Review: "Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism" by Ozzie Zehner

I watched the documentary Planet of the Humans and acquired Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism, whose author, Ozzie Zehner, was a producer.

The book has three sections. The first debunks the idea of clean energy production. This is especially difficult to read, because I had never entertained serious doubts that humanity could and should continue to expand its energy production as long as it used "clean" & "renewable" energy such as solar, wind, tidal and (one day!) nuclear fusion. I'm an avid consumer of science fiction and futurism, and most of these cultural products assume that humanity has solved its environmental limits while maintaining an ever-increasing standard of living.

A few lines from Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth by Adam Frank explains why physicists believe this is theoretically impossible, but Ozzie Zehner's documentary and book brought this point home to me.

Review: The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War by Eilleen Welsome

Eileen Welsome's The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War should be a cautionary tale for all people considering scientific and technological solutions to grave problems. People in authority -- intelligent, ambitious, competent, hard-working people who talk well, smell good and love their children -- will always place their goals above the harms their actions do to people they consider less consequential. As humanity approaches the cliff of the climate catastrophe, many beneficiaries of greenhouse gas emitting economic activities will propose technological remedies with unknown and unknowable consequences, and you can be sure that these proposals' main feature is they keep the people on top in the same relative position of privilege.

Welsome's book is like a compilation of "long-read" articles describing various aspects of the United States's military's dealings with nuclear energy during the development of the first atomic bomb and through the next few decades as it attempted to find tactical uses for nuclear weapons.

Review: Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying - The Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWs by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer

Sönke Neitzel & Harald Welzer. Jefferson Chase, translator. Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying - The Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWs. Alfred A Knopf, New York, 2012.

Jennifer Teege, author of My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me, spoke in my town. I asked her about English language books which might help me understand the mentality of Germans during fascism, and she recommend this book.

Sönke Neitzel, a historian, and Harald Welzer, a social psychologist, analyzed declassified transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations of German prisoners of war in British & American prisons during World War II. These transcripts confirm both the shocking level of violence fascists unleashed and the suitability of the psychological and institutional structures of a modern capitalist, industrial society to support this violence. Reading it in the United States of America in 2019 increases the urgency of radical resistance to oligarch-inspired labor docility, militarism and global genocide through ecological destruction.