I was digging up old layers of the Internet and found out about old (well, late 90s, early 2000s) texts by Bruce Sterling who mentioned his Viridian notes where he describes something very close to a solarpunk movement (sustainability focused tech and social changes). It is fun to read because some have very strong cyberpunkish vibes but with the twist that cyberpunk describes the world we are in right now and viridian is the world we want.
It led me to learn that there is a label that more or less matches solarpunk in political theory: Bright Green Environmentalism
This is a huge corpus of text and I obviously disagree with some things, and the 1999 vibes of promoting at the same time intense air travel (for multi-culturalism) and sustainability sounds a bit tone-deaf, but I find it interesting to dive in with a tolerant curiosity.
(Dig that 1999 GIF btw!)
The impression I’ve gotten of Solarpunk through lurking on this instance is of some sort of hybrid between bright and dark green environmentalism. These mix like oil and water. The bright green component, that solar panels and EVs are going whisk us away to a utopian future, is a turn off from participating.
I think this fundamentally comes from Solarpunk being an aesthetic movement where it is just so easy to draw a bunch of solar panels and batteries in some digital artwork. How are the quartz and those battery materials being mined? How are those raw ores being reduced both on a chemical and energetic standpoint? Is it even possible to have artisan/localized ways of producing these technologies vs the current status quo dependent on highly energy-intensive six continent supply chain and cheap hydrocarbon flows. Brushing aside these kinds of difficult questions with techno-optimism leads to bright green environmentalism.
The manifesto states that this movement is optimistic, but there is room for aesthetic optimism constrained by the laws of physics in the collapse of the current system. Having to re-localize and work together to survive after supply chains fail leading to re-establishment of community. Ingenious ways of salvaging unusable modern technology, like building a wind turbine from harvested car alternator. Maybe this isn’t ‘solarpunk’ but I would like to know what movement it is.
I agree that they mix super bad.
Personally, why am I a bright green environmentalist? That’s because when I first came upon this criticism that we may not have enough raw material, enough energy, that there may be physical constraints in the natural world that prevents us to do large-scale transitions, I was still in engineering school in the hope of solving problems that the world has. So I took this criticism seriously. Deeply. I was there to help the world, not destroy it. So I did my homeworks. And also, you know, telling to an aspiring professional problem-solver that there are additional constraints to their problems is not a showstopper at all. Actually, that’s pretty exciting.
Do we have a limited amount of energy to do the transition? Do we have to count on a limited number of tons of cobalt? Are we going to miss some crucial exotic rare earth? Hell, are we going to have to create computers out of wood? That’s actually super exciting!
And turns out that no, when you do your homeworks, when you look about the quantities that are necessary, you see that the problems are mostly invented. There is a CO2 emission problem (and also several other GHG emission problem but CO2 is the main one). There is an oil depletion problem. There is a biodiversity destruction problem. There are tons of very real but pretty local pollution and ecosystem destruction problems.
That’s a ton of problems to solve, and we need to address all of them. We need to address all of them simultaneously. People are not talking enough about the biodiversity destruction in the ocean, in my opinion. It’s as important as the greenhouse effect. Because the greenhouse effect, if we are lucky, we may reverse it. Biodiversity destruction, we will never. But I don’t make a hierarchy in these problems. We need to solve all of them and we need to solve them fast.
I do make a difference though between problems that are real and problems that are invented for reasons that are not totally clear to me. We are not going to lack any non fossil mineral resource (I guess you could make a case for helium and some radioactive isotopes but that’s about it). Copper, Lithium, Sand, Cobalt, Nickel, any rare earth you can name We have no resources problem about it If you think we have a problem on these resources Go check what the USGS says about it. Mandatory reading: the definitions about reserves.
The answer is yes. The thing is, we don’t brush them away, we demonstrate them away. Energy can be produced in a sustainable way, it can be done at a huge scale and that energy can be used for the mining and transport (the biggest mining machines are electric, diesel engines can’t provide enough power). It’s all mostly about energy. Actually when you dig up a bit there’s almost nothing that you can’t replace if you have abundant and cheap energy.
A few decades ago, you had to do the math to demonstrate that it’s possible to switch to sustainable energy at scale. Now you don’t even have to do the math, you just have to look at the transition path of several countries.
The chemical part is in my opinion the only problem that there is in the extraction industry right now. not because of a lack of chemical components, we have plenty of this, but because of the way the byproducts are usually just dumped into the environment. And the reason why is not because we don’t have the technology to do differently, it’s because of the economic incentives. See there is a global market for mineral commodities and as they are mostly fungible you can just compete on price. How do you get the price down? You get the price down by having slave workers and by having zero environmental concerns.
The problem here is unregulated free market. We can do responsible mining, we can do mining with workers rights, we can do mining with environmental procedures. Thing is, it just makes the mineral 10 times more expensive. And why would a company buy an expensive mineral if they can have exactly the same thing for much cheaper? This is the problem to solve. Cobalt has the same physical properties whether it was mined by a unionized worker that uses an environmental responsible way to chemically refine the minerals or if it was mined by a teenage slave in a third world country.
To me, bright green environmentalism is about recognition that we have tons of technologically workable solutions, but that we need also a lot of social innovation to get out of the externalities that capitalism produces.
So personally, I’m not shy of criticizing capitalism and proposing alternatives. But they need to be credible and workable. They need to be holistic in the actual meaning of the word: they need to consider the whole system, technological, sociological, economical, political. Degrowth could work on some of these aspects but not in all of it, for a simple reason: most of the people don’t want it and dark greens have no solution to solve that crucial political problems than just pretending it doesn’t exist.
I dislike reality denial. I think that’s harmful to whichever problem you’re trying to solve.
Why wouldn’t that be Solarpunk? Because there is an electric vehicles community on this instance? You are jumping to conclusions honestly.