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A review by trentthompson
Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do about It by Lierre Keith, Derrick Jensen, Max Wilbert
sad
medium-paced
4.5
Quotes I liked:
Our way of life doesn’t need to be saved. The planet needs to be saved from our way of life.
Bright green [environmentalism] tell[s] a lot of people what they want to hear, which is that you can have it all: industrial civilization and a planet too. Or, put another way, you don't have to change your lifestyle at all; you can have a planet and consume it too.
We have a lot of numbers. They keep us sane, providing a kind of gallows' comfort against the intransigent sadism of power: We know the world is being murdered, despite the mass denial.
You can't cut down a forest, take out all of that biomass (read: the bodies of those who live in and make up the forest), and expect the forest to continue to live. Yet bright greens, capitalists, and nations continue to count biomass as carbon neutral, and count it and its numbers as part of the [environmental] "success story”.
Without subsidies, the [solar] industry would collapse even more quickly than would most industries. And even with subsidies, it can't, as we've seen, power, much less fuel the economy.
The free market is a lie … capitalism requires subsidies or it will collapse.
Industrial solar … is entirely dependent on mining.
Green energy is made from the dust of shattered mountains, lakes of acid, and the agony of our winged and scaled kin.
Our justified panic to address global warming has made us susceptible to seductive technological promises.
Shiny fantasies of a clean, green future are being built on numbers that aren't real. Most of us don't have the time or the training to investigate past an article or two. We know there's an emergency; we believe the educated, earnest leaders; we read headlines that ease our fears … Someone has a plan—an engineer, a senator, an environmental group—and even if the details are difficult, surely the idea is basically sound? What we are asking you to consider is that the idea of "green energy" is not sound—neither in the broad strokes (continuing to fuel the destruction of the planet is in fact a bad idea) nor in the particulars (that nondestructive sources of industrial scale energy exist).
To provide for the USA’s total energy consumption, fully 72 percent of the continent would have to be devoted to wind farms. At the scale required, wind farms would be an active player in the climate system.
The brutal truth is that oil is functionally irreplaceable for an industrial economy.
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. And indeed, they have been, for decades, and yet there is no new battery. The ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries are a refinement of technology that's 40 years old.
What appears to be a simple lightbulb—flick the switch and it turns on—is the result of a long chain of industrial technologies and processes involving mining, factories, complex chemistry, robotics, research laboratories … and billions of dollars in investment. It's all tied together. LEDs would be impossible to create without globalization, imperialism, resource theft, and war.
New energy sources (e.g. solar, wind) are mostly stacked on top of old (e.g. coal, oil) rather than replacing them.
Bright green environmentalism has gained as much attention as it has in great measure because it tells a lot of people what they want to hear: that you can have industrialism and a planet too, or put another way, that you can have a planet and consume it too. But we can't. And so bright green environmentalism does great harm by wasting time we don't have on "solutions" that cannot work.
Demand is rising too fast, and recycling can't keep up, which means that more raw source materials need to be extracted. That means more mountains blown up, more forests turned into open-pit mines, more rivers poisoned. As long as the global economy is expanding, steel recycling (and all recycling) will never be enough to keep up with demand. And since 100 percent recycling is functionally impossible, even a steady-state (or zero-growth) economy can't be sustained by recyeling.
Recycling as an industry is dependent on continued mass consumption. Anything that threatens the system of consumption will also threaten the recycling industry, since the recycling industry directly depends on the waste stream of the capitalist process. As usual, any threat to the system must be discouraged. This helps explain why "reduce" and "reuse" have been more or less eliminated from the program: the system is in charge, and anything that gets in the way of expanding the economy will be shunted aside or destroved.
When our food and goods are delivered to us by the economic and social system, we can easily come to perceive the system as the source of the food and goods. The fish you just ate came from Safeway, not the ocean, and the materials in your house came from the Home Depot, not a forest. And when we perceive the system is the source of life, we can come to value the economic and social system over life on the planet.