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
Caltopo has a similar feature including an 'average' for, say, the month of January, which gives more of a sense of where it's darker.
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.
I agree, was trying to convey the purely economical point of view that owner operators of large utility scale solar likely have.
> I'll start by noting that in my region variable pricing does not exist, so that effect is not in play.
Where abouts are you located? Most electricity networks have market mechanisms, even if the end consumer of the electricity only pays flat usage rate. Although it is a supply and demand problem to balance an electricity network, regulation needs to be carefully controlled and enforced since generators will actively seek out exploits to save/make money that goes against stability of the network.
> 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".)
Yup, that is pretty normal in my neck of the woods as well.
> 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.
It will likely move the needle yes, and for countries with publicly owned networks, they can do this now just at a larger upfront cost. As much as I like home solar panels for generation, but I'm actually not a fan of home batteries. They have a non zero fire risk (unless chemistries like LTO are used, again deemed too expensive) and require more equipment that can fail and then has to be maintained for such a small installation (less than 50kwh for example). When multiplied out, you have a much higher frequency of issues that can take out home power. Distributed solar generation has several weather based advantages as you spread out the generation, cloud disruptions get smoothed out for example. I get that home batteries make the system more resilient in ways, I still just don't think it should be in/around homes. Neighborhood batteries make a lot of sense, especially since networks commonly have zone substations distributed around.
That's a feature from an overall perspective. Not for the seller. Additionally when those panels then don't or barely produce electricity such as at night or in most of europe during much of winter it mandates a costly variable additional source that can output for days on end so many battery solutions end up out of the question at grid scale. Often when pumped hydro isn't an option only co2 emitting gas remains.
To the individual. What i'm referring to is when you want to be climate "neutral" and collectively use that solar whilst your peak is not just at a recurring 10pm or so but also across many days/weeks/months and it's not just for you as an individual but for your wider region or country. After all there will be long periods where my panels will produce not even a 10th of what they might produce on average in summer.
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 humbly suggest we start to think about how we all can get back to that time. It’s come to rule the roost over all other concerns and we are not seeing the bright future we deserve as humanity in part but not solely, due to this fact.
We can change that, but it means drawing the line. And I mean all of us
Ideally, everyone is sustainable. 'equal' is neither possible nor desirable, and naively trying to reward the 'superior' is a path to Hapsburg-ville.
It has always been the same. Knowledgeable citizens who can push back are the only defence.
There's been a huge cultural shift over the past several decades, which I would broadly describe as moving from a philosophy of "companies are here to provide a good or service, and make money by doing that" to "companies are here to make as much money as possible, and most of them have to provide a good or service in order to do so."
Naturally, there were people and companies with the latter philosophy before, just as there are with the former now, but the overall attitude of our corporate world has moved more to the latter.
I think that to a large extent, this has correlated with the dismantling of regulations, the gutting of unions, the relaxation of antitrust enforcement, and the rise of the unchallengeable power of wealthy corporations. (Causality is definitely murkier, and probably goes both ways to some extent.)
There was a time - however brief - that it wasn’t line it is now. Where shareholders and investors didn’t have primacy
By definition, if a large enough group wields the majority of political power then they will always have “primacy”.
It’s like complaining about rivers flowing downhill instead of uphill.
The real issue is that there is legal doctrine that makes it hard for businesses to not be dominated by their largest investors / shareholders in such a way that extracting short term profits every quarter has taken precedence over building healthy sustainable businesses. Everyone is chasing the absolute most % of profit to the detriment to even the business
Some mysterious beings outside of society?
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.
Yeah, it's a niche hobby. Nobody is relying on their backyard tomato harvest without a lot of work. Just like your backyard solar array.
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?
Meanwhile It's ridiculously bad for traffic and getting every other kind of utility available everywhere.
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 might be, but I'd wager it's a pretty efficient way for humans to live, in terms of carbon footprint.
Really? Do you have any examples of these communities?
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.
What you’re describing is the perennially utopian pitch of Marxist societies — a century of failure, not withstanding.
You are right, and the US won that battle. But let’s wait a few years as that winning looking quite so solid today.
I don't get it. What do you prefer? The inverse?
(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.
Solarpunk, on the other hand, is accessible for an incredibly wide swath of people to contribute toward achieving, as a solarpunk life would actually save money while improving quality of life and mitigating global warming.
Solar panels are within the financial reach of most parts of society, bicycles are far more affordable than cars, better zoning laws are only a stroke of a pen, gardening your food or creating a larger communal gardening area creates food resiliency while saving money, and again is within reach of almost all economic situations.
It can be a big government program, but it scales down incredibly well compared to colonizing the moon, and I believe that is key to it being viable.
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.
For outsiders, while the show was pretty careful about expressing a respect for differing cultural views, they did seem to side one way or the other. When there was disagreement within the federation it tended to be a single person or small fraction with an unpopular opinion (like the guy who wanted to disassemble and reverse-engineer Data) creating conflict vs a sizable faction.
It let the writers comment on contemporary issues with adjustable knobs for violence, sex, and laser beams, in hopes that the right cocktail could dislodge people from from their instinctive association with a political identity and let them learn something.
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.
Plus, keep in mind that poop is likely turned back into food. If you have tech to reassemble molecules from one thing to another, this is trivial.
In any case, if we want to discuss a realistic implementation of this (which is probably at least a century away), we'd likely use some form of nanotechnology to recompose waste into food. But again, without "creating" matter, simply rearranging it.
Nanotech isn't magic. The process would still require energy and would create more waste than can be possibly recovered, and diminishing returns would be inevitable. There's no perfect system possible here, entropy can't be cheated.
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.
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.
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
bulk of it is at the service of the people in
charge and are net negatives to the bulk of
humanity
In the last year alone they have combined to help me with dozens upon dozens of upon dozens of things, from changing the air filter in my car to waterproofing a canopy. It has been an extremely challenging year for me for personal reasons and there's so much stuff that would have gone undone without this combo.
Asking ChatGPT why synthetic motor oil lasts longer than regular oil is perhaps not a "sexy" application of the technology, especially when concerned with weightier matters like whether or not LLMs will achieve AGI and/or replace software engineers. But this has indeed been life-enhancing.
Yes, LLMs need double-checking to ensure they're not hallucinating. And yes we've been able to use tech to "learn how to do things" ever since search engines were invented or perhaps even back to the days of newsgroups and BBSs. But it's so much more effective than its ever been IME.
(YouTube technically predates GMaps, but Google purchased YT a year after GMaps, and while Google's stewardship has not been perfect, their decision to allow literally unbounded growth has allowed so much niche information to take root there)
I have also personally found Apple's AirTags to be life-enhancing as fuck. They are, of course, enabled by the sort of always-connected networked life that brings a lot of other ills. But it is also invaluable to me from both a practical standpoint and a state-of-mind standpoint to not have to worry where my important shit is.
I'll tell that to the kids with deformed necks and backs who scroll tiktok in groups for 2-3 hours a day in the bench in front of my building, I'm sure it'll enhance their lives
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-7...
What I did: Pointed out a few bits of technology that have had a positive impact on my life.
What I did not do: At no point did I mention TikTok. Or motor oil. I also did not make any kind of larger statements like, "all technology is good" or "most technology is good" or even express an optimistic view about technology in general. In fact I kind of share your overarching pessimism regarding technology. However, I must again point out that my post ventured into no such territory.
Here's what I think happened.
You skimmed my post. Quickly, and you skipped most of the words and didn't really understand anything. This is probably why you're talking about "motor oil" when I mentioned air filters. This happened not because you are stupid but because you scanned it quickly perhaps while your mind was on something else. The smattering of words that did register with you looked like some kind of glib techno-optimism in the face of a burning world, and you became irritated enough to write that utter non-sequitir.
But anyway, yeah. I probably agree with ya on the overall state of things.
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.
But it can be. With enough energy, any physical process can be reversed.
The sun provides enough energy.
Period.
So I don't know about you, but I wouldn't bet the well being of our children on humanity discovering and commercializing faster than light travel within our lifetime. Because that's what you are suggesting.
Citation needed.
"Our economies and societies are built on the premise of endless growth"
Like any life. It grows until it runs out of ressources. Then it stagnates. New technology moves the limits.
"So I don't know about you, but I wouldn't bet the well being of our children on humanity discovering and commercializing faster than light travel within our lifetime. Because that's what you are suggesting"
And no I am not, because I really doubt your numbers and assumptions.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ by a Professor of Physics, Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego.
> Like any life. It grows until it runs out of ressources.
Citation needed. Show me any other species that managed to increase the extinction rate of other species by 1000x in 50 years.
> Then it stagnates.
Have you seen what happens to slime molds once they run out of resources?
"keep up the current growth in energy use "
But this was not what I was talking about at all.
Energy comes to earth via sun, whether we use it, or not. For all our practical matters, it will be plenty to recycle all of our solar panels.
Because human population growth won't continue, like it did after industrialisation moved the limits of growth.
Discovering (allmost) speed of life travel would again moved those limits.
Till then humans will mate, as long as they see a future for their babies. As long as there is food and space. If there isn't, they largely won't reproduce. It is a common effect, can also be studied in rat populations in a lab. Self regulation.
"Have you seen what happens to slime molds once they run out of resources?"
They try to find a better habitat. Some succed, some fail.
We don't have another habitat ...
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.
Then again, it’s probably a taunting metaphor to describe a certain ineradicable, flaming fanatism that cannot be tainted by facts anymore, which is what you used it for, so that’s that.
>"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.
Because there's eight billion of us. A lot of things work for one person but not for everybody. The big issues of land use, density, water, and transport end up forcing people into choice that perhaps nobody ultimately wants.
(this is not a reason for you or anybody else not to do it! But it's a reason against all sorts of "why doesn't everybody just X")
A lot less resilient compared to what?
Biodiversity is a very good mechanism for resilience. Even on a tiny scale: if this year one of my tomato varieties doesn't produce due to heat/cold/damp, some of the others will. And if all tomatoes fail, I have beans. Or salad. And potatoes, and turnips, and carrots.
Yet if all you have is one variety of potatoes, and it gets sick, it can upset an entire country, kill millions¹
You'd think the solution is obvious, but the opposite is happening. Especially the staple foods that are now feeding the billions, are rapidly dwindling in varieties. Some crops, like bananas and agave already down to effectively one genetic variety - if (when) that fails, we'll lose the ability to produce bananas or agave (tequila, etc) almost entirely. Imagine this happening to rice or grain or potatoes.
For example, a big part of an industrial farm's "efficiency" is down to reduction of labour costs and optimisation of logistics, but the actual environmental resource usage does not scale along the same curve.
Many of that "efficiency" is achieved by externalizing costs.
The farm can (must?) produce cheaper (or have bigger margins), by polluting both its environment and the very resources it needs to run on in the long term. It "externalizes" costs to the community around it and to a future.
Pollution, depletion, animal abuse, reduced biodiversity, sped up resistance to antibiotics, etc etc.
This isn't by any means "sustainable" in the literal sense: that it can continue, let alone grow, like this. We're on borrowed time already. It's very clear that the current model also cannot sustain billions. So dismissing alternatives because they cannot sustain billions is a poor argument.
Is it? All my "hobby" needs, is to feed me and my household and some friends and they me. My "hobby" doesn't need to feed the entire world population.
All I want is for it to *reduce* the footprint of five, maybe ten people around me. It does that. And therefore is a net benefit. Ten people with less emissions, less pollution, less animal harm, and more fun. Even if only one in hundred thousand people does this, thats 700000 people with significantly reduced footprint.
I honestly have a problem with the absolutism in such discussions. Something doesn't have to "feed the entire world" in order to help us move forward.
To compare the 700000 figure: Tesla churns out 3 times that amount of cars in a year. If we presume these teslas are bought by people who want to reduce their footprint, and that the reduction of one bought tesla is close to my reduction (its not, its obviously much more complex) just being a bit more self-sustaining would be similar to a third of the win all of Tesla contributes.
And if we agree that "one tesla" equals "some reduction of footprint" (I don't agree, though), every tesla is a win. This isn't only valuable until every car is an EV. It's not absolutes.
80% of the resources you are buying to support your hobby farm are produced by people living in places where this makes no sense.
The fact that you're saying "I don't care if it scales" implies you're solving a problem for yourself, not the world.
But I don't have to solve the problem of feeding the entire world sustainably¹. I just have to make sure that my contribution to a more sustainable world is net positive. It is.
The same argument often comes up in "Being vegetarian": my personal choice won't solve animal welfare or carbon emissions of food production. But all the vegetarians in the world do make a large difference.
> 80% of the resources you are buying to support your hobby farm
That's a bold statement to make and one that I know, for a fact, to be untrue. I source most myself. You truly don't need that much to grow 20kg of apples or 10kg of tomatoes in a year. Nearly all of what it needs is provided by "nature" and my direct surroundings. From compost to seeds to sun, water and CO2. I really don't need that much to grow this. Same for keeping bees. Some wood for their hives - less wood per hive than the pallet used for shipping your honey from China into Europe. Some tools and some (reusable) packaging. But non of that compares to what's needed to get that plastic squeezy jar of honey into your cabinet. I'm certain my net emission is far less - per jar, per tomato, per apple than when I'd buy them in a supermarket.
¹ And that ignores the fact that the current model of food production also cannot feed the entire world population on generational timescale. So to argue that my "contribution" won't feed the world is a strange one.
Here's how I think about it.
You reducing carbon emissions by reducing your agri footprint by going vegan is an improvement over the alternative even if I wouldn't. Everyone doing this is a major improvement over the alternative.
Me not using tarps, pesticides, not using synthetic fertilizers and caring about runoff, etc and being a backyard farmer rather than having a lawn in this endless suburb like i'm already doing is an improvement over the alternative. (even tho i need more time and land to cover most of my carbs and a bit more than some quail too)
But spreading out 8 billion people and making everyone backyard farmers is probably an ecological disaster.
The real problem is that a lot of people use everyone else as an excuse to do nothing, and then nothing gets done.
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.
https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Build-Use-A-Dye-Sensiti...
Same with batteries, but just not in a way to compete with the large scale industrial processes. A wind turbine is far easier here.
Still, with improvement of tools, I can see a future, where even small communities have the capacity to practically make their own solar panels and their own batteries. But also buying it from the next industrial center makes sense to me (not at odds with the solarpunk idea to me).
I also do see small nuclear reactors a possibilitiy for those small communities, but I really don't see humanity advanced enough, to handle so much distributed radioactive material, without having dirty bombs or improvised nuclear bombs going off regulary.
If you have access to a supply chain that digs up the materials you need from the ground and manufactures fancy glass panes and circuitry and such for you, then sure. You can assemble a solar panel at home
It's much easier to be sustainable in a small well built rectangular passive house than in the average texan mcmansion atrocity (bad insulation, insanely inefficient shapes, &c.) for example
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.
"Putin has continued to invoke Nuclear Orthodoxy on various occasions, such as a 2018 claim that Russians would "go to heaven as martyrs" and foreigners would "simply drop dead.""
Thank you very much for this new utopic information.
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.
Open borders seem pretty pro-liberty as well. What’s more authoritarian than a government telling you there’s a magic invisible line on the ground and if you cross it, that’s crime?
Sorry, bud, it's just monkey stuff.
What is not natural is nations.
The big difference between China and the west seems to be that in the west, we need to pay a tax to our wealthy by their ownership stake in major companies and private capital that keep enshittifying everything.
[1] https://www.aiib.org/en/news-events/media-center/blog/2024/H...
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.
- https://advanceddentalartsnyc.com/is-toothpaste-necessary/
- https://www.huffmansmilesdental.com/is-it-okay-to-brush-your...
One of my favorite activities (which I do regularly) is "solar" cooking using an Instant Pot and an air fryer that both run off my domestic battery that is primarily charged with off peak solar power (either from my panels or the grid). This is how I cook 80% of my family's meals.
In my case I have a whole house battery, but in theory you could run an Instant pot off one of the larger capacity portable batteries.
https://youtu.be/z-Ng5ZvrDm4?si=BEmNr2kaBblgI64v
People hate on it for different reasons, but I like the vision/aesthetic they're going for.
Note: not affiliated with Chobani
Here's a short summary of our energy setup (and other notes on the Atlantic crossing) https://lille-oe.de/2025-01-24/
Admittedly in the time since Canaries we've also burned some 10-15l of diesel for propulsion purposes. And we cook with an alcohol stove, not electric. But we do desalinate all our water with the solar we have.
Anything less and you're making important tradeoffs. Either on heating/cooling, transportation, or hardware capabilities. Usually making tradeoffs hurts the most disadvantaged and poor.
Remember to also count stuff. Embodied energy is a thing so often forgotten. Trash and other waste disposal is not free either. Growing food requires energy input too.
Unless a building is crowd-funded by the future tenants with the promise of no electrical costs, and also the future tenants expect to live like 100 more years, I can't see how this could happen, short of the eradication of private property and the government constructing these things.
> you replace bricks every couple hundred years, but solar panels every 10–20, right?
Old panels perhaps, but modern solar panels come with performance warranties that guarantee they will be producing >85% of their initial output after 30 yrs.
> 2000W solar panel is like $300 or something and it's half the size of a door
2000W solar panels generally don't exist, so I assume that's a typo for 200W? Modern utility scale panels top out at ~700W with dimensions of 2.4 m x 1.3 m, however rooftop panels for commercial buildings are in the 500W range and ~ 2 x 1 m (so yeah about a door). International wholesale prices for these from Tier 1 manufacturers are now < $0.10 USD / W (although from what I understand more expensive in the USA).
like it's cheap, easy and environmentally friendly to do such installations... just search for the end-of-life management and chemicals used at their production. we have thousands of ways of doing better urbanism or feeling less "barbaric and primitive" than making skyscrapers (which seriously, are built for who?) producing energy
Earnest question - why isn't this solved by the fact that batteries exist? Are you saying that there is some technical/physical problem at-scale with storing _that much_ energy, or that there is some logistical problem with distributing and managing the batteries (ensuring the right ones are discharging at the right times), or that they are simply too expensive or specialist for us to build quickly enough right now, or...?
You make a claim about reworking our economy,
> The power is cheap enough that it's worth reworking our entire economy around it.
Can you substantiate this? Would it be fair to describe it as a utopian claim?
In the case of water heating (and water based space heating also) it's already here in terms of technology and availability. Heat pump storage water heaters are now widely available. The problem is that they can only be phased in as fast as existing gas water heaters reach EOL.
Domestic water heating comprises almost 18% of household energy use in the United States.
I have no problem with aesthetics like *punk. But when these aesthetics influence public policy we end up with dysfunction, like countries that have lots of electric vehicles being powered by new coal power plants. The original post said our era will be looked down on for not covering buildings with solar panels. I don’t think that is correct.
I mean they had things like slavery and gladiator fights, I’m really not very sympathetic to them in general, I think they were quite cruel. But dumb? Nah.
Solar panels are currently very expensive as building material. We could be exploiting passive solar more effectively I think, though.
It's nice image. But don't think Chobani is doing much different than any other dairy product manufacturer.
But realistically, as something to strive for? So much of the technology in it is essentially magic, but there's just enough physical labor to romanticize. It's pretty obvious the physical labor is optional and voluntary. In other words, it's a group of people hanging out in an automated agricultural facility that has been designed to allow them to LARP as old-time farmers.
I mean, either that or the technology just happened, coincidentally, to need exactly an enjoyable and healthy amount of labor to keep it going, and the labor just happened to take the outward form of a romanticized relationship to the land and nature.
But that's too much of a coincidence to take seriously, and the alternative is that the human labor isn't necessary to produce the food, and the humans' place in the process was designed to be enjoyable for them and also not to be compulsory. If the people aren't needed there, presumably they aren't confined to the premises and forced to act out an unnecessary and antiquated form of labor. They come and go, and when nobody is there, the automation takes over. So it's basically farming as glamping. (Glarming?) The people in this vision could drop everything tomorrow and go to a spa, without any consequences for whoever depends on the output of this farm.
I don't think it is really, it's escapism fundamentally. There's a lot of "cozy" aesthetics like this going around, "Cottagecore"[1] is related cousin, Stardew Valley and games like that embraced the pastoral aesthetics, I think you could also even count lofi music in this.
Solarpunk did explicitly start as an activist movement so I think it really does need to ask itself some questions, first I'd pose is how a Solarpunk community defends itself against some less solarpunky and benevolent people. It's a particular irony that defense, rapidly gaining importance in the world, is not exactly suited to be powered by solarpanels
Those power banks are then charged by various means, from generators (noisy & having a significant heat signature so need to be far from anything importannt) to solar panels (quite big, reflected light might give off their position but are possibly harder to easily destroy remotely than a single generator).
But don’t make it a green Aesop. That’d be boring, and the whole point is that those problems are mostly solved. So what are the new problems? Make it an original conflict, maybe something we wouldn’t even imagine.
I'm an Aussie living in the EU, and if anything is going to eventually tempt me to go back it's going to be ridiculously cheap solar energy. I think the odds of building any kind of utopia there are pretty remote but I think massive scale green steel smelters (+ other metals), green ammonia facilities, and expansion of desalination (combined with indoor agriculture). If Aus doesn't completely fumble the ball, I think there's a really good opportunity for another "mining boom".
Had a lot of fun listening to Saul Griffith explaining that solar energy and electrification is inherently deflationary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFr87rZyr3o
I had high hopes that Andrew Forrest might be the one to pull this off after watching him deliver this [1] Boyer lecture 4 years ago, but as far as I'm aware this none of this has materialised.
In general I think the east coast and the national energy market is cooked, I'm not sure how, and when the pioneering spirit died but it did. On the non-fatalistic side EV and rooftop solar uptake are great, so who knows?
On the other hand I'm much more optimistic about WA, they seem to be quietly making the correct decisions as far as I can tell. Expansions in desalination, huge battery projects, green industry (ammonia up in the pilbara [1], and inroads into the lithium supply chain in kiwana).
Let's see how this all shakes out, and hopefully the public rejects the pro fossil fuel / nuclear bullshit.
Batteries are a little easier. For used in the US I'd take a look at https://batteryhookup.com/
• Solar and wind hit 30% of global electricity in 2023 (up from 19% in 2000), with solar growing 22% yearly since 2010.
• Vertical farming is proliferating, and projected to increase by 25% annually through 2030.
• Urban greening is spreading with, for example, New York, seeing an increase of 100,000 trees between 2005 and 2015.
If guided meditations and solar punk are your thing, you're not alone
It seems to me that a parabolic reflector has the power to do a lot of good things - recharging batteries, powering pumps, etc.
I just wonder - why isn't it more widespread as a solution? There is a lot of energy out there - we just don't seem to be harnessing it ..
Although, I admit, I've been waiting until Spring to buy a solar oven, so I guess I'm manifesting this reality.
The actual grounded reality of solar power is that small scale solar powerplants are mostly popping up in the southern hemisphere, and their existence is justified by true need, note some first-world champagne socialist's desire for a green economy.
Countries in the southern hemisphere tend to be poorer, have lesser quality governments and infrastructure, meaning the continuous supply of electricity is not a given. At the same time, these places get a lot more sunlight, and need constantly running ACs, as in sweltering hot weather, having an air conditioner can be a life or death decision.
I'm pretty sure the availablity of reliable power and constant tolerable indoor temperatures has been a godsend to these places and will show up as a major economic booster in the years to come.
Thus the recently falling prices and rising availablity (of mainly Chinese) panels, inverters, and batteries has been a godsend for these places. If you look on youtube, there's an absolute ton of videos showcasing solar installs in places like the Middle East and Africa, which would satisfy the definiton of 'solarpunk', as in, communities only weakly tied to central infrastructure.
Meanwhile, places like the US or Europe, don't suffer from energy scarcity, comparatively get less sunlight and have expensive, and overly complex permitting processes.
[1] https://newintrigue.com/2025/01/29/solarpunk-a-vision-for-a-...
[2] https://hackernoon.com/what-is-the-solarpunk-aesthetic-and-m...
But even Singapore isn't perfect—way too hot and humid, somewhat car-centric road planning, and for many Western people, too authoritarian.
Not affiliated with it, I simply found out about it through the "srsly wrong" podcast a few years ago.
There's a reason the past 2000 years of urban development have been in rowhouses and smaller multi-story buildings.
I've seen it both ways. Some environmentalists hate single family homes and see suburban sprawl as the enemy. They'd rather have everyone packed into dense urban environments where anything a person will ever need in life is just a 15 minute walk/bike ride away from where they live eliminating the need for cars and leaving more land untainted by human interference. They'd be happy to do away with the inefficiencies of getting products, utilities, healthcare, and other resources to rural homes and communities spread out all over the place as well.
Usually they fight for golf courses and so on alongside socialists. That is what environmentalism means in the US. It is like the words Democratic People's Republic. They're words. But they mean a different thing.
All this to say that I consider myself reasonably well versed on both "academic" notions of environmentalism, and on what my left-leaning, SFH-dwelling neighbours consider environmentalism.
That "most environmentalists detest tall buildings" seems untrue, in my anecdotal experience. My environmentalist neighbours are some of the most vocal YIMBYs in the city, and also some of the people that stand to lose the most from changing "community character". YIMBYism is widely associated with both social and environmental sustainability, at least in the North American country I live in.
Canada and the US certainly, so you must be describing Mexico which I'm not acquainted with.
They'll always say they just want things to be built "in a sustainable manner" "with renewable materials and local labour" "and be affordable". But the code words are obvious to anyone who tries. Things are just not renewable materials. If steel, because of mining. If wood, because of tree loss. If concrete, because of emissions.
Likewise, each of the other things. The bad faith they act in has characterized them. Everyone knows they're against "evil developers trying to ruin the community character for massive profits" while they have COEXIST stickers on their SUVs and "In this house we believe" on their lawns.
It's probably more worthwhile to look at what the actual people building housing, planning cities, and advocating for sustainable housing are saying. You would be extremely hard-pressed to find a reputable group in this space that doesn't support infill, missing middle, taller, and higher-density developments. There are countless organizations within my (Canadian) city advocating for this.
I am surrounded by people considered "environmentalists" all day. My wife also works in the field. I just got out of a meeting consisting of planning organizations, construction companies, academics, and sustainable-housing organizations that was literally about adding density and sustainably building taller buildings. I can tell you that every single "environmentalist" who's opinion I know - from my extended research group, to my neighbours, and even to the SFH developers - view densification (within reason) as a more sustainable style of housing development.
I keep track of major developments in my area. There are several condo towers going up in my previously low-density neighbourhood, and the response from the majority of the community has been: "that's good to see, we need more housing". Of course at CoA meetings and community consultations there will always be some loud NIMBYs, but this has always been the nature of change in general, nothing to do with tall buildings in particular. It has honestly been empowering to see the amount of support these developments are getting in my community.
What sort of additional evidence can I provide that would convince you that your statement "most environmentalists detest the tall buildings" is simply not true?
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Wood, when sustainably harvested, is the definition of a renewable material.
Dude, they literally lobby the government to prevent homes being built in San Francisco the densest place in the nation and the perfect place for parking lots to become housing towers.
In my lifetime of living here in San Francisco, the Sierra Club has talked a big environmental game and opposed all housing. In fact, I recall the first year I was interested in policy and was curious why SF finds things so hard. I remember my uncle having Sierra Club posters on his wall so I went to look. I remember very clearly Sierra Club endorsements https://www.sierraclub.org/san-francisco-bay/2015-sf-endorse...
I remember their opposition to 8 Washington. I remember their opposition to 75 Howard (which became 17 Steuart, I think). In fact, every single time push comes to shove, the Sierra Club has opposed housing. Explain this.
My family used to work in Cross-Laminated Timber and Dowel-Laminated Timber structural design, my man. You don't have to convince me about wood. We have encountered who stalls construction and who opposes specific projects while talking a grand game. And it's the environmentalists.
In fact, if you think the Sierra Club is a pro-housing group after I've seen them, with my own eyes, oppose housing on the grounds of shadows, lobby against pro-housing bills, and protest it, I really do question what you know about things. I don't mean this in an online "gotcha" way. I mean in actual practice. What do you know about the Sierra Club that is not from online research? If you only know them through online research, I can understand your confusion. Sierra Club BC is a very different game than Sierra Club in California.
I just googled "mainstream environmentalist organization" and "housing policy" and clicked the the first one I found. Sorry if it seemed like I was pretending to know something about them - I was honestly just confused about what kind of evidence/organizations you wanted.
I found the statement "most environmentalists detest tall buildings" to be wildly cynical and unqualified, but I think what this is coming down to is that we have very different definitions of "environmentalists"(which I was hoping you would clarify).
To me (and to the dictionary, it seems), if you act/advocate in the interest of the environment, you are an environmentalist. Could be by protesting outside your local natural gas plant, but could also be by setting up special financing programs for CLT buildings, planting pollinator gardens in your front yard, limiting exclusionary zoning, etc. Given this - and given the fact that most of the environmentalists I know actively support building taller - it makes no sense to me to say that the majority of environmentalists are against tall buildings.
I get the feeling that your complaints lie with a very particular flavour of "environmentalist"*, which I don't think is at all representative of the true gamut of people who are doing actual, productive work on (vastly different) environmental issues. Suggesting that we need to "break the back of environmentalism to save the planet" is bogus doomerism... unless you are limiting your definition to something like:
"environmental organizations that oppose taller buildings in urban areas"
Which, yeah, I am not going to disagree with... because I am an environmentalist...
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*of the NIMBY, COEXIST-sticker-having, (probably) white-haired variety.
I’m not going to No True Scotsman this over “Yes, we’ll Democratic People’s Republics aren’t really democratic so when you say you want to end them you specifically mean blah blah”. But now that you know what American green organizations are like you know better. And knowing that you’re not pro-sprawl suffices for me. No friendly fire under this tent. But we will burn the rest of the green out of the US.