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!)

  • endthymes@slrpnk.net
    2·
    2 months ago

    Thanks for this thoughtful and in-depth reply. You are clearly someone who hasn’t ‘brushed aside’ the questions like I mentioned.

    We are not going to lack any non fossil mineral resource

    What do you think of this report by GTK? See slide 23. I would be interested in what you are looking at more specifically from the USGS and how these views could be made consistent.

    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.

    Yes, I agree it’s mostly all about energy. I disagree that we have demonstrated energy production in a sustainable way. If you are referring to Wind/PV, the production of those energy harvesting devices is completely and utterly dependent on the current fossil-based system. It is not at all readily apparent to be that you could have a self-sustaining closed loop system producing then maintaining ‘renewables’, all while decarbonizing the massive energy consumption everywhere else. This is the crux of the question. I have an open mind, but don’t see it.

    ‘Renewable’ energy harvesting machines are still a blip in the overall scale of energy system and have only added onto energy use instead of replacing it. Any handwaving at exponential growth and empirical reduction in costs is not confronting the material/energy bottleneck issue that will add new terms to that ‘cost differential equation’ when we try to go to global scale with those technologies.

    Coincidentally, The Honest Sorcerer posted an article along these lines today: A Diesel Powered Civilization. I think the views outlined there are a good guess at what is going to happen and close to whatever I am calling ‘dark green environmentalism’.

    However, I am intrigued by your referring to ‘the biggest mining machines are electric’ and how that contradicts the Honest Sorcerer saying that we need diesel. My understanding is that Diesel is unique in it’s ability for mining due to high compression ratio, but I don’t understand that. I think you are referring to the crushers, but not the excavators.

    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.

    This is also the point. With everything being 10x times as expensive, this will lead to economic collapse. Our system is dependent on cheap energy and materials.

    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.

    You are right. I am proposing no solution because for me there is no solution. We’ve gotten ourselves into an inescapable predicament by developing such a large civilization so utterly dependent on fossil fuels, which are irreplaceable miracle substances. People will resist any reduction in standard of living that arises from switching to inferior energy sources (see a certain recent election and discussion of fracking), and our system will pull every last drop of said miracle substances out of the ground that it economically can. Eventually the energy return on investment will collapse, and the complex global supply chains currently leading to “low cost” “renewables” will become unworkable.

    So the way forward to me is to anticipate the collapse and imagine creative ways how we are going to salvage survival in that environment and under those constraints. Right now our focus is on how to replace ICE cars with EVs when we really should be using our precious remaining diesel resources to dismantle our insane and unhealthy car-dependent infrastructure, allowing for people to get around without needing these stupid giant metal chariots. We should be scouting out appropriate technologies that don’t need mining instead of doubling down all our efforts on energy-intensive ‘renewable’ methods.

    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!

    Exactly.