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Bad Energy

The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who Are Selling Off Our Future

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Bad Energy

By: Joshua Frank
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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 listeners 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.

©2026 Joshua Frank (P)2026 Joshua Frank
Politics & Government
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Critic Reviews

"We are told that the climate crisis demands only a change of energy. Joshua Frank shows what that story conceals: gutted sacred lands, poisoned aquifers, collapsing biodiversity, and a billionaire class whose carbon footprint dwarfs continents. Bad Energy is incisive, fact-laden, and relentless — meticulous, damning, and necessary." —Raj Patel, author of Stuff and Starved

"Think of Bad Energy as a diagnostic manual to expose the violence of our global transition to green energy; by the last page, you’ll realize that under the hood of your low-emissions Tesla is a gaping terrestrial wound two miles wide and a thousand feet deep that matches the size of the copper mine that makes it run. Frank maintains a razor-sharp focus on this hard truth of renewable energy: it is the same capitalist plunder repackaged by the ruling class as collective salvation from the climate catastrophe their greed created. Will we fall for their false gift of green capitalism? Or will we develop global class consciousness to save the earth (and ourselves)? Bad Energy is a crucial guide for the struggle to come." —Melanie Yazzie (Diné), co-author of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation

“Joshua Frank makes it clear there are no easy answers to the complex problems of climate change, ecological crises, energy production and consumption, and justice for people, animals, and the planet. Mixing reporting from the frontlines of the climate crisis—and the mines, power plants, and data centers fueling it—with structural analysis of the vampiric consumption of energy in the service of capitalism, militarism, and imperialism, Frank convincingly argues that greenwashing the status quo only leads us further into an untenable future. Degrowth and decolonization are our best options to ‘prevent the apocalypse,’ and must be undertaken with urgency and care.” —Ray Acheson, author of Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages

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