it produces for years to come to pull off this conversion. And it wouldn’t be worth it because ultimately, renewables provide a net-zero reduction in carbon emissions per dollar. Not net zero as in carbon reduction, but net zero difference from fossil fuels. It’s an environmental con game for the authors.

Clearly, many environmentalists have been drinking the corporate Kool-Aid. They get agreement from Big Industry by softening their attacks and promising everyone can keep doing what they’re already doing while they somehow heal the planet. This is pie in the sky environmentalism. The truth is much more grim.

As long as corporations are considered people, they will hide their true calling – milking government and the planet for as much money as possible. And for anyone who has followed my reviews, it is clearly the corporations in their immoral quest to rule the world that all this rests on. The entire global economy is based on taking carbon out of the ground and putting it in the air by burning it. The cost of doing this is trivial; there is essentially no charge for it. Paying for the effects of it is not to be mentioned in the same breath as corporations.

One of the more insulting episodes is the ongoing LEED scam, in which high-priced engineers certify the environmental friendliness of buildings and factories. They give the example of the ideal home, displayed at a Las Vegas trade show in 2013. This LEED-certified platinum home is 7000 square feet, has a four-car garage and redundant energy systems. A perfect fit for the environmentally conscious American.

Another travesty I found is an energy report in The Economist. It projects that by just 2030, Saudi Arabia will consume as much energy just for air-conditioning as it sells in petroleum. This is nothing like sustainability. Sustainability is an urban legend – wishful thinking only.

For me, the most dramatic quote in the book comes from Corporate anthropologist Jane Anne Morris. She wrote in Help! I’ve Been Colonized and I Can’t Get Up: “Corporate persons have constitutional rights to due process and equal protection that human persons, affected citizens, don’t have. For noncorporate human citizens, there’s a democracy theme park where we can pull levers on voting machines and talk into microphones at hearings. But don’t worry; they’re not connected to anything and nobody is listening except for us. What regulatory law regulates is citizen input, not corporate behavior.”

There is a remarkable chapter on recycling as well. The book examines the component parts of various recyclables, showing where they came from, what properties they have, how they are made, how they are saved, and how much of them can appear in new products. It is not very encouraging, though there are some bright spots. Bottles are recycled at the rate of 10%. Clothing is pretty much a disaster, with the average American consumer purchasing nearly 50 new pieces every year and disposing of others. Steel has a pretty decent story but it is clearly an exception.

When they speak publicly about their hard truths, the authors find there is quite naturally resistance. Participants refuse to consider solutions that would reduce their luxuries and their lifestyles. Their criticism is couched in - but that would hurt the economy! Which the authors take as further proof (if any were needed) that it is the economy that is destroying the planet.

There’s lots to argue about in these 400 pages. Just one example: they try to pin the death of birds on wind turbines, even to the drop in pressure from the blades that can burst the heart of a passing bird. The numbers they come up with amount to under two million, way down the list from the real killers.

Ordinary housecats annually kill 2.5 billion birds in North America alone. And for no reason other than boredom. The authors acknowledge this, but seem to think it is somehow natural, acceptable, and/or irrelevant, which it is not. The seven billion humans on this planet keep a billion cats as pets. Compare this to the 35 remaining Scottish wildcats the book mentions several times, or the 3000 total number of tigers left in the world. It is another instance of Man’s sheer weight upsetting yet another balance. We have domesticated the cat into a weapon of mass destruction for our own simple pleasure.

There are simply not enough fish in the ocean for a billion housecats, as we are finding out now. Housecats are not benign beings in the environment. Like Man, they are removed from the ecological system, not dependent on any other species and not participating in any other chain. Every other living thing is dependent on other beings for its existence and can only exist because of them. Not so Man. Or cats. These exceptions are proving to be intolerable to the health of the planet.

Their conclusion, they say, is simple: to stop destroying the planet, stop destroying the planet. They mean this literally. In the conclusions, they show that cleanup experiments from England to India show that nature rushes back in given half a chance. Grasses revitalize the soil, birds are attracted to the increased presence of insects, top predators keep the ruminants from destroying the plant growth, and the soil comes alive with literally trillions of interactions between species from bacteria on up the chain. Unexpected and unpredicted relationships show how quickly nature can restore the balance, but it means letting nature take control, and that is something Man will not even consider.

They take the 3Rs of environmentalism (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) and add three of their own – Refuse, Resist, and Restore. These are fighting words and show the authors’ true colors.

Let there be no doubt, this is a tough book. The reality of restoring balance means Man sacrificing what he has built. Cities can never be carbon neutral. Vertical farming is a nice demo project, but it does not scale. Cities will always have to outsource to supply themselves, pushing the pollution and the carbon onto others, for a huge net loss – somewhere else. Industrial agriculture can never be sustainable. Nor can mining or manufacturing. As long as Man insists on transporting everything globally, the planet will suffer the consequences.

The book provides no acceptable path to success. It is either do it right now or suffer the consequences. But in a country where getting people to wear masks during a pandemic has failed miserably, and people protested for months when the government sought to eliminate incandescent light bulbs in favor of LEDs, any kind of sacrifice at all will not play. The authors show that stopping deforestation and restoring logged lands would remove more carbon from the air than is generated by all cars (over a billion of them). And a mere 2% increase in carbon sequestration in soil would offset 100% of greenhouse gas emissions. But there is zero will to do these things.

The prize will go to whomever figures out how to make palatable the sacrifices that are minimum requirements to save mankind from itself. Bright Green Lies isn’t it, but it does call out the environmental movement for its bogus positions and hypocrisy. Is that a help?

David Wineberg

[Gretchen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bright Green Lies is the most important environmental book of 2021.
With an environment-friendly president in the White House, we have an opportunity to address the climate emergency in a meaningful way. But recent studies prove that while green technology can reduce emissions, scaling that technology will cost us dearly. Lithium batteries require harmful mining and habitat destruction. Building wind turbines requires the creation of concrete and steel, which -- globally -- is responsible for 25% of all emissions. Plus, the amount of habitat destruction involved in the creation of solar fields and wind farms is unimaginable. In the US there's talk that we would need to turn over land equivalent to Utah and Wyoming combined.
The authors expertly pick apart the fable that bright green environmentalists (who believe technology will save the Earth) are pushing. Instead, they argue, humans must address the plague of overconsumption of resources. We must pull back from destroying the planet and restore its wetlands, grasslands, and forests -- the most efficient systems for absorbing CO2.
An urgent and important read!

[Sunil · Rating 5 out of 5]

A scathing polemic of an deceitful industry.

So-called "green energy" is a cauldron of barely-concealed scandals.
Jensen, Keith and Wilbert bring these scandals to the surface of awareness, one horror at a time.

In this Bright Green Lies is reminiscent of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a work that brought to consciousness the hazards and horrors of careless use of agricultural chemicals. I believe that this book is as important to understanding the world that we've made as Carson's book was.

Creating a catalogue of hidden horrors would be shocking enough.
But given the history and claims of the environmental movement Jensen goes further.
He examines the question of why the environmental movement (as well as people in general) have stubbornly refused to see these horrors.

They have been obvious. They've been right in front of our face.
But at a collective level we chose wilful ignorance rather than accepting the hard realities.

It's always difficult to read work that shows us things that we don't want to see.
Even being convinced that promises of the green energy industrial complex are false and lead to terrible places, I wish I could live in the world where those promises were true ones.

But the harsh look at reality is tempered by a deep respect for life itself.
This book has heart.

[Jay Storey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think that every person who considers themselves an environmentalist should read this book. Even if you don’t agree with the authors (personally, I have no doubt that the vast majority of what they say is right), it will at least give you something to think about.

The book is a scathing indictment of the ‘bright greens’ – environmentalists who have become cheerleaders for the so-called ‘renewable’ technologies: solar and wind power, electric vehicles, etc.

Regarding renewable energy sources, the book claims that:
1. They will never make more than a slight dent in the use of fossil fuels.
2. Even if by some miracle they could replace fossil fuels, their impact on the environment would be virtually as bad.

Regarding electric vehicles, they have pretty much the same view I do – a car is a car is a car. Whether it’s powered by gasoline or batteries, it still has a devastating impact on the planet. I have always guessed that this was the case, but this book lays out the problem in minute (some might even say too fine) detail. And bear in mind that while only one component (oil) needs to be extracted from the Earth to run a gas-powered vehicle, lithium batteries have at least 5 major component materials: Cobalt, Nickel, Lithium, Manganese, and Graphite (and probably many more). So we need at least 5 separate highly destructive mining operations to extract those materials. That's a 'green' solution?

The book’s overarching premise is that our industrial civilization is, at its core, incompatible with a healthy planet. Note that they don’t say it’s incompatible unless it’s fixed. They say it’s incompatible – period. They also point out what seems an obvious truth - that our economic dependency on constant growth is not sustainable. It’s like endlessly pouring water into a bucket and expecting that magically the bucket will never be full. Is there really anyone reading this who doesn’t grasp that this strategy is insane?

The authors accuse the bright greens of distracting from the real problems facing the world – the continuing destruction of the animals, plants, and ecosystems, by pretending (and I really mean pretending) that it can all be fixed with technology. But building that technology requires a massive infrastructure of mines, factories, roads, and dams. That is true regardless of the technology being built. And it’s that infrastructure that's killing the world in the first place.

There is only one way to save the planet – one way – let me repeat that – one way: we have to drastically cut back on our rampant consumption, and our use of technology, everything from cars, smart phones, and big screen TVs to designer running shoes. The problem is, people don’t want to do that, so they invent all kinds of complex pretend ways that they can somehow have their Earth and destroy it too. They can’t.

In George Orwell’s chilling futuristic novel 1984, the government keeps the populace distracted by constantly waging wars against a series of shadowy adversaries. In our world, industry, government, and even many environmentalists, keep us all distracted by claiming that we’re fighting Climate Change, and that somehow everything will be okay if we can just fix that one thing. Climate Change is a catastrophic problem, but it’s only one of many. Driving an electric car won’t undo the unrelenting extinction of the world’s plants, animals, insects, and fish. It won’t remove the mountains of plastic from the oceans. It won’t eliminate the toxic waste from the rivers, lakes, and soil. It probably won’t even fix Climate Change.

What we humans need to do is fundamentally change the way we live. That’s a really sobering thought, but I believe it’s true. Nothing else will work. Everything else is just misdirection, sleight of hand.

There's one incentive the authors point out that might make the truth easier to swallow. We really don’t have a choice. If we don’t do it, Nature will simply do it for us. At some point, and probably soon, we will reach a state where the planet is truly unlivable for everybody – including us.

[Ozzie Zehner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bright Green Lies is the central book for understanding the new generation of environmental thinking.

The three highly capable authors don’t pull any punches. They name the names, disclose the locations, and brilliantly interrogate the lies we've been told. But most powerfully, they dismantle the lies we've been telling ourselves. A must-read book.

[Richard Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

In an era when the info stream is running heavy on conspiracy theories, fake news, and balderdash, it’s not unusual to come across stories of green energy miracles. For example, we might see that a progressive country somewhere overseas is now almost entirely running on wind or solar energy. Oh, really? In this era of deceptive “news” releases, truth can be a slippery rascal.

Bright green environmentalism is a mindset that has big hopes for a brighter future, and strongly advocates renewable energy. Their primary interest is preserving our luxurious high-impact lifestyle and mega-profitable economy, while (hopefully) lightening our eco-footprint a wee bit, allowing us to feel slightly less uncomfortable.

The cat is out of the bag with regard to approaching fossil energy limits and the Climate Crisis. The bad old-fashioned way of living has become unhip and embarrassing. It has to go. Bright green is a brilliant marketing strategy. Look! Here’s a new and improved way of living in the fast lane that’s friendly to the birds and trees! It’s great for the economy, and it’s great for the planet! Imagine that! How totally cool! (Um, the inconvenient truth here is that, no matter how hard we wish, we can’t have both industrial civilization and a living planet.)

Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert are the authors of Bright Green Lies, which enthusiastically reveals all the kinky and creepy aspects of the bright green cult. The three wordsmiths are apostles of a gospel called Deep Green Resistance, which passionately advocates defending the living world, to the highest degree possible, without delay. (“No, that doesn’t mean killing all humans. That means changing our lifestyle dramatically.”) OK!

Once I made it across the border into chapter three, I suddenly became extremely excited! I found myself exploring a fascinating, in-depth “birds and bees” discussion of the unfortunate realities, drawbacks, and limitations of alternative energy — lots of stuff they never taught me in school (and I wish they were teaching now).

My Admiral TV was made in 1946. It doesn’t have a screen the size of a barn door. I’ve never seen it work. Watching a dead TV is boring. Reading is a lot more interesting. When you spend 25 to 30 years studying ecology, anthropology, and environmental history, you can learn a lot of stuff that mainstream folks don’t know — stuff more important than football scores, soap operas, game shows, celebrity shenanigans, and so on.

Folks who have working TVs, and thousands of channels, are often very well informed about countless subjects that are not especially important. They are unlikely to be up to date on difficulties of lithium recycling, or why Big Mama Nature loathes and despises notorious bright green billionaires, or why the electric grid is so poorly designed for effectively distributing renewable energy that is intermittent, unpredictable, hard to control, and a pain in the ass.

They are likely to be blissfully ignorant about most of the countless eco-impacts of their consumer lifestyles. The view outside their picture window is not strip mines, clear-cuts, forest fires, methane craters, oil fields, toxic spills, chemical plants, and landfills. Out of sight, out of mind. Most importantly, they are unlikely to understand why running today’s industrial civilization entirely on renewable energy is absolutely impossible, and why attempting a transition would provide little or no benefit — but a lot more damage to the planet.

Of course, everyone remembers William Jevons, who discovered something very strange in 1865. In those days, the steam engine industry was making big gains in efficiency. More work could be done with less coal. Instead of reducing coal mining, demand for coal increased, because it was the greedy and profitable thing to do. Jevon’s Paradox asserts, “Increased efficiency not only doesn’t generally reduce demand, but instead increases it.”

Bright greens still dance to the Jevon’s boogie. Richard York, a University of Oregon wizard, studied data from 128 nations, and found that for every unit of “green” power brought online, only one-tenth as much fossil fuel was taken offline. “Industrial civilization requires industrial levels of energy, and fossil fuel is functionally irreplaceable.” Electric cars can’t be made without it. Nor can wind turbines, solar panels, planes, ships, concrete, cell phones, etc. Oil is incredibly energy dense.

Solar power pauses for sunset or clouds, sometimes for days. Wind turbines take a nap when it’s calm, sometimes for days. Meanwhile, demand for electricity expects the grid to always provide our every need immediately, and demand can surge without warning. This means that a conventional generation system (typically fossil powered) must constantly be kept running on standby, to immediately feed the grid when clouds pass, breezes calm, or demand suddenly spikes. Brilliant, eh?

While coal or oil is energy that can be stored for millions of years, the grid delivers alternating current (AC) electricity, which is impossible to store — use it or lose it. Batteries can store direct current (DC) electricity, but high capacity utility-scale batteries are not in common use. There are other ways of storing energy, like hydro-electric dams, pumped hydro, compressed air, thermal, etc. These can be used in unique locations, not everywhere. Bottom line: “The grid was not built for renewables.” Therefore, a new fantastically expensive state of the art grid is needed.

No storage systems are made of harmless green fairy dust. All require a fossil energy powered industrial civilization. In the world of batteries, lithium-ion is the most efficient. Elon Musk is working hard to design and build lithium batteries for cars, homes, and industrial scale power storage. Exponential growth in demand for lithium is predicted into the late 2020s and 2030s.

Some fear that staggering demand for lithium could drive prices into the stratosphere, and close the gate to a beautiful green utopia. Even worse, some predict that “not enough economically recoverable lithium exists to build anywhere near the number of batteries needed in a global electric-vehicle economy.” This also applies to other gizmos that require lithium. Oh-oh!

As a special bonus, readers are also taken on a naughty and exciting tour behind the curtains, to get a shocking peek at the steamy world of hardcore geology porn. In addition to a long list of conventional minerals, “green” energy hardware requires exotic minerals, like lithium and rare earth metals, which are found in limited locations, and are not easy or “green” to mine. The mining industry excels at creating enduring, toxic, eco-catastrophes.

The book explores a number of other subjects — power distribution grids, hydropower, recycling, green cities, biofuels, geothermal, and so on. Near the end are 28 pages of “solutions,” all of which consumer society has zero interest in. Consumer society wants to survive and grow until the planet can no longer breathe. The authors suggest a more interesting path.

Put the plows away forever and bring back the grasslands, via holistic management (beneficial grazing). Before long, the recovery of healthy wild vegetation will suck the excess carbon out of the air, and turn some of it into organic grass-fed meat. Grass will save our ass! Deal with overpopulation and extinctions. Eliminate carbon emissions in five years. Remove five dams per day and stop building new ones. End logging. And on and on. In short, end the destruction, let the Earth heal. Make America Walk Again.

Jensen has spoken to many audiences over 20+ years. He asks each group the same question. “Do you think this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable society?” No one has ever said yes. This is exactly the point of his extreme recommendations. There is no solution that leaves our way of life intact. Our way of life has some really big issues. This book will help you better understand some of them. I liked it.

[Courtney · Rating 2 out of 5]

https://www.resilience.org/stories/20...
(From Craig Collins )

"Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert (JK&W) have marshaled their brainpower to fire a well-researched, but poorly aimed broadside at the environmental movement. Their research reveals the serious downsides of renewable energy by demonstrating how much of what passes for “green” is neither sustainable nor Earth-friendly. They do a thorough job of exposing the ways biomass, solar, wind, recycling, hydropower, energy efficiency, electric cars, eco-cities, mechanized agriculture, and geo-engineering are all ecologically damaging, fossil fuel dependent, and unable to sustain industrial civilization or protect the Earth. In short, Bright Green Lies debunks the notion that modern civilization can be “greened.” It obliges readers to face two vexing truths: industrialism is unsustainable and ecocidal—even if it embraces “renewable” energy."

..."This book was designed to divide rather than build a movement. It wrote off and ridiculed anyone engaged in fighting industrialism for humanity’s sake. Instead of encouraging massive resistance to industrialism, JK&W seemed bent on converting naïve environmentalists to Deep Green fundamentalism by spinning a narrative that ignored eco-humanism and blasted everyone who puts people over polar bears as Bright Green “human supremacists.” This amounts to strategic suicide for people and the planet."

I thought the above review did a much better job than I would. Overall, this book presents plenty of vary enlightening facts about the shortcomings of green energy, but delivers it in an emotional and biased manner that assumes there is no acceptable reason to ever cause any damage to nature. It doesn't allow me to draw my own conclusions. Like how many mines would it really take to save millions, or even billions of lives? Is one mine acceptable? 2? 100? For the authors it seems like it would be zero. Or, how much pollution could we live with if it meant transitioning to a better, more sustainable future? Surely there is some middle ground between unfettered capitalism and destruction of nature for prfot, and a complete return to hunter gather society or outright destruction of all humans. These should be valid questions, and to most rational people reading this book, you are probably asking yourselves these same unanswered questions.

[Shelli]

This book sounds interesting, in a good way.

The authors, however, are worrisome, and I cannot help but take that into account.

Author Derrick Jensen seems to have distanced himself from the anarchist movement with whom there was a mutual respect if not full-on embrace, and toward the traditional political left some years ago, although given some of the reviews of this book, he more recently appears to be extremely critical of even the most radical of the environmental movement. (I don’t inherently have any problem with that last part; there are some issues in which everyone is just pretty much wrong!) I don’t know much about co-author Max Wilbert either, but he has obviously been a close associate of Jensen’s for a long time.

Association says a lot, and that brings me to the third author of Bright Green Lies, Lierre Keith. Lierre Keith is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF), and there’s really no way around that for me. Her arguments against vegetarianism just seem silly to me, but I simply can’t abide transphobia in any form. And when it’s as virulent as Keith’s, I find it hard to reconcile anything they say with what I hold as the most basic moral building blocks of anarchism and deep ecology.

All three authors appear, write, and organize with each other two regularly, so it’s fair to assume they’re all on board with the TERFism. If not, neither Jensen nor Wilbert have spoken up about it in any way that Google makes apparent in a slightly-more-than-cursory search, and the issue has definitely come up a lot in public reaction. Even if they were to completely disavow this one principle of Keith, I’d still have issues – again, because it’s a deep-seated moral issue to me.

So I’d like to read the book but I won’t buy it (I’m entering the Goodreads Giveaway for it, so wish me luck, ha ha), and I just think that if you, dear reader, plan to read it, you should know this context too.

[Gail Nyoka · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt that the authors belabored their points – pages of examples to illuminate the same argument. One could say that the information is important enough to warrant the many examples, but sometimes it makes for tedious reading.

The majority of us have been blissfully unaware of the problems created by green technology, and the inability of this technology to bring about the desired planetary benefits which we would like to see. The authors present compelling arguments for a complete rethink of how we live our lives, and why big changes are needed in order to bring about a reversal in the destruction of our planet.

These changes, although necessary, will not be easy – we all like our luxuries and conveniences.
The subtitle of the book is How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. I would have liked to have seen more details on ‘what we can do about it,” but that could be a book by itself.

[Sandi Brockway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Derrick Jensen's new book arrives in the wake of Jeff Gibbs documentary "Planet of the Humans" which exposed green corporate corruption. Long ago Murray Bookchin warned about these conspicuous realities. No one listened.

The only thing that could save us would be mass decentralization and local self reliance, but the centralized corporate commercial capitalist system and malignant American McCarthyism will not be satisfied until they have destroyed every square mile of Planet Earth. The crumbs it tosses us will never be enough to save us and Mother Nature.

Which remaining battles are worth fighting? Read the book and find out.

[Chiro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Environmentalism used to mean something, it was about saving the living world and sentient beings. In this powerful book, we see how it’s been co-opted for another purpose entirely: feeding industrial civilization, swapping one non-renewable resource for other non-renewable resources. “Green” tech isn’t green when all it’s parts are toxic. Big truths in this book everyone should read!

[Nikki Craft · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful, original and as usual these authors are unusually well grounded in reality. Refreshing honesty with not an iota of gaslighting or hopeism.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vandana Shiva tells us how we have to discard the “destructive machine of civilization” and learn once again to tread lightly on the earth collectively as our ancestors did. Some kind of humans lived on this planet for 2.5 million years sustainably within the means of the landbase and then -bam- came the desire for more than the land can provide. David Montgomery tells us agricultural societies last “800 to 2,000 years …until the soil gives out” This is because agriculture is biotic cleansing, and it always needs more land. Prairie topsoil was 12 feet deep when the white invaders arrived. A century later it was measured only in inches. Now, 98% of the prairie is gone. The amount of Roman mining dust that drifted onto Greenland from elsewhere amounts to a whopping 800 tons of copper and 400 tons of lead. Wow. The Roman industrial pollution death toll, “may have numbered in the millions across Europe and the Middle East.” Try to find an old copper mine that was healed 2,000 years later. Think of life as a property of “an ecological system”. Francis Bacon = “dominion over creation”. The epic of Gilgamesh asked, How do you answer for turning a forest into a wasteland? We know that wolves restore rivers, salmon feed forests, prairie dogs bring the rain, while dominion over nature instead kills the planet, with its weaponized Wetiko mélange of deceit, hubris, and rapacity. Some of us with intact consciences instinctively know, like Rachel Carson did, that there is no peace in keeping silent.

Many left media heroes actually say their “green” plan is to save Civilization, but having reviewed 32 anti-Civ books in the past year, I can’t imagine why the rush to save a project which by design was NEVER sustainable. All Derrick’s writings tell us that Civilization never lived sustainably within the means of its landbase, but the indigenous did. Civilization won’t save the natural world, civilization would probably cut down the last tree to make the last box of Kleenex. IMF estimates place annual subsidies to fossil fuel and coal at $5 trillion annually. RFK Jr said, show me a subsidy and I’ll show you a polluter. Ah, true American values in action: “Give me Money, or Give me Death” = Patrick Henry translated into Neoliberalism. In reality, the economy “destroys the real world”. The free market and capitalism collapses without subsidies.

No forest historically has stood more than three rotations (three cut downs). Read that incredible sentence again. The famous Black Forest in Europe is presently dying at the end of the third rotation. Forests create soil. More animals house in dead trees lying in a forest than a live tree. 80% of terrestrial biodiversity depends on forests. To Ursula McGuin, “the word for world is forest.” Oregon loves to log, but logging is Oregon’s largest source of carbon emissions. Germany’s actions aren’t so green because 30% of its renewable is biomass from forests being cut down/slaughtered around the world. Burning wood pellets as biofuel creates 15 to 20% more CO emissions than coal. This book covers the many ways how ignoring the clear effects of mining around the globe makes things seem greener. How dams are evil and methane factories. Greenies cringe at South American deforestation while not talking about the US southern wetland forest being logged at a rate four times faster.

The Green New Deal depends on not so green mining. Old Roman mines are still polluting today but we are going to ramp up a new polluting industry that will bring jobs based on false promises. Complex problems will be compounded by green energy. This book explains in depth all the various health problems caused by manufacturing all green tech and the price born on the people living near its manufacture. Many stories of dumping rare earth toxic waste in China in order to bring the liberal latte crowd their E Car charging PVs. And installed PV lasts at most 20-25 years.

The Jacobson green plan requires building 3.8 million 5MW turbines by 2030. Each of those 5MW turbines have “several hundred gallons of oil and hydraulic fluid” while the base holds another 500 gallons in the transformer. Now picture 3.8 million of these toxic puppies. Don’t forget you will have to change the oil on each one – that’s a lot of oil. Naomi Klein must also understand that 3.8 million new turbines means needing “3.8 billion pounds of copper alone to make those 3.8 million turbines. Those turbines of course don’t grow on trees, and that number of turbines will destroy 58,575 valleys when in place. Each blade on the Vesta V164 10MW turbine alone weighs a modest 38 tons and is only 263 feet long. At the end of their short life, NONE of these blades will be recycled. Feel the joy. The scale of all this green construction is like building 13 Hoover Dams per day. Sounds green, right? And windfarms also have a known warming effect forcing rising hot air back to the ground. Tesla owners will enjoy reading this book’s section on Lithium extraction worldwide. “500,000 gallons of water are needed to produce one ton of lithium.” And then there’s the land destruction. No animal life anywhere near the mines and no agriculture possible. “More than 8,000 lithium mining claims were staked in Nevada between January 2015 and September 2016.” Getting half of the cobalt in lithium batteries from the Congo, means 40,000 children are presently working without protection in mines for a dollar a day. To sweeten the lithium deal, Nevada has given Tesla $1.3 billion in tax breaks and incentives. Show me a subsidy and I’ll show you a polluter. Elon Musk, when busted for supporting the nasty Anez coup in Bolivia in order to get cheaper lithium said, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” There goes Bolivia’s famed world’s largest salt flats of Salar de Uyuni. As National Geographic once wrote, “Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni is considered one of the most extreme and remarkable vistas in all of South America, if not Earth”. Elon as editor wants to change that National Geo sentence to the past tense. Screw him.

Did you know there was a Syrian elephant? It was hunted to death before 100 BCE. Rome captured thousands of Atlas Bears to watch their deaths at the Coliseum. The Hokkaido white wolf was exterminated en masse with strychnine (extra painful death). Brazil destroys 2,4000 square miles of forest to create charcoal. “US mines pollute up to 27 billion gallons of water annually.” Green energy is made from “the dust of shattered mountains, lakes of acid, and the agony of our winged and scaled kin.” Bill McKibben visits Baotau, China for National Geo and never once discusses the environmental price paid by the region. No wildlife, drinkable water, and illness in every family there, yet evergreen Bill saw nothing wrong. Recovery from mining takes from thousands to millions of years, so let’s increase mining? When you intentionally push clearly negative costs on to a third party (one’s children and grandchildren) in order to profit, that is called exploitation.

Patriots will be delighted to know that wind farms are exempt from the crime of killing bald and golden eagles. Take a look a barotrauma: that is when the blades on a windfarm causes the eardrums, lungs and hearts of bats to explode through creating a pressure drop in the air behind them. US wind turbines kill over 600,000 bats per year but under the Jacobson plan with 3.8 million new turbines that number will increase to 250 million bat deaths per year. 7 deaths per second. The bright green response is to put up painful sirens to keep bats away from the turbines. Apparently, those bladeless turbine designs will be super loud in operation, sounds very relaxing. Scotland alone, since 2000, has deforested more than 17,000 acres for wind farming. Aluminum is recycled at 1350 degrees. Scrap metal is recycled at 3200 degrees. I grew up with our milk bottles washed and reused. Where’s the profit in that? Today’s bottles are melted down to make new ones, and our paper pulped once again to become paper. Garbage trucks get “about two to three miles per gallon”. The MT5500 truck used in mining weighs a million pounds and uses a gallon of diesel every 30 seconds.

“Plastics #3 through #7 often have the recycling symbol, but in the US, they’re almost always sent to a landfill.” “A recycled bottle contains 90 percent new plastic.” Solar panel manufacture needs float glass which requires heating to 2,700 degrees, not only glass but metal. Good luck making it locally, a float glass factory costs $200 million and sadly only uses “15-30 percent recycled cullet as a raw source material.” Many kinds of glass not recycled are listed by Lierre. Metal scrap shredders use 50 gallons of water per minute. The water exits the shredders highly contaminated many scrapyards notorious for high contamination (including PCBs and toxic chemicals). Slag losses and the fact that some “metals and alloys are mixed in the waste stream”, keep metal recycling from achieving 100 percent. Less than 40% of new steel has recycled content. Lithium batteries are “almost never” recycled. Lierre explains why.

You can’t send solar panels to regular landfills because you don’t want the lead and carcinogenic cadmium leaching out. Iceland’s three aluminum smelters use “73 percent of all energy generated in Iceland”. Tides take in nutrients and send out wastes and silt. Harnessing the tides for energy with barrages increases silt, robs animals and plants in affected estuaries of needed oxygen, bad for seals and whales and limpets can’t do their job that depends on tides. Nova Scotia put in a tidal turbine and wiped out a kind of striped bass they had.

The fashion industry lives to sell you new stuff, but 85% of US used textiles goes to the landfill. A Salvation Army in New York City will throw away six tons of clothing per day. Your new cell phone has about 65 elements in it. Old hard drives and cell phones get shredded, that causes “a huge loss of material”. As of 2019, less than 5 percent of rare earths were recycled. The FDA allows lipsticks to have up to 7ppm of lead. All plastic bottles bottled end up in LA for recycling. Plastic goes to China. NY trash now goes to Alabama, and Alabama trash goes to Toby Keith Concerts. Semi-trucks average six miles a gallon of diesel. Cities depend on “ghost acreage” where the food is grown, resources are taken, workers live. The Seattle area gets more than 60% of its food from outside of the country. Container Ship Insane Fact: “The 16 largest ships create more pollution than all the cars in the world.” Is this book filled with cool stuff or what?

Dubai, where it’s against the law to share your hotel room with a non-spouse, has to import all its sand used for building because desert sand won’t cut it for making concrete. Every year 35>50 million railroad ties must be replaced around the world. The FSC certifies grinding trees into pellets as “sustainable harvests”. Book Review Historical Intermission: Picture Bison herds that took four days to pass the onlooker …or pigeons completely filling the sky for three days straight. Ah…

“People are immersed in technology instead of the real world.” How do you save the planet when you have an economy that must double every 24 years (3% growth rate) in order to survive? Some foundations I know well, got sidetracked into divestment as a “kind” of activism. Divestment makes once held shares openly available to others and helps trading houses, even Bill Gates doesn’t see it as a solution. Loss in share prices leads less ethical investors in. The affected firm can buy back the shares, or at least it helps the price to earnings ratio for the company. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, led to 49 million acres of abandoned agricultural land which then began to heal. In just 10 years, that land captured 63 million tons of carbon.

The dry Mediterranean landscape of today comes from centuries of unchecked exploitation. “Giant trees used to cover the land.” Trees killed to make countless ships and buildings. Rome annually required “500,000 tons of grain imported from Sicily, North Africa, and Campania”. “In a city there’s no negative feedback loop for importing too much.” Brilliant. Three-quarters of all lead extracted worldwide is for lead-acid batteries. The butane in your lighter comes from natural gas. Cars were once seen as an environmental savior, saving man from horse pollution. Every animal species today has PTFE-family chemicals in their bodies, what a great final ad for Dupont, “Better Living through Chemistry.”

Reservoirs, like the lovely Ashokan Reservoir I see from my window, contribute to global warming by releasing twice as much CO2 and 10X the methane than a natural lake. The Ashokan Reservoir was created by flooding vegetation that decomposes under zero shade. Trees shade lakes but not reservoirs. The Reservoir below me looks so beautiful as I read that a Brazilian Institute calls reservoirs “the largest single anthropogenic source of methane, being responsible for 23 percent of all methane emissions due to human activities.” Dams are called “methane factories”. Renewable doesn’t mean benign. When greens use geoengineering to lessen the sun’s effects by seeding the clouds they are lessening the effects of their PV installation. Seems rather counter-productive.

Look around you and ask, what are you seeing that was not brought by truck? An electric semi-tractor would need 55,000 pounds of just batteries to travel the same distance as a diesel semi presently could without refueling. The book then discusses how China is the magnesium king and how magnesium injures China’s landscape. 70% of air pollution in the area is magnesium related. Compressed air energy storage is next for discussion. Jevons Paradox - increased efficiency increases demand, not reduces it. For example, when Taylor Swift put out two records in 2020 she increased her efficiency, which increased demand (not reduced it). Ha ha. You can be sure, Miss Swift with her 2 CDs was just the shining energy example Derrick was thinking of.

This book is all about not wasting time with false solutions. Instead, this book sets forth its own solutions to our predicament beginning on page 442. Years ago, I reviewed the amazing “Green Illusions” by Ozzie Zehner, on the same subject as this book. Once after that, Ozzie came to my recording studio with Jeff Gibbs and I learned a lot more that day from them, how the faux-green problem was only getting worse. Everyone should read this BGL book, because it’s the most current book on Our Collective Future once all present green fantasies are replaced by on-the-ground facts. Think of this as a corrective reference book, ten years in the making, which offers a parade of remarkably eye-opening data by Derrick, Lierre, and not-so mad Max, too much to include in this already lengthy review. More of this review on my Facebook Page.

[George Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert, will probably be the most important book published anywhere in 2021, on the most important issue facing all Life on Earth—why we must end the prevailing human economic and industrial practices and the anthropocentric cultural worldviews. It will probably also be the most reviled, attacked, suppressed, censored, dismissed, misrepresented, and slandered book published this year, as well, for some of the same reasons that many people virulently attacked and censored the documentary film, “Planet of the Humans,” last year. Why?

The authors answer the question of why these facts are so difficult to hear, and why they are also so difficult for many of us reluctant messengers to tell, at many points throughout their book, including this passage from the chapter on green energy storage:

“We are being sold a story, and we are buying it because we like it. We want it to be true. We want to believe that our lives can go on with all the ease and comfort we accept as our due. How painless to believe that a simple switch of wind for oil and solar for coal and we can go on with our air conditioning and cell phones and suburbs. Every time we hit a trip wire of unsettling facts or basic math, we soothe ourselves with our faith in technology. If all that stands between us and the end of the world is a battery that can store 46 MJ/kg, surely someone is working on it.”

Most modern humans have been taught all of their lives, by most of the voices of their culture, that their own comfort, pleasure, purpose, social standing, legacy, avoidance of pain, and continued survival depend upon the perpetuation of, and their conformity to, western industrial technological capitalist civilization. That teaching has been reinforced within their psyches by a long series of painful and pleasurable personal experiences. Therefore, they do not want to hear convincing, factual arguments which clearly demonstrate that nearly everything that they have been taught to value and have devoted their lives to is intertwined within a path toward the imminent destruction, collapse, and extinction of not only their so-called “way of life,” but also the real, natural world upon which all biological life on Earth depends. Besides that, most humans of this culture and era do not want to hear that there is no viable and actually existing technological “fix” for this predicament—which the authors of Bright Green Lies make painfully clear—and many do not want anybody else to hear or declare that either. In addition to all of that, most modern, capitalist, technophile humans are not (yet) prepared to engage with the solutions offered in this book: ending most industrial technological activities and allowing Nature and the few humans who still have such knowledge to teach us how to live without those destructive entities, by her truly sustainable laws and systems, (like we did for 97% of the time of our species’ existence), thus enabling all that remains of natural Life to heal and continue. Bright Green Lies also asks its readers—especially those who identify themselves as “environmentalists” or “environmental activists”—to face up to the fact that they must choose whether they value and seek to protect what the authors refer to as the “real world” (the natural, life-giving, life-sustaining world), or, instead, protect the human-made civilizations that order and constrain their lives, because, with what the world has now come to, we cannot save both. Is such a potentially life-shattering choice more than most people can deal with, even when presented with an overwhelming preponderance of factual evidence persuading them that the choice is unavoidable?

Putting aside (for now) the human tendencies toward acting on faith, auto-conformity, or the herd mentality, and assuming that when making the most serious, life or death, joy-or-perpetual-misery types of decisions, most people will still place some value in actual facts and bother to do a little research, we should expect such people to proceed with such appropriate caution when determining how to answer the challenges presented in this book. Knowing that, and being acutely familiar with the reactions of many politically moderate/liberal, save-civilization-first (before the natural world) people to their previous publications and to similar publications by others, such as Ozzie Zehner’s Green Illusions, back in 2012, and to Jeff Gibbs’ Planet of the Humans documentary, the authors of Bright Green Lies obviously “did their homework,” while drawing also from their decades of expertise on these topics. Nearly every one of the 478 pages in this illuminating volume contain several footnotes citing a variety of relevant and reliable sources for the multitude of little-known, seldom-mentioned facts about the extent of toxic destruction and ecocide that are routine impacts from our commonly-engaged industrial technologies, as well as from the production of solar panels, wind turbines, lithium batteries and other products that are alleged to be “green” and even “100% renewable!” Beginning with solar power, and moving on from there to wind turbines, “green energy” storage (especially lithium), “efficiency,” recycling, “green” cities, “green” electric grids, hydropower, carbon capture, geoengineering, and several other false and misrepresented “solutions,” Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert repeatedly and clearly assist us in the difficult process of discerning and untangling truth from lies.

Here is a summary outline of some of the more potent revelations (for the not-yet-informed) brought forth in this book:

• Promoters of solar, wind and other allegedly “green” technologies have repeatedly and misleadingly conflated the words “energy” and “electricity” when making their claims. The reason that is significant is that electric grid production, which is what solar, wind, hydropower and biofuels are primarily used for, makes up only about 20% (in Germany, the “green” energy technology advocates’ favorite showcase, 15% in the U.S., and ranging between 12 and 35 % elsewhere) of the actual total energy used to power the machinery of modern industrial society. So when they give a figure for how much of Germany’s “energy” is provided by “green renewables,” that figure has to be reduced by 80%--and that still might be too high, due to other falsehoods.

• Of the 20% of energy use that goes to electricity (in Germany), only about 14.8% comes from “green renewables,” with wind accounting for 3.5 % and 1.6 % for solar, for a total of 5.1 % between them. (These are 2019 statistics, the most recent available when the book went to press.) Biomass (including logged forests) provides 7.6 % of Germany’s electricity; waste products incinerated along with the biomass provide another 1%; 0.5% comes from geothermal heat pumps; and 0.6% comes from hydro power. In addition to those “renewables,” Germany gets 6.4 % of its electricity from nuclear power. Those are the actual figures for the “green showcase” nation, and the renewable electricity figures are generally lower for the rest of the world. Solar and wind enthusiasts have sometimes claimed that Germany gets as much as 75% of its “energy” from renewables.

• Elon Musk, multi-billionaire producer of the Tesla electric car, admitted to a broadcast journalist in July of 2020 that he supported the coup that overthrew Bolivian President Evo Morales in November of 2019. The Tesla car runs on rechargeable lithium batteries and Bolivia has one of the largest lithium deposits on the planet, which many industrialists, including Musk, hope to mine under terms favorable to their interests. Morales is a socialist whose interest is in what is best for his people and their homeland, and who led an international conference in 2010 that produced the Universal Declaration for the Rights of Mother Earth. Musk told the journalist, “We’ll coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” (TeleSUR English, July 25, 2020 https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/e... )

• Lithium mining is just one of scores of very toxic industrial activities described in gory detail in this book, along with the names of the chemicals involved in these processes and the various harms and damages that they inflict upon many species of life, human and non-human. The processes involved in producing so-called “green energy” devices, including mining the raw materials, transporting them to factories, refining and forming the materials into more machines and consumable products, transporting it all over the world, clearing the land of the living beings who already live where the devices are to be installed, operation, maintenance, removal after expiration, and replacement, are all just as destructive to Life on Earth as most other modern industrial activities. None of that activity is truly “green” or beneficial to natural ecosystems or living organisms.

• Biofuel, a renewable energy source that is much more widely in use than wind turbines or solar panels, depends mostly on deforestation and the creation of vast monoculture tree farms that replace biodiverse natural habitat, causing death, misery and extinction for many species of life, just to grow trees that will be burned for fuel. And what are they fueling? Very often it is energy for industrial factories that will produce more machines to make more toxic and unnecessary consumer products. All “green” energy devices will continue to contribute energy to the rest of the industrial infrastructure, by the dictates and customs of the current economic system and culture.

• In their chapter questioning the value to life on Earth of “efficiency,” the authors clearly demonstrate how and why efficiency is no incentive for the reduction of CO2 and other harmful by-products of modern industrialism, when carried out within an economic system devoted to unlimited growth and competition (capitalism) and a culture devoted to maximizing convenience and consumption. Using examples based on Jevon’s paradox (basically that efficiency in manufacture and/or use tends to increase the production and consumption of that thing, rather than providing us more time to do other things besides producing and consuming) and on the facts regarding what has actually occurred with the gradual increases in renewable energy devices—not replacing, but, instead, accompanying continued increases in fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions—their point is made clear, as seen in the following chart:

(Chart not insertable here. To see it and the rest of this review that didn't fit the word limit, go to:
https://learningearthways.net/2021/06...

(If you look for charts like this on the internet, you will have a hard time finding ones that end at 2019. Instead, you will see many charts that project beyond, usually up to 2050, showing that somehow the dismal reality portrayed above will magically explode into a dramatic increase in the use of solar and wind technology, even with industrial capitalism remaining intact. They do concede, though, that fossil fuel use—and, of course, CO2 emissions—will still be a considerable part of the picture by then, because of the energy “needs” of industrial capitalism that renewables just cannot provide. That is a difficult fact to admit, but the main reason that it must be faced is found in a combination of basic physics and the capitalist imperative for the maximization of profit. The physics can be summed up in the fact that the average energy density for fossil fuels is 46 megajoules per kilogram (MJ/kg) and “the best lithium battery can only store 1 MJ/kg.” The authors also report that “a diesel semi-tractor can haul 60,000 pounds of freight 600 miles before refueling. To get a similar range [with an imaginary, not-yet-invented electric semi-truck], that tractor would have to have about 55,000 pounds of batteries.” So, which truck would any capitalist distributor of products who wants to maximize efficiency and profit prefer to use? In addition to all that, many climate scientists now say that still using fossil fuels past 2030 means unstoppable bio-system collapse. But people have to have something they can believe in, right? And they cannot be allowed to believe in an end to capitalism or replacing that system with many local, truly democratic, community economic systems that are based in cooperation with Earth ecosystems and Nature’s laws.)

• One of the grandest forms of deception, exposed repeatedly in several parts of Bright Green Lies, especially the chapter titled, “The Green City Lie,” revolves around a practice called “pollution outsourcing” or “carbon footprint outsourcing.” When measuring a country or city’s pollution or CO2 output, it is common practice to only count what is emitted locally, within the city or nation’s boundaries, omitting completely the emissions made in other countries around the world (typically in relatively poor countries outside of Europe and the U.S.) by citizens and corporations residing in the nation or city being measured. Examples include the facts that the U.S. “annually imports about $500 billion worth of products from China,” and Seattle (considered by many to be possibly the “greenest” city in the U.S.) imports “more than 60% of its food” from countries outside the U.S. After describing the horrific amount of pollution and CO2 emissions created by shipping, trucking and train transport, the authors report that when we do “account for imported products and services, cities are responsible for 60 percent higher carbon emissions than previously thought.” The failure to measure the impacts to other ecosystems of this kind of outsourcing, “allows a city to exist without its occupants coming into contact with the land they depend on, building, in essence, a ‘phantom carrying capacity’ based on the consumption of soil, forests, grasslands, water, and so on from other locations.”

• The last example of “bright green lying” given in this book that I will mention here (although there are so many more!) involves the horrific potential impacts to life on Earth from attempting to implement green energy technologies at the scale required to run this ever-expanding, long-ago-overshot, capitalist industrial economic system, replacing the use of fossil fuels. The necessary infrastructure creation for that alone is not only mind-boggling and physically impossible, but also clearly ecocidal. For example, “12 percent of the continental United States would have to be covered in windfarms to meet current electricity demands. But electricity is only one-sixth of the nation’s energy consumption. To provide for the U.S.A.’s total energy consumption, fully 72 percent of the continent would have to be devoted to wind farms.” A slightly more conservative estimate is given in a recent report by a pro-green-energy team of researchers, stating that, if we combined wind farms and solar panel installations to replace all fossil fuel electricity production, we would only have to cover 10 % of the surface of the U.S. (The Race to Zero: can America reach net-zero emissions by 2050?, by Oliver Milman, Alvin Chang and Rashida Kamal, The Guardian, March 15, 2021) That figure does not take into account the amount of additional land surface (and habitat destruction) required for all of the necessary increase in transmission lines, which the authors of the Race to Zero… report estimate would be “enough new transmission lines to wrap around Earth 19 times.” (and that’s just for the U.S.!) To put that amount of Earth surface destruction into some familiar perspective, currently about 2% of the surface of the U.S. is covered with asphalt and concrete pavement. We all have some sense of what that much pavement (on roads, sidewalks, parking lots, freeways, etc.) looks like. Imagine then, 10 to 70 times that much ground covered with wind turbines and solar panels, and much more land than that converted to accommodate new power transmission lines. Do you need any more material than that for new nightmares to keep you awake at night? And I didn’t mention all of the resulting dead birds, tortoises, trees and other wildlife, which Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert also describe in painful detail. Who needs horror movies when we have these kinds of visions springing up all around us? Would such a repulsive scenario be worth submitting ourselves to just to preserve a so-called “way of life” for just a little while longer? It would not last long with most of the natural ecosystems and species of life that keep us all alive destroyed or extinct.

I cannot end this book review without mentioning the love for all inter-connected natural Life that is a continual thread throughout its pages and is clearly the supreme motivating force behind the book’s creation. Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert are what I would call “old school” environmentalists—people who put Earth and all of her interconnected Life first, and have no fondness for any human system or culture that must continually harm and even destroy our living world in order to exist. I also appreciate the authors’ acknowledgement, in their “Real Solutions” chapter, that traditional Indigenous peoples have known the answers to our predicament all along. By following the first ways and the guidance of our natural Earth relatives (of all species), we can help the living world to heal all of our interrelated beings. I will close here with a few top quotes from the book:

“So many indigenous people have said that the first and most important thing we must do is decolonize our hearts and minds. We must grow, they’ve told me, to see the dominant culture for what it is: not as the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to human beings, but instead as a way of life that provides conveniences—luxuries—to one set of humans at the expense of everyone else—human and non-human.”

“Because the earth is the source of all life, the health of the earth must be the primary consideration in our decision-making processes.”

“’How can we continue to harvest industrial quantities of energy without causing harm?’ is the wrong question. The correct question is: What can we do to help the earth repair the damage caused by this culture?”

[Maris Pedaja]

A brilliantly written book that makes a very convincing case of why the "green" market solutions and technological fixes do not solve the environmental and social crises of the Capitalocene: since the living world is being killed because of industrial civilization, any attempt to uphold industrial civilization, however "green" it may appear, is not working.

Based on classical Leopoldian thought of preserving the living world for the sake of the living world itself, the authors contrast to the school of "bright greens" who are trying to "save the world" for the sake of saving industrial civilization instead. Sadly, however, any economic model (be it green or any other color) that is grounded in the growth imperative and thus relies on extraction and exploitation of the people AND the environment is incompatible within the planetary boundaries. A fact: "green growth" as a sustainable way forward is a myth; the possibility of decoupling economic growth from environmental harm has not been proven. Ever.

Definitely not the most hopeful read but the authors' way forward is pretty straightforward. Think of this: since the industries are legally obliged to grow, they're legally obligated to destroy the planet. In short, we should put the interests of the living world above corporate interests (for the sake of all life on the planet). Stop subsidizing environmentally destructive and socially harmful activities. Stop colonizing nature. Stop the commodification of the environment. Support the restoration of the biotic communities. Foster local capacity & self-sufficiency. Be human.

All in all, (quoting now,) "the most important, and simplest, solution to the destruction of the planet is to stop the destruction of the planet."

Word.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally, a book that, with the calm clarity and tonally nuanced amber maple voice of an expert and experienced midwife frankly and brusquely delivering sober news, gives the truth about the environmentalism with which most people are familiar. It is the one that assumes a framework of life continuing as it is, but with "greener" LEEDS certified mega office buildings, electric cars, giant worldwide shipping businesses with buildings the size of city blocks, business as usual but with some changes, innumerable life saving machines, electricity, air conditioning, and internet for all. Some humans get to keep everything they love, exotic spices, liveable weather, drinkable water, animals to eat, chemicals, bulldozers, and cable laying ships, to make everything they know and think they love, continue, such as shopping for new things, innumerable choices to gaze at on screens, click of a finger ordering of anything on Amazon, fruit from around the world, vacays to Mexico or Polynesia, and every exisitng gadget currently known. We get to feel good about it too in this version of a green washed utopian future. We use metal straws, recycle, reduce our carbon footprint, and all is well. Polar bears, starfish, earthworms, dolphins, wolverines, coyotes, fungi, trees, voles, moles, and mice, each cavort, fuss, fight, and frolic in the dirt and water, full of food only possible because of dirt, sun, and microorganisms, in this world where not a lot changed but everything is ok because some people made changes. Wind "farms", an inconceivable and new nightmare for those who can fly, solar panels (made out of what, from where?), fish captive in watery prisons called farms, machines to gather up plastic in the ocean, they purportedly will save us. No, the opposite is true.
Everything is so not ok., but with fundamental, earth changing, tectonic shift, massive change of life and perception, and halting of activities that are not able to coexist with life on earth, many things, definitely not all, and many beings, not even close to all, can be ok. This book, Bright Green Lies, bares bones, lays waste to this assumed and artificial framework within which now mainstream environmentalism has been working. There is no living world compatible with more mining for the metals for cell phones or electric vehicles. There is no living world where plastic coexists with life. The current way of life must do more than make cosmetic changes, no matter how earnestly those cosmetic changes are implemented. This book uses only facts to show the sad, sorry, state of affairs. Data, in unmanipulated form, shows how stopping, not making changes, to the industrial way of life, is the only hope there is for a future where there are fish in the oceans, living dirt to support beautiful birth, life, death, decay, and the resultant unfurling, wriggling, and swimming, of new life. The book is full of concrete information about the things people are being told are "good for the earth", including carefully sourced information, clearly presented numbers, and common sense. It's good these authors have compiled this information so it is available to those who want life on earth to continue. More organizations and people can decide what are the best ways to act. So then, indeed, the world can be brown, blue, and green, not the artificial green of plastic turf, but green with chlorophyll, green with animals who grow moss, green with the glint of new life, filled with diatoms, not diamonds.

[Egan Gaerdt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Machines making machines making machines." That is one way that the authors of Bright Green Lies describe the process of creating "green" energy technologies and devices, and putting them online. Wind turbines, solar panels, dams and electric cars, and many, many more — all of them require massive amounts of mining, smelting, manufacturing, and transporting using fossil fuels and destroying the land where they take place.

Bright Green Lies fills in the details of the story that the stunning Planet of the Humans started. The authors do the math and show their work, painstakingly piling on detail after detail of example after example of all the supposedly "green solutions" to climate change. The inescapable conclusion: green tech will make the problem worse, not better. Way worse.

This is not an easy read, but an absolutely necessary one. Some have chided the authors for their "hectoring tone," but the situation is dire and people need to wake up fast to just how dire it is. It is necessary in order to save any kind of life on Earth, including human ones.

[Chris W · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-researched and comprehensive, heartfelt and passionate, this book will change the way we look at "solutions". Bright Green Lies is a must read for anyone who cares about the planet. We have been told a lie that green technology will save the environment. The authors explain that this technology is not green at all. It is harming the planet and it is adding to the problem.

[Jore · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most important books I have ever read. It's a deep dive into how and why the modern environmental movement has been neutralised and co-opted into a de facto lobbying arm of the renewable technologies industries over the past several decades. It's an honest look at the mess we're in, and an extremely well-reasoned call to get out of this rut as quickly as possible. With 250 species going extinct every day, and the world being more feverishly destroyed to make batteries and solar panels and wind harvesting facilities, this book is *exactly* what we need to know, so we can finally stop wasting time on dead-end solutions that don't and can't stop the primary harms to the planet. We can and must get back on track, and this book is a profound and urgent pathway to getting us there. 5 stars!

[Corvus · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book met my expectations given that Jensen and Keith are both transphobic authors who exclude large parts of "the environmental movement" from being able to participate. When there are decent critiques offered, they are overshadowed by the reality in which "the environmental movement" they seek is only for some people, while putting others in danger. There is also a major exclusion of other animals since Keith has a long history of making statements funded by the Weston A Price foundation that even many non-vegan people see right through. People who encourage the world to eat more yuppie grass fed animal flesh that the planet can't sustain now, let alone in the future, when animal agribusiness is the top destroyer of animal lives and top contributor to climate change, make little sense. It's preposterous and anti-science enough that I'd laugh if the planet weren't on fire around me.

There are better books out there on these topics that don't involve excluding large swathes of marginalized people or the spread of further misinformation.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Has the environmental movement shifted its goals from saving the earth's biodiversity, creatures, healthy ecosystems etc to arguing instead for the much-less-contentious saving of human industrial civilization with "green technology" promises of convenience, continued extraction, and ecological depletion? The book is a bit heavy on bashing the myths contained in how solar, hydro, recycling, cities, etc are not solutions to the root causes of extractive industrial consumptive convenience, but fair enough. Save life on earth, or save industrial civilization? It's a bit of a false bind, but it's also important to see when options marketed as "environmentally friendly" are mostly friendly to our continued inaction.

[Srikanth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very enlightening book about all the lies that we've been told over and over about all the green technologies. It is an eye opener in a sense that I hadn't realized about the carbon emission that is caused in the process of manufacturing, installing and maintaining all of the green technologies like solar, wind, hydro, etc.
The very crux of the book is to make us see the planet and the natural world as life and not as 'resources' to be harvested for human interest. 4 stars because I felt there is a lot of repetition and the authors could have easily reduced the book by some 100 pages.

[Curtis Anthony Bozif · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't say this often, but I really couldn't put this book down. In Bright Green Lies, co-authors Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert take on "mainstream environmentalists who overwhelmingly prioritize saving industrial civilization over saving life on the planet." Citing an array of sources, they explain how "renewables" like solar, wind, hydro, biomass, and the batteries and infrastructure they require are anything but sustainable or good for the environment and debunk the many outrageous claims made by mainstream environmentalists that technologies like these can be scaled up to meet the energy demands of industrial civilization. Ultimately, you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. Required reading for anyone who identifies as an environmentalist or is concerned about today's ecological and climate crises.

[Rebecca (Medusa's Rock Garden) · Rating 5 out of 5]

you can have a planet and consume it too

You know in disaster movies when they evacuate a town or city and you, the viewer, want to shake the idiots who take forever to leave because they want to take all their worldly goods with them? Come on, your life is more important than those bits and pieces. Just leave.

That's what we, all of us, are doing during the climate crisis. We're desperately clinging to our industrial high tech way of life, we are seeking for a way to continue to live this way, knowing full well that we cannot truly do so if we actually want to stop destroying this planet. It's a choice between life and death... but hey, at least we died with a phone in our hands.

Our way of life doesn't need to be saved. The planet needs to be saved from our way of life.

I shouldn't be surprised by the things this book discusses, and yet I did indeed find myself shocked by many of the numbers, many of the revelations, many of the quotes, many of the realities being shoved in my face. There are some harsh truths about the environmental movement in this book, and it's important that we face them. Sure, governments and corporations and industry are the entities most responsible for the devastation of our world. But the environmental movement is culpable and it's a truth that needs to be confronted.

I really like this book (and DGR in general if I'm honest) and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in environmentalism and the climate crisis.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading.

“This is how you heal the planet. You begin with one river, then the next, and the next. …. But you can’t begin if your time and resources go toward false solutions. That’s why the first step is to stop believing in bright green fairy tales that technology will save the planet. Instead, put your belief in soils, grasses, forests, seaweeds, and the billions of living beings who every moment are working to regenerate the conditions that support life and beauty on this planet. That is why we’ve written this book.” (P. 442)

[Brooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Infuriating and enlightening

[João Abegão · Rating 5 out of 5]

Regarding all the madness, hypocrisy, and cognitive dissonance of the bright 'environmental and climate movements,' this book provides the conscience awareness and the ammunition to dismantle and challenge their 'green' industrial plans to save the world. The first thing that needs to be done is denouncing the false solutions that are being ailed as miracles for the natural world, when they are, in fact, a palatable attempt to continue our modern way of life by consuming the biosphere and calling it 'climate and environmental activism.'

Demolishing industrial civilization is a trickier issue. Putting aside the possibility that without industrial civilization, a large chunk of the current unsustainable population would starve and die, or immediately immigrate by the hundreds of millions spreading havoc in their wake (and this would include, of course, people in the over-developed world who depend on the most on the global industrial complex and have negligible knowledge of self-sufficiency), it would be, in the long-run, probably much better for the biosphere (one would have to factor for example the immense deforestation that would occur as billions would attempt to survive).

Although it wasn't stressed that much in the book, the current human population and growth would not be maintained without an industrial complex sustaining it. The same for our sharing of this planet with every non-human species. It just won't work with the level of transgression we have caused through our numbers and the size of the economy. Most likely, the authors didn't want to focus too much on changing the population as that would draw the repeated accusations of misanthropy. Instead, they address the dismantling of the industrial culture and the bright green myths. They still call for efforts to reduce as much as possible unwanted pregnancies and expand access to contraception. Still, those familiar with population dynamics know that it won't be enough to stop population growth and eventually reduce the size of the population. We must realize that at this point, our numbers and worldviews (meaning the absence of knowledge of self-sufficiency and of the landscapes we inhabit) are so intrinsically linked with the industrial complex that without it, there would be no other way than to return to a more sustainable human population (involuntarily through mass-death events), meaning a much lower population size with contracted footprints. Only then can we really start talking about letting the biosphere heal itself through ecological succession and reforestation, rewilding, and revivification projects. Without it, even the noblest projects described in the book as 'real solutions' will sooner or later be consumed by a growing population that requires food, shelter, materials, water, waste management, infrastructures, and more.

Thankfully, there are still true environmentalists and conservationists out there who follow the foundational values of Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Thoreau, or John Muir and want, above all else, to defend the natural world from the invasive juggernaut of industrial civilization and our unsustainable numbers.

Lastly, one would probably lose access to excellent books such as this one without a global market and a supply chain bringing it all the way from the US to Portugal. Still, there would be no need to write it in the first place without our industrial civilizational project operating on the scale that it is.

As someone who studies environmental history, past societal collapse, and the limits of sustainability, I have been asked if I think that this 'industrial civilizational project' will collapse. My answer still is that My Loyalty Lies with Life and not with 'this' civilization.

[Elisabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before picking up this book, I'd already studied bright green "solutions" enough to conclude these so-called "solutions" are only worsening the ecocide of this beautiful planet and hastening the demise of the living. This book confirmed those conclusions, and more. Turns out the litany of horrors I thought I'd thoroughly uncovered about industrial civilization and the technology being pushed to "save us" from climate change were, in fact, just the tip of the iceberg.

The authors of Bright Green Lies dive deep into the details of these technologies and "solutions" to expose the true devastation they will, and indeed already are, causing, all while bright greens claim they will save the Earth. And the authors explain all this in an accessible and engaging way--so much so, that I had a hard time putting this book down.

Those of us who call ourselves environmentalists have long known that a civilization powered by oil, coal, gas, plastic and the pollution they cause is not sustainable, and is in fact in the process of collapsing. What many environmentalists may not have noticed is that "environmentalism" has been thoroughly co-opted by corporations--in many cases, by the very same corporations who would previously have had us believe that more oil, coal, gas and plastic were good things. These corporations have turned environmentalism from saving the Earth into saving civilization, and environmentalists into shills for industry--industry that learned how to make us all feel like we're doing good things for the planet by begging for MORE industry, only colored "green". Because that's what we're doing when we say we need the Green New Deal, or we need to "electrify everything", or we say we need more renewable energy, or we see pictures of solar panels and wind turbines and dams and believe these technologies will save the planet. They will not. This book explains in devastating detail why they, and other so-called solutions, will not save the planet, and how they will do so much more harm than we can possibly imagine.

At the end, there is no arguing left to be done. The authors anticipated every "but what about..." and explain why those won't work either. At the end, every environmentalist, even those who might--right now--be promoting new solar farms in the desert, or supporting new dams in the Amazon, or new lithium mines for the lithium to power those batteries in those cool electric cars we want to drive around in, will understand: we cannot support any of that if our loyalty is with the living world, and if our loyalty is NOT with the living world, then we have a death wish, because we humans cannot and will not survive on a dead planet.

Everyone should read this book, especially environmentalists. The first 13 chapters are devastating because there is no escaping the depth of the pickle we're in. Chapter 14 is where they lay out the REAL solutions--the only ones that will actually work. It's a short chapter, because the solutions are simple. As the authors say: to stop destroying the planet, we have to stop destroying the planet. It really is that simple.

Read this book. Then act. Stop destroying this planet, the one and only planet we call home, the one we can't live without. No more excuses; no more rationalizations; no more denying the truth or pretending that the harms we can't see don't really exist. It's time to face reality.

[Doug Wauneka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent reading. Very informative.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think that this may be the first time that I have rated a book a 4/5 but placed it in my favorites category. Although the book was not written as well as it could have been, it has had a TREMENDOUS impact on my life. Prior to reading this book (and probably still, unfortunately) I was definitely a bright green environmentalist. I thought that if we just converted from fossil fuels to renewable energy, it would be enough to allow us to continue on with our economy and our way of lives. Like the authors so accurately pointed out, I had heard the comments regarding electric cars (namely) of "What happens to the battery after the car is no longer used?" and concerns about recycling the battery. Even with hybrids, I had heard concerns of how bad the batteries are for the environment. I assumed that these comments/jabs were just from the oil industry lackeys who were trying to make sure that hybrid/electric cars don't gain mainstream appeal to keep them fat and rich. That, or just that it was the lesser of two evils. That the life span of a battery was better in favor of reducing the demand, however slightly for fossil fuels.

Now I realize how bad things really are. It makes complete sense, and I am so surprised that I wasn't able to see it prior to this book. Not only are humans far too numerous, but we just keep wanting more and more. Our economy requires growth to continue, not only as our demands increase but the number of people in the world is ever increasing. As the planet has finite resources, something has to give. We will have to reduce our strain on the planet by reducing our demands and needs even if it does mean that the economy takes a hit. It's either that or we keep destroying the planet.

The general population seems to feel that technology will save us. This plays right into solutions that involve renewable energy. People feel that if they drive an electric car (almost always a Tesla) and have solar panels on their roof that they're doing no harm to the planet and it's the best that they can do. People don't think about the consequences of their car, and think that it's still a car and all the resources that went into making it. I don't think that I have previously ever heard anyone bad mouth solar or wind power. I recently started watching Greta's documentary and series and it's amazing how even people so critical about the energy industry have a disconnect where if they see solar panels or wind mills they automatically assume that it's good. Maybe it's so that people don't completely give up hope? Maybe it's something that people can buy which keeps the economy ever-growing but at the same time makes them feel like they're doing what's best for the planet and making a difference.

It's a similar point to one of the points made in Seaspiracy, there are a lot of non-profit organization who surely intend to help the situation (like the Sierra Club) but they are not willing to go far enough and to the point where they could potentially alienate donors. They are surely trying to make a difference, but is it because they care about making a difference, or because they care about looking good so that they can have more donors? Are they really a non-profit, or a business supported by donations?

Another potential reason for people's lack of concern is that other people aren't more concerned. This point really seemed to come out with the pandemic we are all currently living through. One of the downsides in living in a slightly rural place in the south is that it is very conservative/Republican. Because of that, there are many people who don't want to wear masks and feel that they don't need to. Even myself have been guilty of feeling that it's alright not to wear a mask because no one else is wearing a mask. But then I hear about my co-workers who live in a place like Washington DC, and they are even wearing masks when they're outside and distanced from other people. Because there are not enough people who are concerned about the environment, people feel that it is fine to not be concerned about the environment and go about their lives as if nothing was wrong.

So why didn't I give this life changing book a 5/5? It does have a lot of references, which are great especially for a book that makes so many claims. I didn't check the references, but I also wasn't deeply into the science and not completely skeptical of the claims being made. The book is very (dare I say overly) skeptical and analytical. There is more than one reference to claims being made regarding electricity vs power (the main difference being that power includes vehicles and energy that is obtained by not sticking a cord into a socket). When a country says that they are close to 100% renewable power (which isn't true in the way you hope either), they actually mean close to 100% renewable electricity. So one hand, specifically saying 100% renewable electricity does make it more obvious that vehicles are being excluded and makes you think about how much further we have to go. The authors also have a tendency to take claims and extrapolate them to the point where they become ridiculous. For example, the amount of material and land that would be needed to power the United States with solar panels.

They also attack specific people and points ad nauseam repeatedly. I feel bad for not only Naomi Klein who they continuously ridicule throughout the book. Unfortunately I can't remember the individual's name or maybe what their plan was called, but there was a plan that was submitted to convert either all of the planet's energy to renewable or maybe just the United States's? Either way, they continuously come back to this plan and attack it as well throughout the book. Another negative is that frequently too much time is spent belaboring and tearing down the same idea or technology. A similar argument is made several times with few differences in the wording. This makes me wonder if multiple authors contributed to the same sections and just happened to come out sounding very similar and it wasn't noticed? Either way, it could have been shorter and more concise.

One of the biggest revelations that came from this book from me is that the addition of renewable energy doesn't displace fossil fuels. Instead, it just adds more energy that is available. It makes companies more money and the addition of additional money is never going to be used to cause companies to take a step backwards.

One of the biggest problems with this book is the lack of realistic solutions. The biggest solution that could be enacted would be to get rid of civilization and our economy. Although ideal, that won't happen until we are forced to do so. So what solutions can we do? At least there are some solutions and it doesn't stop at the downfall of civilization. The biggest include reforesting/rewilding as much land as possible and also improving soil health, which seemed to be the point of the Kiss the Ground documentary that came out last year. When I was watching the Kiss the Ground documentary, I kept thinking that it sounded great and like a solution that could potentially help, but how am I going to do anything to help this along without land? There are some potential solutions in this book, but without having significant land/money/power, the most we can do is campaign and raise awareness.

This book was extremely thought provoking, disturbing (in the way of awakening myself to my previously held beliefs) and I would even say life changing. I have started annoying my wife with the frequency that I have been talking about the evils of bright greens and pointing out the fallacies in their logic. I find myself speaking against "green" technology at least a couple of times a day while reading this book and find it so hard to bite my tongue when I hear people talking about how great solar and wind power are.

I am glad that I now see the renewable energy industry for what it is, but wish that there was more that I was able to do as an individual to help the planet.