this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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Solarpunk technology
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Technology for a Solar-Punk future.
Airships and hydroponic farms...
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I disagree. I think what distinguishes solarpunk from anarcho-primitivism and anarcho-agrarianism is the belief that more advanced technology can help humanity to regain harmony with the rest of the natural world. Solar panels replacing coal burning power plants is one example. So is geoengineering, and CO2 capture, and an army of seagoing drones scooping plastic - don't we have not just a need but a duty to use our technology to cure some of the wounds our technology has inflicted?
Of course solarpunk means that advance technology can further develop humanity's place in compliment rather than in contradiction with the natural world, but geoengineering ain't it.
Your reply reads as if you lack engagement with real literature on what geoengineering entails. Many plants and animals have slowly adapted to a warming climate. Blocking the sun would cool the climate too fast to cause a catastrophic shock to ecosystems worldwide. If geoengineering is attempted, it cannot be stopped because to stop it would cause yet another catastrophic shock to the ecosystems that survived the initial shock would have begun to adapt to the cooler climate. That's two additional catastrophic mass extinction events that could be caused by adding sulfur dioxide to the climate, not to mention the amount of sulfur dioxide needed would absolutely kill innumerable disabled people worldwide.
Yeah, why don't we mess with our climate a second time instead of pursuing real solutions like renewable energy, degrowth, and decarbonization? I'm begging you to read up on geoengineering before making these uninformed comments.
Because it's too late for those options to work.
I agree this particular geoengineering idea isn't sufficiently thought out yet. But the problem is: the world won't stop polluting, won't stop growing its economies, won't stop expanding. Even if the US and Europe cut their emissions and slow down, the developing world, India and China and Nigeria and Kenya, and so on, won't. They see the standard of living in the West, they think their people deserve to live just as well, and they see we got there through unchecked resource consumption within a capitalist economic system, and how the hell do we have the right to tell those countries to stay poor for the sake of the environment when we got rich by fucking the environment?
So the only things that will save the world are globally organized, probably UN coordinated, technological solutions to mitigate the damage done by unchecked capitalist expansion, because we can't stop capitalism.
I support geoengineering because, frankly, it's the only hope left.
You are passing a lot of assumptions as facts here.
Unless you are a time traveler, this is a belief, not a fact.
Here you are assuming a lot about how those countries / populations might analyze the situation. Also, that the path we followed to develop is the only one, and that they are bound to follow our example. That's quite a colonialist point of view.
If you start from the premise that there is no alternative to capitalism, that this rather young form of social organization is the end of human history, I can understand why you reach that conclusion. But don't assume that your line of reasoning is the only logical conclusion one can reach.
I mean, my assumption is "people will keep doing what they're doing now", and, barring a global eco-religious revival, I don't really think that's an unreasonable assumption.
Yes, and here you are also assuming "people" is a homogenous group, that the western culture you are from (aren't you ?) is hegemonic.
But looking at how geopolitics are evolving lately, the world is increasingly multipolar, with multiple models of civilization competing. I don't know, maybe India will wake the fuck up before us and thrive, while Europe rots and USA goes down the toilet drain?
And the solution is what? To pollute the climate with sulfur dioxide, initiating another mass extinction and the social murder of millions of people through disease and starvation?
And your solution is what? Find salvation in technology? There are no technological solutions to social problems. You can't engineer your way out of ecological crises. Ecological crises are intimately social crisis, so the solution to ecological problems are found by addressing social issues. Technologies are deeply embedded in a social matrix—technologies are things that exist in specific social contexts. Your very justification is based on the premise that greenhouse gas emissions cannot be cut, thereby justifying a technological solution that allows the continuing dumping of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. See how this technology serves to only entrench climate injustice?
There we see your bias, that you cannot imagine a fundamentally different way of life that what bourgeois ideology tells you about. The solution to the climate crisis doesn't mean poverty for all—though a failure to solve the climate crisis will mean poverty for all—but rather that well-being and standards of living ought be disentangled with emissions. Solarpunk technologies and philosophies already give us insight into what kind of technologies can be used to disentangle the good life from bourgeois standards of living and the carbon emissions associated with it. Instead, you essentially assume that solarpunk is impossible (or rather that genocidal projects like geoengineering is solarpunk), thereby already dismissing the plurality of what life could be in a post-carbon world.
Then the world you support is dystopia, climate chaos, and genocide, because to be clear: geoengineering will kill millions in ecological devastation, drought, and geoengineering-related diseases. Those on the side of climate justice will oppose geoengineering just as much as we oppose the system that is destroying the world. When the time comes, we will see which side of the barricades you find yourself.