Solarpunk is not about switching to a scrappy medieval lifestyle, it is about building a sustainable comfortable future.
Why do so many people always assume that energy uses are necessarily unsustainable or scarce? It is the first part of “SOLARpunk”. You can have renewable and abundant energy.
Right but even renewable and abundant energy is scarce, in that it’s not infinite and mismanagement or inefficient use can mean it’s not there when you need it.
Communal kitchens, bathrooms and toilets mean that all the energy, materials and manpower saved from deduplicated construction and maintenance can go somewhere else.
Renewable and abundant is what we are going full speed towards. No need to mention infinity but we will clearly end up with more renewable energy production than fossil energy we are using now. Renewables are going to actually end scarcity of energy.
It doesn’t make sense to shift all consumption to renewables if there’s no thought for efficient consumption or reducing consumption. There’s a finite amount of renewable energy that can be extracted, if consumption itself isn’t managed we can be right back in the same boat of unmet needs in another century.
There’s a difference between “renewable and abundant” and “infinite”.
It would take the resources of five Earths for everyone on the planet to live like an American. More solar panels aren’t going to change that.
What will bring sustainability is Americans, and other people living wealthy Western lifestyles, learning to live comfortably with fewer resources. You can be comfortable without eating beef for dinner every night. You can be comfortable living in a resource-efficient apartment instead of a sprawling subdivision. You can be comfortable taking public transit instead of owning a car, or teleworking instead of commuting daily, or having a low flow shower in your home instead of a tub.
Home ownership, car ownership, a meat heavy diet, fast fashion, disposable technology, plastic everything, are entitlements that you receive as a benefit of living in the imperial core. These are not necessities of life. You just think they are because patriotic and corporate propaganda has convinced you of it to make you a collaborator in its colonial extraction of the world’s resources.
A sustainable comfortable future doesn’t just mean improving the standard of living of the poorest in the world. It means the world’s wealthiest need to check their entitlement and learn the difference between comfort and luxury.
There’s a difference between “renewable and abundant” and “infinite”.
The amount of energy required to heat bath water is not infinite.
More solar panels aren’t going to change that.
Well yes it will. That’s the whole point. To get out of fossil fuels. You get out of it by replacing things that require fossil fuels by renewable ones. You don’t get out of it by merely using less of it.
That’s the mentality I dont get.
Why do so many people always assume that energy uses are necessarily unsustainable or scarce? It is the first part of “SOLARpunk”. You can have renewable and abundant energy.
It’s not an assumption, it’s a calculation. There’s no way you can use the same amount of energy with solar and wind as you can with fossil fuels and nuclear. Cutting use is the thing. Anyone who’s looked at the numbers of the energy budget is forced to conclude this.
Show me the calculation then. To me it is clear that we are heading towards 100% renewables now that batteries have reached prices that makes intermittence a solvable problem.
To me the switch to renewable, on the contrary, will remove many scarcity constraints from energy production. We will have peak production times where energy will have a negative cost. This will radically change the way we think about energy consumption.
There’s no way you can use the same amount of energy with solar and wind as you can with fossil fuels and nuclear.
Renewables keep reaching “impossible” milestones. Recently in many places, including places in the US, renewables surpass coal so to create an “impossible” milestone you need to separate wind and solar from other renewables and lump together fossils and nuclear (which is not a problematic source for the climate)
I mean, can you imagine telling people 15 years ago that even Texas, despite its toxic mentality of coupling fossil fuels and masculinity would produce more wind energy than coal energy by 2024? The trend is clear, the impossible thresholds are met one after the other and without electricity production dropping.
