by Bruce Shigeura

Renewable energy could replace fossil fuels and resolve global warming, but it is not being implemented at the pace needed. While renewable energy would ultimately be profitable, it depreciates the value of existing fossil fuel infrastructure—unacceptable to not only the fossil fuel industry, but to all the neoliberal capitalists and mainstream politicians. The focus on technological solutions obscures the environmental destruction inherent in rapid technological development and economic growth. Creating a world in which civilization and nature are in balance is not a technical problem but a political and social one.

Green energy will have little to no impact on other destructive industrial and agricultural practices. Extractive industries like metal mining, overfishing, and overlogging, destroy natural habitats. Over-farming and over-grazing deplete soil, drain aquifers, clear rainforests, and cause desertification. Pollution of soil, air, and fresh water resources with toxic chemicals devastate habitats and human health. Shrinking natural habitats is causing mass extinction.  

Renewable energy includes processes that must be mitigated. Solar and wind energy involve electronics and batteries that require mining of rare earth metals and lithium, with solar consuming land area. Hydropower can disrupt river life. Geothermal requires deep drilling, producing tailings. Nuclear exposes miners and workers to radiation, and generates heat pollution and radioactive waste.

A number of fake solutions have been promoted by neoliberal capitalists and their allies within the environmental movement. Carbon sequestering and carbon trading, like recycling, are end-process, ineffective, and serve mainly as propaganda to evade real solutions. Geoengineering, such as seeding the atmosphere with reflectants, would harm small farmers, and exacerbate the wealth differential between rich and poor countries. The myth of technological solutions to environmental devastation is promoted by neoliberal disaster capitalists and tech bro masters of the universe who seek to profit from the destruction of civilization.

Technological development, accumulating knowledge of our environment, and transformation of our environment are as old as the human species and may be written into our genome. New inventions increase labor productivity, enabling more efficient extraction of natural resources, higher population levels, and, for past societies, a survival advantage. As hunter gatherers, we set fires to manage forests and grasslands. Agriculture led to population growth, increased division of labor, and spread of urban civilization. The capitalist profit-driven colonization of the world, industrial and information age technology and growth, have transformed the biosphere. Humankind is at the point where civilization will either collapse or find a new relationship with the natural world.

Solarpunk envisions an economy that integrates civilization into the natural world to create a symbiotic relationship—where people sustain natural habitats. Community democracies, not economic and political elites, decide on technological and economic policies. Capitalism has built an infrastructure capable of meeting the needs of all humanity, and we must redirect it. We will advance only technologies that benefit nature and humans, and will distribute them globally to create relative equality and harmony between societies. We will no longer by slaves to our economic system or to our genome, but rationally chose the future we want.

Nature restores itself, adapting to natural changes in climate and other physical conditions, and will do so if civilization collapses. Our only positive future is based on meeting the needs of humanity for food, shelter, cooking fuel and heat, health care and education, all of our material and cultural needs, in harmony with the biosphere.

Many solutions require not technological advance, but return to simpler technologies and natural processes. Replacing industrial and chemical agriculture with permaculture; construction with natural materials; using small scale, minimally disruptive techniques for harvesting minerals, fish, timber, all necessities. Materials science can develop bioplastics, ceramics, biofuels, and other organic and inorganic chemical fluids and solids to replace petroleum products and toxic chemicals. Engineers can design reduced energy technology, such as alternatives to jet engine air transport and ocean-going freighters. Toxic chemicals must be replaced or abandoned.

A solarpunk future ends profit, efficiency, the hierarchy of power and status, and technology for its own sake, replacing them with human values. We will reorganize society democratically, to use technology to benefit all humanity and nature.