I already had some mild opinions about environmentalism, drilling for oil, empty consumerism, the U.S. car culture, etc before reading this book. I bought this book because I was seeking an honest, open analysis of "what can the average person do help with the climate/environmental crisis?" This book has absolutely, 110%, answered my question.

Zehner has provided important information that all Americans (really, all people in industrialized countries) should be exposed to. You'll find out why solar cells, wind power, ethanol, and other "green" energy solutions are not as perfect as they are touted in the popular media. You'll probably be shocked to comprehend exactly how deeply ingrained we are in U.S. culture with the need to drive cars, buy as much as possible, and work overtime. Think about it - what do people really want? More vacation time? More time with the people we love, friends and family? More time outdoors in nature? And yet what do we do everyday? We go to work, go to the store, sit in traffic, eat prepackaged food, and watch TV. Do these activities make us happier? Healthier? More able to enjoy every moment? No. Absolutely not. The book includes realistic ways for real people to start small in reversing the unhealthy, damaging habits we have developed in our society over the past few hundred years, as well as larger, more sweeping suggestions for communities and the government to consider.

If you want to read a book that will make you question your current way of life, and start working toward living a better life right now, read this book. If you're paying any attention at all, it will spur you into action. Let's start taking better care of ourselves and our earth, today, right now. Thanks to the author for a candid and striking discussion of topics that have typically been swept under the rug in our American society. This is an excellent book that I will read and refer back to again and again.

Without a doubt, this is the most engaging and insightful book I've read on environmental issues. Most of us think that our greatest environmental challenges will be solved by innovative scientists and entrepreneurs working to harness renewable sources of energy. We bank on the ingenuity of technical experts to power our future needs with solar panels, wind turbines, biofuels, nuclear plants, and other alternative energy technologies. Ozzie Zehner offers a very different view: our environmental survival and wellbeing are in our own hands, not those of technology gurus. We have a consumption, not an energy, crisis, and it can be resolved primarily through our own self-discipline and resourcefulness rather than others' inventive genius. We can no longer continue refashioning the world to suit our needs and wants in hope that technology can keep up with our runaway appetites. Zehner offers a trenchant critique of current alternative energy technologies explaining in accessible terms their drawbacks and limitations. The path toward sustainable communities lies through a reappraisal of our everyday lifestyles and values. What will matter for our collective life beyond the 21st century is what consumer goods we enjoy, what homes and neighborhoods we inhabit, what transportation we use, what foods we eat, what hobbies we pursue, and other contexts of a responsible personal life and a just society. Green Illusions discusses several practical strategies toward securing a livable future with a focus on our consumption patterns, cultural values, and civic engagement. Zehner explicates environmental concerns and first steps for tackling them in diverse social spheres--including urban development, scientific research, media, education, healthcare, and political governance--to help us understand how to live more like informed and engaged citizens rather than passive onlookers and consumers. When you finish reading this book, you have no illusions that a genuine environmental change starts with you, with adjusting your deep-seated habits and pursuits--a vexing but empowering truth.

Excellent information, informative, insightful. You don't have to agree with, or certainly like, everything the author has to say to get a lot out of this book. It is almost sad that he is breaking new ground in talking about that taboo subject of the PROBLEMS with our teenage love affair with alternative, "green" energy.

Sometimes I think the data offered up is a bit skewed in defense of his points, but find me someone who doesn't do that for their publication, he is reasonable in his conclusions overall, even if not perhaps 100% always accurate - arguably, again, maybe he is - and that's the point, these things need to be discussed, even argued about more. If there is one thing I'd conclude about this book, it's not to let all the bad news get you down and throw this book on the pile of "Debbie Downer" harbingers of bad news, it is more than that. We need to evolve in our love affair and grow up when it comes to assessing - and applying - the realities of alternative energy beyond the conscripts of for-profit capitalism, and dreamy, black and white thinking of too many environmentalists who want to embrace all energy renewables, all the time, in all places. And what I love most is that he talks about reducing CONSUMPTION over all. Finally, someone is saying the "c' word!

Zehner goes right after many environmentalist sacred calves and holds nothing back in Green Illusions. The result is a really intriguing work that hammers home several key points. I'll try to summarize a few of them.

1. Increasing energy production sources (by using power from "renewable" wind, solar, geothermal sources etc. or improving fossil fuel technologies) results in a reduction in energy prices, which history has proven time and time again, results in a rebound effect in which consumption rises, consuming whatever short term gains were accomplished.

2. Comparing the environmental impact of renewable energies to fossil fuels is fundamentally flawed because being more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels is a preposterously low bar which to clear. This results in "less bad" technologies being portrayed as "good" because they are slightly better than the previous "bad" options.

3. Looking exclusively at the power generation side of the equation, whether fossil or renewable, is an approach akin to treating a symptom. Environmentalism would be more productive treating the causal side of the equation, which is consumption.

Zehner's Green Illusions first section is quite similar to Robert Bryce's Power Hungry http://www.amazon.com/Power-Hungry-Myths-Energy-Future/dp/1586487892 . Zehner systematically goes down the list of energy technologies, fossil and renewable, and describes the realities of both their energy production potential and their environmental impacts.

The latter half of the book is closer in tone to Robert Laughlin's Powering the Future http://www.amazon.com/Powering-Future-Eventually-Civilization-Tomorrow/dp/0465022197 . Zehner describes real solutions and ideas of what could occur to actual address the world's power problems via practical reductions in consumption through social, political and cultural changes.

Zehner doesn't have all the answers, but he seems to have honed in on the problem, and as they say, before we can agree on the solution, we have to agree on the problem.

I live in MT where wind farms have popped up like weeds. The promises of cheap power have long since given way to higher energy costs. Wind projects in the 300MW range seemed like a great deal until the project managers negotiated with the state public service commission that local power companies - not wind farms - had to pay for the power lines that bring wind power to the grid, and local power companies HAD to include 20% of renewables in their power portfolio. Ironically, hydro is specifically excluded by state law as a renewable 'to encourage new development.' Things like this alienate the locals. After all that, the wind farms haven't lived up to their billing, producing a fraction of the claimed output. We got railroaded.

Ozzie Zehner's book Described perfectly what happened to us: Promoters bragged up the 'data tag' capacity of the project but forgot to tell us about 'capacity factor - CF.' Data tag ratings are for ideal conditions. CF is a running average of the actual output because nature's hand is on the throttle, not the hand of the grid manager. A 1000Mw coal plant usually has a CF 0f 95%. Due to poor siting (too windy, built near migratory bird routes or rest stops) some of the wind projects have a CF in the single digits. So the power company has to maintain 'spinning reserve' to pick up the load when wind can't.

Ozzie points out that replacing a 1000Mw coal plant with wind gets into some seriously strange numbers. Each tower must be spaced 3 blade diameters from it's neighbor. Blades are pushing 300ft, so we are talking 900 ft tower to tower. Build 1000 1Mw towers to produce 1000Mw to replace the coal plant. But wait, CF for a farm is in the single digits - so one needs 10x that many to replace the coal plant. Pretty soon we are looking at 30 square miles of wind towers to replace one coal plant on ten acres. And they will still need the coal plant as backup in spinning reserve. Increase the number even more if they ever get some sort of battery backup, because the batteries will need charging.

Solar projects suffer even more weaknessses because of dirt, heat, sun angle and reduced output with age. It means that the often repeated claim that we could power the whole USA with a small project in the desert is simply untrue.

That is just one example of ozzies's book. He addresses hydrogen, biofuels, nuclear, clean coal et al in a similar fashion.

Highly recommend.

This book gave me many useful ideas to use, but reading it was a bit heavy going - the points were fascinating but a little bit laboured.

As professor Albert Bartlett points out in "The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See" (check it out on the youtubes if you haven't already), one of the biggest problems in the world today is the inability of humans to understand simple arithmentic. It doesn't come naturally to our brains that even small growth, compounded over time, results in very large numbers. Continued growth is, by essence, unsustainable. Green Illusions addresses this point head on by highlighting that "We don't have an energy crisis. We have a consumption crisis." The fact that we have been trained to think that producing more energy (be it clean or dirty) to meet our growing consumption demand is simply an illusion.

The first third of the book, focused on the various flaws of existing green tech, is a hard pill to swallow (especially for those involved with or benefiting from the industry). While entertaining to read (Zehner's investigative journalism is top notch), it is unfortunate that this part will draw the most attention/debate because what follows is more important. The second two thirds of the book reveals alternative ways to solve the environmental problems we face today (sorry to spoil the surprise, but it does not involve going back to scavenging and living in caves). Zehner is very pragmatic and realistic in his understanding that any proposed improvements will have to fit organically into peoples lives. He does not offer any kind of panacea, but outlines a set of simple and proven first steps focused on reduction of energy use; steps that, will not only set us on the right trajectory and create the context where green technology can make a positive impact, but also make us happier and leave us better off as a society.

"Green Illusions" is the best kind of critical journalism, written by a researcher with the good of the cause in mind. The deconstructions of solar, wind, biofuels, batteries, suburbs, "green" academia are written with verve and extensive scientific understanding to extract the reality of our energy predicament. The challenge to orthodox green techno-optimism is very strong and cogent.

The difficulty comes in the more gee-whiz kind of "solutions" banality that occupies the latter half of the book. Zehner is quite right to state that walkable, bikable cities with less consumption would be the way to have some shot at human "sustainability," so his architect background leads him to envision this or that green living utopia, from Dutch cities to kids on bikes to efficient retrofits. Fine - yet where is the data to suggest that this is going to come out of the present supersystem of greenwash and big corporate extraction? All the necessary instruction in how we should have designed our global social infrastructure is irrelevant if we are Too Far Gone.

Robert Laughlin, in "Powering the Future," does not make the assumption that walkable/bikable/voluntary simplicity is the next phase of human social reality - carbon is going to come out of the ground, one way or another, until the last drop or chunk.

Look at the CO2 numbers - too high already, and on track to blow through any Gladwellian cliche. Look at the population figures, the server farms, the global waste, the complete corruption of the political governing bodies and process - and yet there is to be biking and non-coerced Amish living across the energy-hungry globe?

Looks at all the alternatives to fossil fuelled energy sources and highlights vested interest pushing one technology over another. All technologies - solar, wind, hydro, nuclear - all have environmental impacts (including CO2) impacts which are never mentioned by proponents of the various technologies. A must read for any one requiring unbiased information.

The author is well red, informed and concious about the things that happen in this world. I enjoyed his observations about the media and our culture as a whole, about the things that are sold to us and about the things we want to buy ( I mean ideas and not items ).

However, this book is not very reader frendly. It seems, that the author just wanted to write everyhting that he could about every topic and it seems that he was not caring too much about the experience of the reader. He just wanted to write "The book about the green energy and environmentalism", and he did it by covering it from a lot of angles. But the books sometimes feels just too much.

The author acknowledged, that in order to improve the situation, you can not just chase after only one thing. He admitted that the society and our structures are connected and do not abide one simple force, however, even though author made smart suggestions, the overall solution still feels like a suggestion from a person who red a lot and thinks that - "this is how it is going to work". From my perspective, the word is more complex than that and you can not really influence the direction in which it is going with your "best" intentions.

This is a very well written and researched book by an environmentalist. It should be required reading by all would be environmentalists. Basically, the author does a thorough job of debunking all of the alleged alternative energies that will save us from the ills of fossil fuel use. The failures of those technologies should be obvious from a casual review of their economics alone and need for massive government supports to bring them into use. However, most people do not care to do simple counting and books like this become necessary to show illuminate all of their shortcomings in great detail. The book ends with a series of recommendations to take us to a lower consumption lifestyle, some of which are powerful, such as more women's empowerment to hopefully lead to smaller human populations, and "walkable", public transit/cycling dominant cities of apartment dwellers which are of much more dubious merit.

Une première partie intéressante qui mets le doigt sur les limitations importantes des énergies vertes...une seconde partie moins convaincante et surtout "lourde" où l'auteur insiste sur les "vraies alternatives" - c'est dommage parce que sur le fond le propos est assez limpide ( consommer moins / changer de modèle de société ) mais se noie dans les répétitions et des arguments plus discutables

Great and realistic expose of Green Delusions by Ozzie zehner and well worth getting a copy to run through his analyses. Look, I'm a deep green conservation activist and I've long seen the crass nature of the industrialisation of environmental rescue. The two do not mix in any rational manner. Ossie looks at this dichotomy in this book, with excellent exemplars and a good view to the future.