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11corvus11's review
1.0
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.
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.
trentthompson's review
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.
mkesten's review
5.0
Oh, Lord. Once I was blind and now I see.
This polemic on society’s addiction to growth and its implications for the natural world reads like revelation.
The authors take us on a whirlwind tour of green solutions to climate change and why they won’t work, and they won’t work because their objectives are to keep the economy humming along while the planet sags under the weight of resource extraction, the eradication of habitat, the continued domination of monoculture, and the greed of our cities.
It’s hard not to agree with the authors on their premise.
Whether it’s on bird-bashing wind turbines, the damming of the rivers’ effects on fish habitat, the scraping of the ocean floors, the impact of mining deadly minerals for solar panels and our infernal smartphones, strip-mining our landscapes for ever increasing mountains of coal to burn and lithium salts to refine, or dredging up the liquid hydrocarbons from the depths, it’s all bad news.
We think our cities can be green, but that’s only if we ignore the outsourcing of the pollution our cities create. We send our garbage and our recycling thousands of miles to poorer and more desperate jurisdictions. Less obvious, our cities demand and consume minerals, food, chemicals, and electricity that are only being harvested far away in ways that would make us pause if it happened in front of our eyes. That includes the materials needed for green solutions.
Do we reduce, reuse, recycle? At the end of the day we don’t reduce, we reuse, but recycling is never enough to satisfy demand.
The authors prefer us to start with reflection on the endgame of unmitigated growth, then advise that we refuse to go along with the paradigm, resist continued intrusion on the world’s biological bounty, and restore what we have broken.
I have read elsewhere what it would actually mean to the planet to build out all those electric cars, and develop the electrical grid to feed the electricity for those cars.
For one thing it would mean heavy mining of the seas and its attendant risks to the ocean habitat. Then there’s all the cement we’d need to build out wind turbines. Increased cement manufacturing would mean dredging up a lot of sand and dramatically increasing CO2 emissions to make the stuff.
Then there’s the question of how likely is it that the public and ultimately, politicians globally will stop the destruction?
The authors conclude the planet would be much better served if we reigned in our consumption, replaced asphalt with grasslands, and freeze any plans to mine the oceans. Nature has many ways to capture carbon but we have to stop interfering.
Now.
This polemic on society’s addiction to growth and its implications for the natural world reads like revelation.
The authors take us on a whirlwind tour of green solutions to climate change and why they won’t work, and they won’t work because their objectives are to keep the economy humming along while the planet sags under the weight of resource extraction, the eradication of habitat, the continued domination of monoculture, and the greed of our cities.
It’s hard not to agree with the authors on their premise.
Whether it’s on bird-bashing wind turbines, the damming of the rivers’ effects on fish habitat, the scraping of the ocean floors, the impact of mining deadly minerals for solar panels and our infernal smartphones, strip-mining our landscapes for ever increasing mountains of coal to burn and lithium salts to refine, or dredging up the liquid hydrocarbons from the depths, it’s all bad news.
We think our cities can be green, but that’s only if we ignore the outsourcing of the pollution our cities create. We send our garbage and our recycling thousands of miles to poorer and more desperate jurisdictions. Less obvious, our cities demand and consume minerals, food, chemicals, and electricity that are only being harvested far away in ways that would make us pause if it happened in front of our eyes. That includes the materials needed for green solutions.
Do we reduce, reuse, recycle? At the end of the day we don’t reduce, we reuse, but recycling is never enough to satisfy demand.
The authors prefer us to start with reflection on the endgame of unmitigated growth, then advise that we refuse to go along with the paradigm, resist continued intrusion on the world’s biological bounty, and restore what we have broken.
I have read elsewhere what it would actually mean to the planet to build out all those electric cars, and develop the electrical grid to feed the electricity for those cars.
For one thing it would mean heavy mining of the seas and its attendant risks to the ocean habitat. Then there’s all the cement we’d need to build out wind turbines. Increased cement manufacturing would mean dredging up a lot of sand and dramatically increasing CO2 emissions to make the stuff.
Then there’s the question of how likely is it that the public and ultimately, politicians globally will stop the destruction?
The authors conclude the planet would be much better served if we reigned in our consumption, replaced asphalt with grasslands, and freeze any plans to mine the oceans. Nature has many ways to capture carbon but we have to stop interfering.
Now.
jefecarpenter's review against another edition
4.0
Two-thirds of this book is important information that scientifically shows that achieving even the most complete version of "clean energy" planned will not be able to carry the load, will not reduce the carbon emissions anywhere near where we need to go. We are in big trouble, in so many different ways. This is a vitally important reckoning.
But, interwoven with this reckoning, the other one-third of the book laments the loss of wildlife, and nature sanctuaries, proposing for us to stop farming, and return to some sort of (un-defined) pre-agricultural civilization. It doesn't address our audience: a society based on military industrial capitalism in a feeding frenzy.
It's a shame to see the crucial value of this book kneecapped by its own authors. How could they have let this happen? In the first few chapters, I was recommending this book to everyone, all the time... but by the end I stopped mentioning it to anyone.
But, interwoven with this reckoning, the other one-third of the book laments the loss of wildlife, and nature sanctuaries, proposing for us to stop farming, and return to some sort of (un-defined) pre-agricultural civilization. It doesn't address our audience: a society based on military industrial capitalism in a feeding frenzy.
It's a shame to see the crucial value of this book kneecapped by its own authors. How could they have let this happen? In the first few chapters, I was recommending this book to everyone, all the time... but by the end I stopped mentioning it to anyone.
miguelf's review against another edition
1.0
Really had a visceral dislike of this book throughout even when many of the points resonated with me because in each and every case there is such a disconnect with the reality on the ground as it pertains to our relationship to energy use and its future. Without large scale human die-offs we're not going to see any of the ideas promulgated here realized and the vast majority cannot and don't want to live as our ancestors did several millennia ago. The authors are also completely dishonest when it comes to the technology - either that or the book is hopelessly outdated. While I'm not a dedicated techno-optimist there are credible paths to get to net zero and while I would otherwise also decry what modern society has become, I'm not so naïve as to think that any of the potential paths laid out here by these authors would ever come to pass, or if they do it's going to be compounded by the suffering that hasn't been seen since the cultural revolution in China or WWII.
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