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!)
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.
Thanks for this thoughtful and in-depth reply. You are clearly someone who hasn’t ‘brushed aside’ the questions like I mentioned.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly.
I’m not sure I’ll have the time to go through all of your claims but I’ll try to address the most salient ones. Please tell me if there are things that I missed that you would like to see addressed. It may wait for a few days though, sorry.
One of the crucial misunderstandings in this question is the nature of reserves and what it means. So let’s first check what the report you mentioned (which by the way does not cite its sources or its methodology) is using in terms of reserves. It is not clear where their numbers come from. Here is the 2018 report on nickel. They probably used the “reserves” numbers, but the USGS is a bit more pessimistic than they are there: USGS estimated 74 million tonnes. They also considered total resources of 130 million tonnes.
Here is the 2024 report on nickel: 130 million of global reserves, 350 million tonnes of resources.
What magic is that? Well, there is a reason I mentioned the definition appendix as mandatory reading:
These resources, they grow just because we explore and prospect. On most minerals, we would have between 40 and 80 years of identified resources because prospecting at a higher rate is usually non-profitable. There was a scare on lithium, and at one point on copper, because the reserves were very low. And the prices went up, not because there was a fear of a lack of geological availability, but because the mines were not opening at an appropriate rate. Since I started being interested in that question, the world has “run out of copper” at least three times.
I’ve seen other articles on a trend that worries the professional of the field, but it’s not about geological availability. It’s about the trend in prospection that change. People are not trying to identify new deposits anymore. They are trying to extend the one that they already have secured the rights to. Economically understandable, strategically problematic. There’s a chance that we cannot supply the demand for minerals, but it will come from market failing, not from lack of geo availability.
Here, there is a methodology question. Right now, we both agree that our current industrial ecosystem is not sustainable. It emits CO2, it uses fossil fuels. Therefore, nothing that you produce out of it will have a zero CO2 footprint. If that’s your criterion, then sustainability is just impossible to produce.
To me that’s not the criterion. The criterion is that at one point we reach a time where you don’t need to emit CO2 to run your production. To get there we will emit CO2 and we will burn fossil fuels. Hopefully, as little as possible.
The consequence of that is that I disagree that you should integrate the indirect emissions of something into your calculation on whether it’s a piece of a sustainable society. The typical example is electric vehicles, which we consider to have a terrible CO2 footprint on production, because we assume they are produced in China with mostly coal electricity mix. What I find problematic with that view is that if you were to move the factory, the exact same factory, into a country like Norway that produces its electricity mostly from hydroelectric means, then you decrease the CO2 footprint of a car by a lot, even though that’s exactly the same car.
It makes sense in some contexts, like trying to lower your own individual footprint, to consider the indirect emissions. But in order to judge if a technology is sustainable and can be part of a sustainable zero-emission society, you should only consider the direct emissions.
And here, that’s pretty clear. Let’s focus on solar panels for simplicity. Solar panels don’t require CO2 to be emitted during their production. They just require electricity and they require transport. These may emit CO2, but that’s independent of the technology used for the production of the panels. And we know that we can transport goods using only electricity. And we know that we can produce electricity by emitting zero CO2. Similarly, mining minerals can be done without emitting CO2. It requires energy. And in the biggest mines, like I said, a lot of the big vehicles are actually electric.
I think that’s your loop. Isn’t it? You produce electricity, emit zero CO2. You use that electricity to mine minerals and to transport it without emitting CO2. And you use that electricity to run your factory without emitting CO2. And you produce solar panels that produce electricity. The loop is closed.
It is about 10% which is pretty decent but of course I want to see it grow faster. I find weird the argument that it’s only added energy instead of replacing. Yes, that’s because the world is using more and more energy as poor countries gets richer. But do you think that without renewables, the growth would be different? They would just build coal power plants. In percentage, it’s definitely displacing fossil sources.
There are also examples of places where it did displace fossils pretty significantly in absolute terms. Germany is a good example: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?country=~DEU (though I find it questionnable to get our of nuclear before getting out of fossils but that’s a different debate).
I see many people arguing similar things, and I used to, because I used to be a post-apocalypse sci-fi enjoyer. But then I realized that I was starting from the conclusion, that on some level, I wanted that simpler world, that less stressful world that I imagined once that complicated industrial civilization collapsed. Re-establishing a link with nature, rebuilding simple machines out of things that I would have mined with my hand. For some time, that’s kind of a pleasant dream. And actually so pleasant that many video games use that premise.
So i have no way of knowing if that’s your case or not but really think whether you reach that conclusion through well-documented premises and careful reasoning or if that’s somehow a belief that’s actually your starting point.
The thing that I understood is that I do want a different lifestyle. I do want a less stressful lifestyle, I want to be closer to nature. And I also understand that hoping that the society would collapse is actually a comfortable way for me to avoid making life decisions, to go where I want to go. So I resigned from my job in Paris. I went back to the Alps, where my parents live, and I started exploring the freelance world and the remote working world 10 years before COVID hit, when no one was doing it. I now live in a nice house, surrounded by cows and trees. Actual nature is 20 minutes away. I see my mountains every morning and I didn’t need society to collapse for that. I am helping the local hackerspace to produce lightweight electric vehicles and we are helping non-profits that recycle plastic. You don’t need to wait for the world to collapse to help it get better. And to me that’s the essence of Solarpunk.
EDIT: fixed a few typos and missing words