A Case Study in the Failure of Green Growth

Presentation to the Canadian Association of the Club of Rome

Welcome! I’m Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It and co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass. This newsletter focuses on sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance. You can subscribe for free. Paying for a subscription supports my writing and organizing work, and gets you access to behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.

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Yesterday, I gave a presentation to the Canadian Association of the Club of Rome (CACOR), an organization which was founded in 1970 as one of the first of now more than thirty national associations affiliated with the International Club of Rome, the organization famous for sponsoring the Limits to Growth study in 1972. CACOR is autonomous, independent, and nonpartisan. Its main objective is to further the sustainability of the global ecosystem including the survival of humanity. Here’s the video of my presentation and the Q&A that followed:

Summary:

With the rapid growth in the energy storage and electric vehicle industries, demand for raw materials like lithium is rising.  This is creating new frontiers of resource extraction as land that was previously uncommodified is now worth billions on the market.  This presentation will build on the previous talk by another of the “Bright Green Lies” authors, Lierre Keith, based on a specific case study: the Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada.  Mr. Wilbert was involved in launching a protest movement to “Protect Thacker Pass.”

Biography:

Max Wilbert is a writer and biocentric community organizer.  He has been part of grassroots political work for 20 years, and is the founder of Protect Thacker Pass.   Max is the author of two books, most recently “Bright Green Lies: How The Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It” (Monkfish 2021).  His work has been featured on CNN, The New York Times, NPR, Le Monde, BBC, and elsewhere.