I truly love this aesthetic and it's vision of the future. Clean air, healthy food, empowered communities. Abundance without waste, progress without destruction, and equal opportunity without tyranny. This is the future that we should be developing software to enable. Instead, I'm frequently disappointed by the modern usages of software, which seem to cause excess waste, accelerate the destruction of our planet, and enable authoritarians. Maybe it's time to rethink what we're working towards.
Everything gets captured by capital.. This aesthetic resonates the same with me. Its partly what drove me to join a startup to do global solar radiation forecasting as first employee. Burnt myself out over 4 years, but built platform that enabled higher penetration of solar pv power into grids all over the world, and was successful in this. I left due to burn out and realizing that most of the customers we would talk to about large scale solar utility sites that wanted integration with the data were basically banks/finance/insurance companies trying to return a better yield, they didn't care how. After I left got bought out by a risk management company.
Call me naive, but I went into it knowing solar power is _cheaper_, and the inability to measure how much solar energy was in an electricity network, and uncertainty about the generation were the main problems the startup was aiming to solve. The finance made it attractive to capital, I got that, partly why I was convinced it would succeed, but I underestimated how laser focused these groups are to "line go up". They would outsource everything because they were there as the money people, and have people in the meeting knowing just enough to gauge if project was on track for expectations of "line go up".
Problem being is that the margins aren't there. Everytime a solar panel is added to an electricity network, the life time ROI for ALL panels in the network goes down. This is due to pushing down the price of electricity during the day. Eg, when oversupply occurs in the middle of the day (and they don't store it cause X is cheaper), it causes electricity markets to drive prices down and even negative, meaning the return of possible life time generated power for each panel also gets reduced.
Saying all that, the adoption of renewables is growing at a rapid pace due to it being cheaper, but also slowed down by constant value extraction shenanigans.
Sorry about the burnout. Sounds like you've got skills and I'd encourage you to explore something smaller. There is a path as a solopreneur. I do sun and shadow modeling using publicly available datasets [1]. My customers are gardeners, permaculture, hunters, fishermen, photographers and also real estate prospectors but they're people not big orgs or banks. It feels good to work on this level and personally answer emails and questions. I don't make much revenue but I like the grassroots path. Maybe you'd find it rewarding as well.
In one sense the more solar we install, the more energy is produced, the cheaper that energy gets. I'd suggest that's a feature not a bug.
I'll start by noting that in my region variable pricing does not exist, so that effect is not in play.
I'll also note that we use a lot more energy during the day than at night. They are very much not equal. (Residentially, WFH, about 75% of my daily energy is I the daytime, and hence "free".)
Lastly I point out that storage is the next silver bullet. I generate excess during the day (10 months of the year) and I have a small battery attached to the home. Potentially a larger battery in an electric car. Grid-level storage solutions (perhaps sodium-ion, perhaps something else) will radically move the needle.
Maybe one day we'll have so many panels installed that energy is "too cheap to measure", but its not today. Water is still measured, and that's already 100% renewable.
Mate, don’t give up! I think it’s time for you to go work on batteries!
Capital is never going away I don’t think, but that doesn’t mean you have to be resigned to its inexorable subsumption of all productive potentials for value extractions… just means you need to keep finding ways to leverage your own knowledge of its behavior and response modes to make positive change (eg start working on demand forecasting in p2p battery storage networks, or utility scale deployment controls, etc etc).
I really wish there was a finance group for solarpunk stuff. It's a constant problem, and when I join any of the many groups online, no-one seems to acknowledge it. If there was some sort of fund that we could contribute to that handled the financing, and looked strictly for long term investments, I'm sure that it would make money, that could then be put back into more long-term solarpunk investments, for the good of all. I don't know how to set such a thing up, or I'd do it myself!
While I do like the appeal of this aesthetic, I honestly feel like putting solar panels on everything you own is a bit like growing tomatoes in your backyard.
If we as a species, were truly committed to clean energy on a civilization scale, we would go all in on nuclear, and have renewables be produced at dedicated sites, built and maintained by professionals.
Which goes against the DIY 'punk' idea of it, but I think 'punk' itself is a contradiction - the ability to live free from the constraints of society means you are using much more resources than someone who makes use of communal resources - flats, public transport, etc. The lifestyle of living in a detached house (or even a row house) is not available to everyone, on account of there not being enough resources to go around.
Those tomatoes taste like real tomatoes, unlike those things, you can usually buy in a supermarket.
And nuclear as the only sane choice is just your personal opinion, not a fact.
What is the worst outcome, with too many solar panels vs too many nuclear reactors?
Only in your nuclear Utopia all those reactors will be maintained to the highest standards. In reality humans cut corners, are still lazy, don't give shit and who cares, "it will be allright". Until it isn't when multiplied with lots of reactors and time.
and would rather like some cheap solar panels and insulation to help get away from our impressively high energy costs. Sadly I live in a flat so it's not really a goer.
My dad had a 160 acre farm outside London on which you could have had loads of solarpunk type dwelling at zero cost to the government but instead it's impossible to build anything due to regulations plus they spend the billions on overpriced Sizewells.
I daresay the reason you can't build anything is people want green countryside rather than packed in unsightly housing estates but maybe something like the art in the Wikipedia could satisfy both? Functional while not hideous?
An aspect of solarpunk is that individuals and small communities can opt into this mindset and change their habits. E.g.: having your own power source, growing your own vegetables, etc. It's not only sustainable, but quite resilient; there's not as much dependency of a larger scale network.
Switching to solar requires a nation-wide initiative (or something close to that scale).
> The lifestyle of living in a detached house (or even a row house) is not available to everyone, on account of there not being enough resources to go around.
This is true, but you don't need a detached house. A row of houses can also have solar on top. A building with a couple of floors and a few apartments can have a shared roof and garden.
Sure, none of this works in a large metropolitan city, but living in a metropolis is kind of the antithesis of solarpunk.
Might be controversial, but I don't. Because solarpunk is insistent on the notion of negative rights, the notion of how one lives their life remains the same as today, and no better than the hunter-gatherers of the past.
There will always be those who seek more, who admire those towers reaching into the sky, even as others admonish it as tyranny. And they are right, ambition will result in tyranny, in oppression and conflict, but even so, I would still believe in a future over an eternal present.
(Chambers’ entire body of work is just generally a nice cup of tea and a warm blanket for the soul in sci-fi form - the Wayfarers series starting with “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet” is maybe the best collection of before-bed reading I’ve ever found.)
> the Wayfarers series starting with “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet” is maybe the best collection of before-bed reading I’ve ever found.
I agree wholeheartedly and do, in fact, read them in bed. I transitioned to the Wayfarers after souring on The Expanse (I enjoyed most parts of those books, but the black ooze is not for me). The low-stakes, slice-of-life content is more up my alley.
I really didn’t enjoy The Wayfarers. But I absolutely adore the Monk & Robot books. I just wish she would write more. It does not feel finished after two books. That series is my warm blanket on a cold winter day book.
I quite enjoyed both series. They are not similar (as you implicitly suggest).
Wayfarer bugged me at first because each book is a massive departure from the next (somewhat like Ender 1 and 2). As much as it pained me to leave the characters of the first book, the following books were more meaningful and stayed with me much longer.
Same. You can clearly tell how much better of an author she got by the time the Psalm came out. It is a very solid book. The second one in the series seemed more confused, but the first one felt very thought though and intentional.
It's the other way around for me. "Psalm" and its sequel dialed up the coziness in exchange for anything resembling stakes. I feel the Murderbot series strike a better balance, where there's still some sort of conflict side dish to go with the hygge.
One thought that keeps popping into my head every time I see something solarpunk related - Solarpunk is proto Star Trek.
It's the closest concept we have to that post scarcity utopia, albeit on a very small scale, and likely completely unsustainable for any decently sized chunk of the global population. But it makes me wonder what the best way to chart that progress would be, and what the present day equivalent for quality of life it would be best to aim at based on current levels of technology.
Sustainability for large populations is kind've a cornerstone of solarpunk, alongside decentralization and horizontal power to empower individuals and communities against corporation and government control.
There's a lot of discussion on how to implement solarpunk in the here and now over on the fediverse, like Lemmy, but a condensed version of short term goals tends to be:
1. Switch to solar and wind on a mass scale, including personal solar such as the type described in low-tech magazine, combined with reducing energy use as much as is reasonable.
2. Embrace permaculture urbanism, where energy and food production take place in cities. The most well researched proposal put forward is by the Edenicity project.
3. Replace as many cars as possible by implementing more robust and far reaching public transport and bicycle infrastructure in urban and rural areas, more in line with the Netherlands.
4. Build new societal structures that are bottom up through mutual aid, to wean ourselves off corporatism and consumerism, and to develop community independence.
None of those objectives are too far fetched, and would lay the groundwork for even more positive change.
I would also add that all of these would provide jobs, construction, high-level engineering, etc and any knock on benefit people with paying work contribute to their local/national economies would bring.
It seems like Trek handwaved away or ignored a lot of the issues that weren't directly solved by replicators. Joseph Sisko had a restaurant on earth. The idea of a guy who loves to cook for people having a place where anyone can walk in off the street, order from a menu, and eat for free is easy to envision. The problem comes when you start to think about how there's a very finite amount of physical space. Questions like who decided that he should have that property for his restaurant vs anyone else who wanted to do something with it just never come up.
I'm interested in seeing Solarpunk grow so that we can see different people's ideas on how issues like this can be addressed without these fictional worlds becoming dystopian.
That part that bothered me is that everyone in the Federation appears to have more or less the same worldview. That struck me as sort of a cop out versus depicting the characters having to navigate different worldviews/religions/ideologies making up the Federation.
To me, it seemed pretty clear that in the Federation context a restaurant or a bar is a cultural space and its value would be beyond its ability to produce meals for hungry people
> The problem comes when you start to think about how there's a very finite amount of physical space.
It's not finite in a practical sense, especially if you are a space faring civilization. Certain space is treasured and in demand, but space usage overall comes down to how well you can utilize it (how tall your buildings can be), and how you access it. And in Star Trek, they have transporter, allowing people to live everywhere and still visiting most places casually for breakfast.
Even today, humankind on earth is not going out of space. Instead, we have problems with finding places which are easier to utilize for the majority, or which are popular for cultural reasons. But the first one is no problem in Star Trek, and the second one seems to have reached a peaceful solution.
> Questions like who decided that he should have that property for his restaurant vs anyone else who wanted to do something with it just never come up.
Who decides today that someone should have a certain space? And I'm not talking about money, welfare-projects exists today too. Every society has their organization, why should this different just because they have no money by our understanding?
And why do you think it's a privilege for Sisko to open a restaurant that others have not? I would think everyone can open a restaurant if they wish, but they simply do not wish to do this if they have no monetary stress doing it. At the end, a restaurant is hard work, not everyone is willing to put up with this.
Yeah. Star Trek is very "Look at this cool society" without "This is how we got there"
I dont know if it is still canon, but the vulcans supposedly simply "fixed" earths economy and transitioned humans away from money. Its very surface level. They never go into depth about how that was done or what the downsides were.
Even in say, Arthur C Clarke's childhoods end, there were details about the how and why people resisted the overlords.
Once a replicator is invented, human economic systems don’t make any sense. In a society without scarcity, money is meaningless as anyone can have whatever he/she desires nearly instantly. Of course, there are great discussions around what this would do to people psychologically and thus what such a breakthrough would do to human civilization.
> completely unsustainable for any decently sized chunk of the global population
I think the inherent critique in Solarpunk is that our current way of doing things is unsustainable for any decently-sized chunk of the global population - that climate change and general environmental collapse are signs that capitalism as we’ve run it so far cannot continue. If you take the critique at face value, it becomes less of a trade-off, because we don’t really have the thing we think we’re trading against: we’re not trading a successful capitalist future for a gamble on sustainability, we’re trying to find a successful future to begin with.
The other one that was quite a bit further, from looking at Earthships, tin can walls, and bottle walls, was Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew in Thailand. The Buddhist temple of 1.5 million empty Heineken and Chang beer bottles.
Not entirely sure how sustainable they are compared to building shorter houses spread horizontally, but the truth is that this country doesn't have any more space to keep doing that.
Since the link was to the in-progress planning and construction announcement page, here's a link to the finished structure's website and the Google Maps Streetview looking up at the finished structure (completed 2022). The finished website, has a lot of cool aerial views looking down from the upper apartments.
As much as it sounds like a nice future, I've come to the painful realization that solarpunk triggers the same trap that the "Technology will save us" mind virus lures us into. A future where we get to keep doing the same destructive practices that abundant evidence suggests are the prescription for the termination of life on earth. Concepts like "Abundance without waste" are like saying "Humane torture", sorry that's an oxymoron. We have absolutely zero idea how to maintain current lifestyles for N billion people across tens of thousands of years. 10k years of heavy mining to replace solar panels will poison this world, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of problems with ideas like solarpunk.
> a future where we get to keep doing the same destructive practices
If anything, I see it as an antidote to the trap you describe. It doesn't reject technology (it's fundamentally progressive) but it also doesn't imagine a future where technology solves all the problems.
The objective of Solarpunk is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits. It is very much about re-imagining culture and exploring what a meaningful lifestyle looks like with a strong focus on community and creative self-expression. It resists the ideology of limitless growth and necessary scarcity while also saying that human societies can continue to progress and flourish in ways that matter.
Every genre of "punk" has explicitly resisted the status-quo and this one is no different.
The real mind virus is that "Technology is evil" and it's been infecting the western world for the last fifty years. Technology is completely indifferent to human and environmental outcomes.
Solar panels are insanely resource efficient, and every study has shown lifespans in practice far exceeding initial expectations. Due to the fact that energy is inherently valuable, I'm sure there'll be a rich circular economy for solar cells/panels (same goes for batteries).
No idea if it leads to a solarpunk "utopia" or just a world with much cleaner air, and electricity abundance.
> Technology is completely indifferent to human and environmental outcomes.
"technology" doesn't mean anything... Are we talking about mass made penicillin or the Twitter guy pretending to solve the world by replacing 1.5B ICE vehicles with 1.5B EVs ? I can defend the former all day long, but to believe the later you have to be quite uninformed and subscribe to the technosolutionist cult blindly
I'm still not convinced anything good came out of mainstream tech after google maps. We get a few ultra niche gadgets that are useful but the bulk of it is at the service of the people in charge and are net negatives to the bulk of humanity
> Have you heard of this new concept called recycling?
Yes, I have. If you have absurdly good 90% recycling - unheard of in this area - and a cycle period of 10 years, you run through material once entirely in less than 500 years.
Sure the Si part is readily available, but what about the metal used for building the thing that transports the thing to the other thing that transports your solar panels for recycling? What about waste products of smelting when recycling? What about the ground water use? And here is the real killer, what about the cost? Show me a design that scales to even 1 billion people, without forcing the rest into slave like conditions.
Our technology, is not sustainable period. Practically none of it is. That thought does not bring joy to me. I used to subscribe to the technology and ingenuity will fix it mindset. But the harsh reality is, 999/1000 needles point in one direction. It's desperation to cling to that one last little maybe, the verdict has been reached. Physics doesn't care about our sentiments or arguments, our politicians can't reason with physics or bribe it.
In Tom Murphy's words:
> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
I agree that it's fluffy and empty. Utopia in art isn't worth much except for advertising. However...
> Concepts like "Abundance without waste" are like saying "Humane torture", sorry that's an oxymoron
Sustainable abundance isn't a logical contradiction, even if we haven't figured it out yet. "Waste" is unavoidable, and as a word and an idea, it tends to take on moral dimensions that overshadow the practical.
Please don't use the mind virus adage. That term is completely burnt by Musk's braindead agenda—there is no virus, if anything, there's opposing viewpoints that you may not agree with, but are just as valid as yours.
I'm a little torn, I see your point. I don't get to choose by myself how language and symbols are co-opted and used - see the whole "all lives matter" debacle that had many well meaning ignorant people spouting off racist garbage. On the other hand, do I really want to let an egotistical asshole - the very one actually fallen prey to the thing he claims so many others are victims of - dictate how I use language? There is a movement to reclaim words - or maybe not let them be misused - in a way that doesn't just roll over, hading over parts of the language, whenever fascistic assholes decide to appropriate them.
The worst part of the aesthetic is the actual cost of building in it.
Solarpunk designs are notorious for being expensive to make, compared to native ones they try to crib off of.
Some of it could be reduced with say 3D printing, or more advanced ground engineering. Some of it requires particular local conditions.
See, solarpunk is distinct from classic futurism in that it is supposed to be both bespoke and green. Zero waste is not the goal.
None of it scales... Which degrowth advocates think actually helps.
The question of cost brings out its shadow - colonialism in a green paint. Someone pays the costs of manufacturing, mining and transport.
Why must everything always "scale" in order to be good? That's a very limited view, IMO.
I've come to love working in my garden, producing fruit, vegetables, eggs, honey. None of it has to scale. Our 8 chickens provide our six households with eggs. My 6m2 vegetable patch gives me enough veggies for my household and some more (to give away). My three hives produce enough honey and wax to sell off and give away.
None of it scales. None of it is optimized. None of it has to. My time spent on these "chores" is free, because I recharge and enjoy that time.
I am aware this isn't "self sustaining". But it does relieve from my footprint a lot. I'm not contributing to bio industry, contributing much less or non at all to food dragged all over the world. All of it while gaining mental energy, joy and happiness.
We could easily start doing more of this. It doesn't have to be absolute and "everything or nothing". I mean, I drink coffee, for example that won't grow here. But only a little, because all the tea that I can and do grow, brings my coffee "needs" down to a handful of coffees a week.
I don't want it to scale or be made efficient, because it would remove a lot of the joy I get from it.
It's a cool aesthetic, but as a practical movement has some issues with reality. You get stuff like the solar powered website that runs out of batteries when enough people visit it. Cool statement but it would probably have been more environmentally friendly by any measure to deploy on a tiny virtual instance living ephemerally on cloud hosting. Bumping AWS's power consumption up by a tiny fraction vs having a bunch of components shipped to your house.
In the theory-land of Solarpunk, pretty much all the more fleshed out example I’ve seen imagined also have a similar issue with reality. In particular I’m thinking of KSR’s (otherwise great) novels.
It’s a shame because I think most people would agree some version of “Star Trek” is desirable and working toward a realistic imagining of it helps work toward a path to getting there.
I think this is an important thought, but climate actions are often more than choosing the path of least emissions, especially since the options available are determined by our current economic system.
Sites like the one you're referencing (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ if I'm correct) don't just exit to be normal sites with less emissions, they're also presenting a vision of the kinds of things our tech world could and should value differently.
It's not quite the right aesthetic but what about having solar panels and an electric car? Or even just an electric bike or scooter. There's definitely a few practical solarpunk-esque tools available to us, probably will be more in the future.
AWS is not a greener solution because it fails to solve the primary goal i.e. DIY, decentralisation and self-ownership.
Besides, the environmental cost of AWS is not the power-draw of your VPS, it's the externalities of monopolistic-capitalism. You are not just funding private jets but a fascist oligarchy and handing them control. It's not even scifi doomerism any more. We are watching in real-time as American oligarchs dismantle environmental laws and I expect there will be glowing editorials in the AWS owner's newspaper.
In a similar vein, I presume that providing AWS as a publicly owned utility (socialism) would also not achieve their goals of individual self-sufficiency. I presume it's more prepper-ish than utopian and considers state centralisation too vulnerable to capture by negative regimes.
My criticism of solarpunk is its emphasis on hydro, wind and solar energy instead of more efficient sources like nuclear. But I appreciate the futurist optimism and self-reliance ethos of solarpunk. I am not interested in aspects of solarpunk which sacrifice individuation and individual liberties—I think it’s possible for innovative solutions to respect both individual liberties and the systems which sustain us all.
A community cannot manufacture solar panels or high capacity batteries either. Like it or not, these things require large supply chains to manufacture in volume
The reason solarpunk aren't hopped up on nuclear is that nuclear is an incredibly slow process that requires governments to fund it, corporations only run it if it's profitable (the Vermont Yankee power plant was shut down due to not being competitive with the price of natural gas even though it was emission free), and there's just too much red tape and delays and lack of public goodwill in comparison to Solar, which in comparison scales down to where individuals can afford it and make a difference RIGHT NOW, without waiting for the stars to align with government funding or cost overruns, licensing, etc.
Solar with battery storage is the cheapest, quickest, and most effective source of power currently on the market, and it can reduce our emissions when time is of the essence.
That's not to say solarpunk would advocate to shut down existing nuclear plants or stop construction of ones already underway, but most in the movement have decided solar and wind as the most expedient and decentralized way of achieving energy independence and emissions reduction.
Not sure how you can call nuclear power more efficient?
It is extremely expensive, boasts a 30% thermal efficiency and uses more raw materials than wind and in line with solar when factoring in the uranium supply chain.
Yes, if we ignore everything but the uranium in the fuel road we can call it efficient. But that would be like measuring solar efficiency based on the weight of the photons.
I'm surprised to hear of the "aspects [...] which sacrifice individuation and individual liberties" - my experience is that the solarpunk aesthetic is often combined with anarchic political views and if anything is too individualistic for my taste. Could you elaborate a little bit on what you're referring to?
From what I can tell, some intellectual circles would like solarpunk to be “Communism with solar panels”, which I find uninspiring. I also find that some thinkers in this movement have misguided notions on social justice (like open border policies), which I worry will result in the same cultural pushback we’re currently observing. I think political extremism is the root cause for why any futurist vision turns dystopian.
Just adding some context here that I think a lot of other comments miss, but the envivonmental movement is often anti-nuclear because it's seen as not progressing passed our system's current extraction based economy.
Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" probably makes this case most clearly, arguing nuclear uses finite resources, creates waste and is damaging to mine.
I'm not arguing for this case here, but that view is very popular in environmentalist circles and probably explains why nuclear is absent from solarpunk literature.
I love solarpunk as an idea. I would love to live in a solarpunk utopia. My biggest problem is its lack of grounding in economics. It's obvious that the people producing solarpunk art and literature comes from a privileged Californian background where the temperature is always suitable for living outside without heating or AC and it's always sunny not too far from the equator and without too much natural disasters. The cost and efficiency of solar panels and wind turbines are never discussed nor compared; which any serious major engineering endeavor should do first to be taken seriously. I think a solarpunk type of society is possible only if the population live near the equator and has a high level of societal sophistication where most people have an engineering degree and contributes positively to advance and maintain a society with the efficiency needed where there is a lower economic availability of energy.
Yup. I'm seeing this as well in trying to write Solarpunk fiction that has near zero hand waving of technical and economic challenges. I've had to rethink a bunch of everyday stuff that today relies on substantial heavy industry behind the scenes (like toothpaste).
I get what you mean in general, but toothpaste isn't a great example as it's not a necessity.
My wife goes without it for years and has no cavity or gum issues.
Readit News
Call me naive, but I went into it knowing solar power is _cheaper_, and the inability to measure how much solar energy was in an electricity network, and uncertainty about the generation were the main problems the startup was aiming to solve. The finance made it attractive to capital, I got that, partly why I was convinced it would succeed, but I underestimated how laser focused these groups are to "line go up". They would outsource everything because they were there as the money people, and have people in the meeting knowing just enough to gauge if project was on track for expectations of "line go up".
Problem being is that the margins aren't there. Everytime a solar panel is added to an electricity network, the life time ROI for ALL panels in the network goes down. This is due to pushing down the price of electricity during the day. Eg, when oversupply occurs in the middle of the day (and they don't store it cause X is cheaper), it causes electricity markets to drive prices down and even negative, meaning the return of possible life time generated power for each panel also gets reduced.
Saying all that, the adoption of renewables is growing at a rapid pace due to it being cheaper, but also slowed down by constant value extraction shenanigans.
[1] shademap.app
I'll start by noting that in my region variable pricing does not exist, so that effect is not in play.
I'll also note that we use a lot more energy during the day than at night. They are very much not equal. (Residentially, WFH, about 75% of my daily energy is I the daytime, and hence "free".)
Lastly I point out that storage is the next silver bullet. I generate excess during the day (10 months of the year) and I have a small battery attached to the home. Potentially a larger battery in an electric car. Grid-level storage solutions (perhaps sodium-ion, perhaps something else) will radically move the needle.
Maybe one day we'll have so many panels installed that energy is "too cheap to measure", but its not today. Water is still measured, and that's already 100% renewable.
Capital is never going away I don’t think, but that doesn’t mean you have to be resigned to its inexorable subsumption of all productive potentials for value extractions… just means you need to keep finding ways to leverage your own knowledge of its behavior and response modes to make positive change (eg start working on demand forecasting in p2p battery storage networks, or utility scale deployment controls, etc etc).
Dead Comment
If we as a species, were truly committed to clean energy on a civilization scale, we would go all in on nuclear, and have renewables be produced at dedicated sites, built and maintained by professionals.
Which goes against the DIY 'punk' idea of it, but I think 'punk' itself is a contradiction - the ability to live free from the constraints of society means you are using much more resources than someone who makes use of communal resources - flats, public transport, etc. The lifestyle of living in a detached house (or even a row house) is not available to everyone, on account of there not being enough resources to go around.
Have you tried it?
Those tomatoes taste like real tomatoes, unlike those things, you can usually buy in a supermarket.
And nuclear as the only sane choice is just your personal opinion, not a fact.
What is the worst outcome, with too many solar panels vs too many nuclear reactors?
Only in your nuclear Utopia all those reactors will be maintained to the highest standards. In reality humans cut corners, are still lazy, don't give shit and who cares, "it will be allright". Until it isn't when multiplied with lots of reactors and time.
and would rather like some cheap solar panels and insulation to help get away from our impressively high energy costs. Sadly I live in a flat so it's not really a goer.
My dad had a 160 acre farm outside London on which you could have had loads of solarpunk type dwelling at zero cost to the government but instead it's impossible to build anything due to regulations plus they spend the billions on overpriced Sizewells.
I daresay the reason you can't build anything is people want green countryside rather than packed in unsightly housing estates but maybe something like the art in the Wikipedia could satisfy both? Functional while not hideous?
Switching to solar requires a nation-wide initiative (or something close to that scale).
> The lifestyle of living in a detached house (or even a row house) is not available to everyone, on account of there not being enough resources to go around.
This is true, but you don't need a detached house. A row of houses can also have solar on top. A building with a couple of floors and a few apartments can have a shared roof and garden.
Sure, none of this works in a large metropolitan city, but living in a metropolis is kind of the antithesis of solarpunk.
It’s as relevant now as it was when it was written.
There will always be those who seek more, who admire those towers reaching into the sky, even as others admonish it as tyranny. And they are right, ambition will result in tyranny, in oppression and conflict, but even so, I would still believe in a future over an eternal present.
Dead Comment
(Chambers’ entire body of work is just generally a nice cup of tea and a warm blanket for the soul in sci-fi form - the Wayfarers series starting with “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet” is maybe the best collection of before-bed reading I’ve ever found.)
I agree wholeheartedly and do, in fact, read them in bed. I transitioned to the Wayfarers after souring on The Expanse (I enjoyed most parts of those books, but the black ooze is not for me). The low-stakes, slice-of-life content is more up my alley.
Wayfarer bugged me at first because each book is a massive departure from the next (somewhat like Ender 1 and 2). As much as it pained me to leave the characters of the first book, the following books were more meaningful and stayed with me much longer.
I also wish Chambers wrote more. Amazing author.
It's the closest concept we have to that post scarcity utopia, albeit on a very small scale, and likely completely unsustainable for any decently sized chunk of the global population. But it makes me wonder what the best way to chart that progress would be, and what the present day equivalent for quality of life it would be best to aim at based on current levels of technology.
There's a lot of discussion on how to implement solarpunk in the here and now over on the fediverse, like Lemmy, but a condensed version of short term goals tends to be:
1. Switch to solar and wind on a mass scale, including personal solar such as the type described in low-tech magazine, combined with reducing energy use as much as is reasonable.
2. Embrace permaculture urbanism, where energy and food production take place in cities. The most well researched proposal put forward is by the Edenicity project.
3. Replace as many cars as possible by implementing more robust and far reaching public transport and bicycle infrastructure in urban and rural areas, more in line with the Netherlands.
4. Build new societal structures that are bottom up through mutual aid, to wean ourselves off corporatism and consumerism, and to develop community independence.
None of those objectives are too far fetched, and would lay the groundwork for even more positive change.
I suppose the question left is overcoming the blocking path dependence - the method of mass action to get there.
I'm interested in seeing Solarpunk grow so that we can see different people's ideas on how issues like this can be addressed without these fictional worlds becoming dystopian.
It's not finite in a practical sense, especially if you are a space faring civilization. Certain space is treasured and in demand, but space usage overall comes down to how well you can utilize it (how tall your buildings can be), and how you access it. And in Star Trek, they have transporter, allowing people to live everywhere and still visiting most places casually for breakfast.
Even today, humankind on earth is not going out of space. Instead, we have problems with finding places which are easier to utilize for the majority, or which are popular for cultural reasons. But the first one is no problem in Star Trek, and the second one seems to have reached a peaceful solution.
> Questions like who decided that he should have that property for his restaurant vs anyone else who wanted to do something with it just never come up.
Who decides today that someone should have a certain space? And I'm not talking about money, welfare-projects exists today too. Every society has their organization, why should this different just because they have no money by our understanding?
And why do you think it's a privilege for Sisko to open a restaurant that others have not? I would think everyone can open a restaurant if they wish, but they simply do not wish to do this if they have no monetary stress doing it. At the end, a restaurant is hard work, not everyone is willing to put up with this.
I dont know if it is still canon, but the vulcans supposedly simply "fixed" earths economy and transitioned humans away from money. Its very surface level. They never go into depth about how that was done or what the downsides were.
Even in say, Arthur C Clarke's childhoods end, there were details about the how and why people resisted the overlords.
I think the inherent critique in Solarpunk is that our current way of doing things is unsustainable for any decently-sized chunk of the global population - that climate change and general environmental collapse are signs that capitalism as we’ve run it so far cannot continue. If you take the critique at face value, it becomes less of a trade-off, because we don’t really have the thing we think we’re trading against: we’re not trading a successful capitalist future for a gamble on sustainability, we’re trying to find a successful future to begin with.
We should at least try to experiment with various social, ecological and economical approaches, as we're currently being held stuck.
Bosco Verticale, isn't all that far away in link jumps, yet one of the most applicable current constructions using those types of sci-fi ideas.
Here's the Streetview version at ground level in Milan: https://maps.app.goo.gl/RS4FBzQE1JcYWYH36
The other one that was quite a bit further, from looking at Earthships, tin can walls, and bottle walls, was Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew in Thailand. The Buddhist temple of 1.5 million empty Heineken and Chang beer bottles.
WP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wat_Pa_Maha_Chedi_Kaew
The photo tour's pretty incredible on Google.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/J2BSqS9zhPfxKUJKA
E.g.: https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/buildings/mvrdv-bre...
Not entirely sure how sustainable they are compared to building shorter houses spread horizontally, but the truth is that this country doesn't have any more space to keep doing that.
Site: https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/233/valley
Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/3Qcmzu9y7kVTydcL9
If anything, I see it as an antidote to the trap you describe. It doesn't reject technology (it's fundamentally progressive) but it also doesn't imagine a future where technology solves all the problems.
The objective of Solarpunk is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits. It is very much about re-imagining culture and exploring what a meaningful lifestyle looks like with a strong focus on community and creative self-expression. It resists the ideology of limitless growth and necessary scarcity while also saying that human societies can continue to progress and flourish in ways that matter.
Every genre of "punk" has explicitly resisted the status-quo and this one is no different.
Solar panels are insanely resource efficient, and every study has shown lifespans in practice far exceeding initial expectations. Due to the fact that energy is inherently valuable, I'm sure there'll be a rich circular economy for solar cells/panels (same goes for batteries).
No idea if it leads to a solarpunk "utopia" or just a world with much cleaner air, and electricity abundance.
"technology" doesn't mean anything... Are we talking about mass made penicillin or the Twitter guy pretending to solve the world by replacing 1.5B ICE vehicles with 1.5B EVs ? I can defend the former all day long, but to believe the later you have to be quite uninformed and subscribe to the technosolutionist cult blindly
I'm still not convinced anything good came out of mainstream tech after google maps. We get a few ultra niche gadgets that are useful but the bulk of it is at the service of the people in charge and are net negatives to the bulk of humanity
Have you heard of this new concept called recycling?
Also, solar panels are mostly made of Si, which is basically pure sand. Melt it, reforge it. Done.
I believe Uranium mining is somewhat dirtier.
Yes, I have. If you have absurdly good 90% recycling - unheard of in this area - and a cycle period of 10 years, you run through material once entirely in less than 500 years.
Sure the Si part is readily available, but what about the metal used for building the thing that transports the thing to the other thing that transports your solar panels for recycling? What about waste products of smelting when recycling? What about the ground water use? And here is the real killer, what about the cost? Show me a design that scales to even 1 billion people, without forcing the rest into slave like conditions.
Our technology, is not sustainable period. Practically none of it is. That thought does not bring joy to me. I used to subscribe to the technology and ingenuity will fix it mindset. But the harsh reality is, 999/1000 needles point in one direction. It's desperation to cling to that one last little maybe, the verdict has been reached. Physics doesn't care about our sentiments or arguments, our politicians can't reason with physics or bribe it.
In Tom Murphy's words:
> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
Perhaps, but then you end up in the extinctionist/Malthusian doom loop instead.
> Concepts like "Abundance without waste" are like saying "Humane torture", sorry that's an oxymoron
Sustainable abundance isn't a logical contradiction, even if we haven't figured it out yet. "Waste" is unavoidable, and as a word and an idea, it tends to take on moral dimensions that overshadow the practical.
>"Musk's braindead agenda"
Some of it could be reduced with say 3D printing, or more advanced ground engineering. Some of it requires particular local conditions.
See, solarpunk is distinct from classic futurism in that it is supposed to be both bespoke and green. Zero waste is not the goal. None of it scales... Which degrowth advocates think actually helps.
The question of cost brings out its shadow - colonialism in a green paint. Someone pays the costs of manufacturing, mining and transport.
I've come to love working in my garden, producing fruit, vegetables, eggs, honey. None of it has to scale. Our 8 chickens provide our six households with eggs. My 6m2 vegetable patch gives me enough veggies for my household and some more (to give away). My three hives produce enough honey and wax to sell off and give away.
None of it scales. None of it is optimized. None of it has to. My time spent on these "chores" is free, because I recharge and enjoy that time.
I am aware this isn't "self sustaining". But it does relieve from my footprint a lot. I'm not contributing to bio industry, contributing much less or non at all to food dragged all over the world. All of it while gaining mental energy, joy and happiness.
We could easily start doing more of this. It doesn't have to be absolute and "everything or nothing". I mean, I drink coffee, for example that won't grow here. But only a little, because all the tea that I can and do grow, brings my coffee "needs" down to a handful of coffees a week.
I don't want it to scale or be made efficient, because it would remove a lot of the joy I get from it.
In the theory-land of Solarpunk, pretty much all the more fleshed out example I’ve seen imagined also have a similar issue with reality. In particular I’m thinking of KSR’s (otherwise great) novels.
It’s a shame because I think most people would agree some version of “Star Trek” is desirable and working toward a realistic imagining of it helps work toward a path to getting there.
Sites like the one you're referencing (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ if I'm correct) don't just exit to be normal sites with less emissions, they're also presenting a vision of the kinds of things our tech world could and should value differently.
Seriously though, high density works for a good reason. Solarpunk mistakes aesthetic that blends into nature with actual efficiency.
Besides, the environmental cost of AWS is not the power-draw of your VPS, it's the externalities of monopolistic-capitalism. You are not just funding private jets but a fascist oligarchy and handing them control. It's not even scifi doomerism any more. We are watching in real-time as American oligarchs dismantle environmental laws and I expect there will be glowing editorials in the AWS owner's newspaper.
In a similar vein, I presume that providing AWS as a publicly owned utility (socialism) would also not achieve their goals of individual self-sufficiency. I presume it's more prepper-ish than utopian and considers state centralisation too vulnerable to capture by negative regimes.
thing is, nuclear is not punk. It requires large-nation-scale financing.
A community cannot build a nuclear power station.
Solar with battery storage is the cheapest, quickest, and most effective source of power currently on the market, and it can reduce our emissions when time is of the essence.
That's not to say solarpunk would advocate to shut down existing nuclear plants or stop construction of ones already underway, but most in the movement have decided solar and wind as the most expedient and decentralized way of achieving energy independence and emissions reduction.
It's just France.
There is a thing called 'Atom Punk'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_derivatives#Atompunk
But it has a different emphasis.
Seems like it. The only picture there has "Atomic war!" as the caption.
It is extremely expensive, boasts a 30% thermal efficiency and uses more raw materials than wind and in line with solar when factoring in the uranium supply chain.
Yes, if we ignore everything but the uranium in the fuel road we can call it efficient. But that would be like measuring solar efficiency based on the weight of the photons.
Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" probably makes this case most clearly, arguing nuclear uses finite resources, creates waste and is damaging to mine.
I'm not arguing for this case here, but that view is very popular in environmentalist circles and probably explains why nuclear is absent from solarpunk literature.
Nuclear is low carbon, but it's far from an environmental panacea and it's about as far from decentralized production (punk) as you can get.
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