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The Myth of:
Renewable Energy
The way we think about saving our planet is
entirely wrong.
-Derrick Jensen
This culture will not act to stop or significantly
slow global warming. This culture will sacrifice
{read: kill} the planet rather than question the
socioeconomic system that is killing our only
home. How do we know that? Well, here are a few
good reasons.
Lets start with Donald Trump. No, even though
the president of the United States thinks climate
change is a hoax, he and his hot air his policies
are not by themselves sufficient to kill the planet.
More significant is that his position on global
warming is representative of his contempt for the
natural world. And even more significant than this
is that his contempt for the natural world is repre-
sentative of the attitudes of much of this culture.
He received almost 62 million votes, meaning
Trump is far from alone in what he feels about the
real world. Its not just Trump and the 62 million
Americans who voted for him who value the eco-
nomic system more than they value the real world.
The same is true for Democrats, Republicans, po-
litical leaders around the world, mainstream jour-
nalists and nearly all climate change activists.
They all make very clear their priorities each and
every day.
Dont believe me? Then ask yourself: What do all
of their so-called solutions to global warming have
in common? The answer is all of their solutions
prioritize this way of life -industrialism, industrial
civilization, capitalism, colonialism- over the
needs of the natural world. All of their solutions
accept this way of life as a givenas what must
be preserved at all costsand presume that the
natural world must conform to the demands and
harmful effects of this culture. So in real terms,
whatever effort thats going into stopping the harm
from global warming is in all truth attempting to
stop the harm to the economy, not the planet.
Theyre quite explicit about this. Read their own
words. They call this The Race to Save Civiliza-
tion. or Providing a Plan to Save Civilization. Or
Mobilizing to Save Civilization.
This brings us to another way we know we would
rather kill the planet than end this way of life. Too
much environmentalism- and especially climate
activism has by now been turned into a de facto
lobbying arm for an industrial sector. Its a pretty
neat trick on the part of capitalism and capitalists:
to turn very real concern over global warming into
a mass movement, then use this mass movement
to advance the aims of specific sectors of the in-
dustrial capitalist economy.
If you ask many of the protesters within this mass
movement why theyre protesting, they may tell
you theyre trying to save the planet. But if you
ask them what are their demands, they may re-
spond that they want additional subsidies for the
industrial solar, wind, hydro, and biomass sectors.
Valuing this way of life over life on the planet
causes its advocates to tell lies, to themselves
and to others. The first lie is that this way of life
isnt inherently destructive. At this stage in the
unraveling of life on this planet I shouldnt have to
support this statement. We need merely look
around.
The last thing the world needs is more industrial
energy generation, energy that will be used to do
what the industrial economy doesconvert the
living to the dead: living forests to two-by-fours,
living mountains into component minerals.
There is no free lunch. Actions have conse-
quences, and when you steal from others, the
others no longer have what you stole from them.
This is as true when this theft is from nonhumans
as it is when its from humans.
But, as Upton Sinclair said, Its hard to make a
man understand something when his job depends
on him not understanding it. stand something
when their whole way of life depends on them not
understanding it.
Its even harder to make people understand some-
thing when their whole way of life depends on
them not understanding it.
So we lie to ourselves. Concerning global warm-
ing, the Trump types lie by simply denying its tak-
ing place. From ecocide to genocide to individual
assaults, this is nearly always the first line of de-
fense for perpetrators of all atrocities: What you
see happening isnt happening.
Climate activists perpetrate a similar lie, in that
they seem to pretend the destruction caused by
the solar, wind, hydro, and biomass industries
doesnt exist. Or that somehow the harm caused
by them is a sacrifice that must be made to serve
the greater good. But the sacrifice is, as always,
made by the planet, and the greater good is that
the industrial economy gets more energy. Thats
not a good deal for the (for now) living planet.
Even leaving aside the fact that the electricity
generated by renewables is used to power the
industrial economy, in other words to further the
murder of the planet, the wind/solar/hydro/
biomass solutions are in themselves harmful.
For example, wind/solar require the mining of rare
earths. All mining is environmentally devastating,
but rare earths mining is especially so. Rare earths
mining and refining has devastated, for example,
the area around Baotou, China. As The Guardian
wrote; From the air it looks like a huge lake, fed
by many tributaries, but on the ground it turns out Europe. If you guessed 99% or less, up your
to be a murky expanse of water, in which no fish or guess and try again: yes, it would be 100%. Most
algae can survive. The shore is coated with a black of these trees from the US are burned as pellets in
crust, so thick you can walk on it. Into this huge, the UK. And its not just the UK that deforests
10 sq km tailings pond nearby factories discharge other countries to serve industry.
water loaded with chemicals used to process the One pro-industry researcher blandly states, As
17 most sought after minerals in the world, collec- North West European wood resources are not suf-
tively known as rare earths. The soil in the region ficient for this sudden demand, the region relies
has also been toxified. on imports from abroad. And of course these
Likewise, no matter how green and renewable countries deforest their own territory as well: Al-
so many climate activists, politicians, and envi- most half of Germanys timber production is sim-
ronmentalists claim dams are, it should be obvi- ply cutting down trees, pulping them, drying them
ous that dams kill rivers. They kill riparian zones into pellets, and burning them.
they inundate. They deprive rivers above dams of
nutrients from anadromous fish. They deprive
floodplains below of nutrients that flow with rivers.
They deprive beaches of sediment. They destroy
And this is how they
propose saving the
habitat of fish and others who live in flowing rivers,
not in slow-moving, warmer reservoirs.
Thats a hell of a PR/marketing coup. And Im
not blaming individual protestors. Theyre not the world or,
problem. The problem is that this is what capital-
ism does. And the real problem is that solar and
hydro help industry, not the real world. Do desert
more accurately,
tortoises need solar-electricity-generation facilities
built on what used to be their homes? Do coho
continuing to power
salmon need dams built on the rivers that used to
be their homes? How about Mekong catfish? the industrial econ-
To be clear, wild naturefrom desert bighorn
sheep to Michigan monkey flowers to Johnsons
seagrassdoesnt benefi in the slightest from so-
omy, as the living
called alternative energies. Sure, in some cases
these alternative energies emit less carbon than
planet who is our only
their oil and gas counterparts, but they still emit
more carbon than if no facility were built, and they home enters death
destroy more habitat than if none were built.
This is part of what I mean when I say that the so-
lutions are meant to protectin this case, power-
spasms.
the economy rather than to protect wild nature.
-Derrick Jensen
And then theres biomass
another darling of the renewable
and green climate activists.
Biomass is just a groovy way of
saying burning things. What it
means in practice is that forests in
the United States, Canada, South
Africa, Germany, Sweden, Czech
Republic, Norway, Russia, Belarus,
the Ukraine and many other
countries are being felled to feed
Europes demand for biofuels.
There are dozens of huge pulp mills just in the
southeastern United States. Guess what percent-
age of the biofuels from these are exported to
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