Joshua Frank w/ Jonathan Peter Jackson Jr., BAD ENERGY

Discussing his new book 'Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who Are Selling Off Our Future'
About this Event

Journalist and editor Joshua Frank discusses his new book, Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who Are Selling Off Our Future, about the green energy transition and the need for a rejection of the capitalist interests driving planetary collapse and a radical vision for a truly sustainable future. He’ll be joined in conversation by Jonathan Peter Jackson Jr, author of the forthcoming Notes of a Radical Son.

Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size.

Green energy and renewables are heralded as the only way to mitigate our ever-worsening ecological crisis. But that’s not the whole story.

In Bad Energy, award-winning journalist Joshua Frank argues that the green energy transition is driven not by an effort to save the planet but by profit incentives. We must stop burning fossil fuels if we have any hope of saving the planet, but the significant, haphazard expansion of green energy in recent years—from large solar projects to wind energy to mining for renewables—has destroyed communities and ecosystems. And worse, renewables simply cannot match our ever-expanding demand for energy, driven in no small part by the rapid proliferation of data centers in the world’s wealthiest nations.

Taking readers from copper mines in Montana and Bolivia to wind farms in Wyoming to the geopolitical battle over deep-sea mining in the South Pacific, Bad Energy offers a stark assessment of the costs of the rush for renewables and the demand for endless growth. As Frank makes clear, we cannot consume our way out of climate chaos. What we need instead is rejection of the capitalist interests driving planetary collapse and a radical vision for a truly sustainable future.

Joshua Frank is co-editor of CounterPunch and co-host of CounterPunch Radio. He is the author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, and Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who are Selling Off Our Future, both with Haymarket Books.

Jonathan Peter Jackson Jr. is a writer and visual artist. Born in California, he spent the first nineteen years of his life living under a different name following the deaths of his father, Jonathan Jackson, and his uncle, George Jackson. He wrote the foreword to the current edition of Soledad Brother: The Pr*son Letters of George Jackson and narrated its 2023 audiobook edition. Writing under the pen name Ivan O. Martin, he wrote the Afrofuturist novel The Reductionists (1999), an early exploration of identity and resistance. Notes of a Radical Son, a memoir of his life and family history, is forthcoming in January 2027 from Seven Stories Press.