I really do enjoy the Solar Punk aesthetic and the optimism it represents, but when I try to bring people to the reality of things like “we still need solar panel and battery factories” people seem to get upset.
Just to say, I see the reality of what Solar Punk could be and I want to take the practical steps needed. And to be clear, my goal is to make sure that the workers own the solar panel factory, not capitalist investors. I think the solar punk aesthetic, whatever version of it we all decide on, will naturally emerge if we can achieve that.
I think ppl forget that the steps to clean energy are merely bridge technologies. You don’t get to industrial age to solarpunk future without some “unclean” steps in between.
Solarpunk is an utopia. If every step we continue making needs to be perfect, we’ll never get there. Instead we have to improve each step we make to get there.
Solarpunk is also about salvaging technology and post-capitalism. It’s supposed to be reached through a transition period. We just gotta make the first steps and introduce more circular economies. This will phase out most harmful mining practices eventually.
That’s a flawed comparison, we’re scientiffically far more advanced now, i dontthink it would be that big of a setback. We’d only change the way society operates. And if you complement the renewable technologies and fossils as bridge technologies correctly, the setback would be little /manageable.
The vast majority of human history operated 100% renewable.
I think that depends on what you mean by history and what you mean by renewable. There is evidence that prehistoric civilizations caused lasting effects on the world around us, from mass extinction events caused from human expansion (see North American megafauna), including extinction of our closest cousins (other lines of homo sapiens, and other species of the homo genus), whenever our settlements encountered theirs.
Once agriculture came on the scene, ancient civilizations were modifying the land, domesticating animals, developing pottery and tools and making use of both renewable and non-renewable resources. With the rise of the bronze age, mining and other permanent resource extraction became the norm.
Plenty of what these ancient civilizations were doing were not sustainable or renewable. Almost every ancient civilization caused deforestation soon after developing agriculture. Plenty of societies relied on mining in an unsustainable way, exhausting the forests of fuel.
So if we’re starting with “history” being human civilization and settlements in the neolithic era, I don’t think that’s quite right. Even if you’re only talking prehistoric homo sapiens, there’s still evidence that we caused mass extinctions before we developed agriculture.
Of course, we did allow for a lot of reforestation, replenishment, and other rehabilitation of the land at times, but often that was not by choice of humans. Disease, war, natural disaster, and famine could cause major population collapse in a way that caused settlements to be abandoned, but that isn’t really what people mean by a renewable practice.
You need the factories, and you also need logging and mining.
Lots of people who want to support the environment are reflexively anti mining and logging, even when it’s done responsibly. I think it’s often nimbyism that they don’t admit to themselves.
Great point, I also think that if we’re more responsible about what we use those technologies for it would also make a huge difference in the environmental impact. If you get rid of all the useless extravagances of the rich we can have a much leaner society resource-wise and still have everyone have a good quality of life.
100%. You need a lot less raw material when you design things to be durable, repairable, interchangeable, and recyclable.
Couple that with combating the “everyone needs to personally own everything they want to use” notion that leads to overconsumption. Loads of things can just work through formal or informal libraries, e.g., no one needs to personally own a carpet cleaner; better to share a really nice one than have dozens of crappy ones in circulation.
I would agree that shared resources are more efficient, and you make a great point about the quality aspect. On the other hand, you don’t want walmart monopolizing the carpet cleaners either, as that could bring up the fear of “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” that the tech bros are pushing.
To kinda build on my first comment, we need to get away from the megacorps and their unconstrained hierarchies and replace them with sensible democratically governed cooperatives. I would image a home improvement store run by a local co-op would be a good choice to rent your cleaner from, much better than home cheapo.
Yeah, I’m not even thinking about renting, though that does have its place. I basically just really like that my local library lends out all the tools that I only need once in a blue moon.
There’s times that I want to buy stuff and just give it to my library so I dont have to store it for the 99% of the time that I’m not using it. Don’t think it actually works that way, though.
That’s awesome if your town can make that work, is it from tax money or donations? Is it a big town? I would imaging it would be more difficult to maintain the tools the bigger the city/library is
I assume just tax money like the books in the library. They dont solicit for donations (for money or tools), and the tools are all pretty much the type you would expect for rentals (more durable than you or I would buy for something we might only need once). For example, they have all Park Tool brand bike tools. There might be liability reasons not to take tool donations.
They also have art, seeds, kids toys, puzzles, and musical instruments.
They take donations of seeds (which I contribute to) and puzzles.
It’s a library system with maybe like 8 locations, and they spread the non-book collections across the different branches, so one has the tools, another has art, etc.
I actually just found some neat stats on my local system, and the expenditure for the system’s whole collection (including books, digital media, and everything) is only 1/10th of the total expenditure. The way they lresent the numbers means i have to calculate things a little weirdly. On average, they spend $0.75 per use of an item. This is going to fluctuate year to year since I only see yearly expenditure and usage, and obviously, items last more than a year.
I dont have usage rates of the tools specifically, but something like a bike tools kit that costs $280 would need to be used 210 times to be hit the same cost per use of an item. I think that’s definitely doable because the rental periods are only 1 week, and you often need to place a hold to be able to get something.
Total expenditure of my library on collections is $8 per capita per year. I would gladly 10x that with my tax money. Obviously storage/administration isnt free, but still, it’s absolutely affordable, and I think it would be even for a small system.
Awesome, thank you for the detailed breakdown. Sounds like the system in your area is very well managed. Always nice to hear the things different people/municipalities are trying.
I really do enjoy the Solar Punk aesthetic and the optimism it represents, but when I try to bring people to the reality of things like “we still need solar panel and battery factories” people seem to get upset.
Just to say, I see the reality of what Solar Punk could be and I want to take the practical steps needed. And to be clear, my goal is to make sure that the workers own the solar panel factory, not capitalist investors. I think the solar punk aesthetic, whatever version of it we all decide on, will naturally emerge if we can achieve that.
I think ppl forget that the steps to clean energy are merely bridge technologies. You don’t get to industrial age to solarpunk future without some “unclean” steps in between.
Solarpunk is an utopia. If every step we continue making needs to be perfect, we’ll never get there. Instead we have to improve each step we make to get there.
Solarpunk is also about salvaging technology and post-capitalism. It’s supposed to be reached through a transition period. We just gotta make the first steps and introduce more circular economies. This will phase out most harmful mining practices eventually.
“No don’t break those poor eggs! That’s not how you make an omelette 😔”
What’s the problem with the concept of ‘a factory’?
Yup, and “clean” gets you right back to the 18th century. The vast majority of human history operated 100% renewable.
That’s a flawed comparison, we’re scientiffically far more advanced now, i dontthink it would be that big of a setback. We’d only change the way society operates. And if you complement the renewable technologies and fossils as bridge technologies correctly, the setback would be little /manageable.
I think that depends on what you mean by history and what you mean by renewable. There is evidence that prehistoric civilizations caused lasting effects on the world around us, from mass extinction events caused from human expansion (see North American megafauna), including extinction of our closest cousins (other lines of homo sapiens, and other species of the homo genus), whenever our settlements encountered theirs.
Once agriculture came on the scene, ancient civilizations were modifying the land, domesticating animals, developing pottery and tools and making use of both renewable and non-renewable resources. With the rise of the bronze age, mining and other permanent resource extraction became the norm.
Plenty of what these ancient civilizations were doing were not sustainable or renewable. Almost every ancient civilization caused deforestation soon after developing agriculture. Plenty of societies relied on mining in an unsustainable way, exhausting the forests of fuel.
So if we’re starting with “history” being human civilization and settlements in the neolithic era, I don’t think that’s quite right. Even if you’re only talking prehistoric homo sapiens, there’s still evidence that we caused mass extinctions before we developed agriculture.
Of course, we did allow for a lot of reforestation, replenishment, and other rehabilitation of the land at times, but often that was not by choice of humans. Disease, war, natural disaster, and famine could cause major population collapse in a way that caused settlements to be abandoned, but that isn’t really what people mean by a renewable practice.
You need the factories, and you also need logging and mining.
Lots of people who want to support the environment are reflexively anti mining and logging, even when it’s done responsibly. I think it’s often nimbyism that they don’t admit to themselves.
Great point, I also think that if we’re more responsible about what we use those technologies for it would also make a huge difference in the environmental impact. If you get rid of all the useless extravagances of the rich we can have a much leaner society resource-wise and still have everyone have a good quality of life.
100%. You need a lot less raw material when you design things to be durable, repairable, interchangeable, and recyclable.
Couple that with combating the “everyone needs to personally own everything they want to use” notion that leads to overconsumption. Loads of things can just work through formal or informal libraries, e.g., no one needs to personally own a carpet cleaner; better to share a really nice one than have dozens of crappy ones in circulation.
I would agree that shared resources are more efficient, and you make a great point about the quality aspect. On the other hand, you don’t want walmart monopolizing the carpet cleaners either, as that could bring up the fear of “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” that the tech bros are pushing.
To kinda build on my first comment, we need to get away from the megacorps and their unconstrained hierarchies and replace them with sensible democratically governed cooperatives. I would image a home improvement store run by a local co-op would be a good choice to rent your cleaner from, much better than home cheapo.
Yeah, I’m not even thinking about renting, though that does have its place. I basically just really like that my local library lends out all the tools that I only need once in a blue moon.
There’s times that I want to buy stuff and just give it to my library so I dont have to store it for the 99% of the time that I’m not using it. Don’t think it actually works that way, though.
That’s awesome if your town can make that work, is it from tax money or donations? Is it a big town? I would imaging it would be more difficult to maintain the tools the bigger the city/library is
I assume just tax money like the books in the library. They dont solicit for donations (for money or tools), and the tools are all pretty much the type you would expect for rentals (more durable than you or I would buy for something we might only need once). For example, they have all Park Tool brand bike tools. There might be liability reasons not to take tool donations.
They also have art, seeds, kids toys, puzzles, and musical instruments.
They take donations of seeds (which I contribute to) and puzzles.
It’s a library system with maybe like 8 locations, and they spread the non-book collections across the different branches, so one has the tools, another has art, etc.
I actually just found some neat stats on my local system, and the expenditure for the system’s whole collection (including books, digital media, and everything) is only 1/10th of the total expenditure. The way they lresent the numbers means i have to calculate things a little weirdly. On average, they spend $0.75 per use of an item. This is going to fluctuate year to year since I only see yearly expenditure and usage, and obviously, items last more than a year.
I dont have usage rates of the tools specifically, but something like a bike tools kit that costs $280 would need to be used 210 times to be hit the same cost per use of an item. I think that’s definitely doable because the rental periods are only 1 week, and you often need to place a hold to be able to get something.
Total expenditure of my library on collections is $8 per capita per year. I would gladly 10x that with my tax money. Obviously storage/administration isnt free, but still, it’s absolutely affordable, and I think it would be even for a small system.
Awesome, thank you for the detailed breakdown. Sounds like the system in your area is very well managed. Always nice to hear the things different people/municipalities are trying.