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solarpunk is a meme. to survive the climate crisis only one solution will work: totally change the basis of production from profit for a few to the needs of us all
So I think I can answer what's holding us back. Once the infrastructure changes to a solarpunk style, specifically with decentralized manufacturing, capitalism's time is limited. However, we need a killer app to get us there. Something that makes that infrastructure transition profitable and necessary in a capitalist climate. Some sort of breakthrough in structural graphene is the only thing I've thought of so far that would prompt such a massive infrastructure transition in first-world countries but undeveloped and developing nations might be more open to alternative infrastructures.
Late to the party but for anyone that sees this: I'm disabled, and I rely on Amazon a fair bit... and *all of what I rely on it for* could be easily replaced by having a local community that supported my needs! A lot of what I get is stuff I can't stand up to shopping for, but another good portion are solutions to problems in my life that a talented friend in a shop could hack out for me in minutes... but my closest friend with a shop is half a state away, and struggling. I think there is a huge untapped power in us working together, and not having everyone's energies caught up in struggles that serve primarily the capitalist class. We can't expect that of each-other, I would not demand anything from the frayed and strained people I know, and am deeply touched by the help I do get. But if they weren't fighting to cope, everything something like amazon does for me and more would be trivially addressed. We are a huge force for local transformation on levels we may not even think of.
Well said, and also in a solarpunk future we could still have infrastructure in place for products that do need to be shipped quickly, just not all the time for everyone who doesn't really need it.
Please, don’t forget that it is ok to phrase a request as “if you can spare the time it would be great if you could help with XYZ.” We are built to take care of each other
The sad truth of this is, our winning evolutionary trait as human beings was cooperation. That's it. We're not particularly strong, fast or dangerous. We don't have huge fangs or claws, aren't poisonous or venomous and are confined to life on land. We can't fly or populate the waters. But we CAN cooperate. We just seem to not really do that anymore.
The animated video is from a milk comercial which I suspect was donde by studio ghilbi. This is why I don't get it when he quotes a captalist milk comercial to say solarpunk is incompatible with capitalism XD
When engineering our environment, industrialists would have us believe that 'efficiency' and 'profitability' are sacrosanct. In particular, this creates a false barrier for alternative solutions that emphasize balance over efficiency. I've never heard asked, “How efficient is your relationship with your loved ones?”
In actuality, the efficiency of the relationship with my family is currently running at 78.6% but I'd like to get it a little higher. Not sure how to do that tho. I'm open to suggestions.
Well, another way of saying "inefficient" is "wasteful". It is absolutely important to use valuable resources efficiently. I don't think your analogy to family relations works. My personal relationships aren't resource management problems, where I have a particular resource and I am looking to use it to a specific effect. But many problems in the real world _are_ resource management problems. This includes agriculture, energy systems, transport and housing. Earthships can get by without external energy because they use the sun's energy efficiently. Sailboats don't need to burn fossile fuels because they use wind energy efficiently.
The "with nature" part is key. Most humans will say they care about nature. That they love nature. But that care and love is only if nature is "out there". As long as they don't have to deal with it. We are animals that evolved to live with all the elements of the current biosphere. Until we realize that and strive to nuture nature, we are doomed to extinction.
But nature is a murduerus beast who cares not for any of its children and has killed 99% of all species it ever created this romantization of Nature is coming from nowhere
Truly. Most people care about nature to the extent that they can benefit from it. This level of thinking and connection with the earth requires an entirely different ideology, one where our current values are completely shifted. It’s not necessarily a new ideology too. We only need to look at how indigenous people have related to nature for thousands of years.
@@altonsafe Don't abandon cities though. Cities are great for the environment. They're much more efficient in a lot of ways, with respect to energy, land use, CO2. Just bring the nature to the city.
@@loturzelrestaurant in fact the vertical axis turbines have proven to be more efficient than big standard wind turbines. If we apply small vertical axis wind turbines on every building, we will be making energy autonomous living units. If you combine that with solar, sea wave, geothermal energy and physically driven batteries, you can cut off the dependency on all other negative energy sources.
@@gaia316 Unless those "green" energy systems grow on trees, producing them is going to have an absolutely enormous impact on the environment, as they're extremely resource intensive to produce relative to some traditional energy generators, like nuclear a hydropower.
@@gaia316 if you combine all of those you will still get lots and lots and lots more of pollution caused by the materials needed to produce the batteries and build the power alternatives, and also the pollution caused by the maintenance of these. The best we can do right now is go full nuclear power and try to "unlock" fusion, or massively cut back on power dependency, meaning we'd have to cut back on everything and worsen our quality of life. This means less innovation, less investigation and experimenting, so we'd come at a stalemate or start regressing, meaning we will fall behind and climate or virus/bacteria will eventually catch up to us and makes us go partially or fully extinct. People tend to forget climate change is way heavier on the natural side than what humanity has caused, due to botched, fake and alarmist studies.
that would be horrible, because all cities will look the same. Analyze modern or the fake futuristic architecture of today and you will realize that all cities look the same.
@@javierpacheco8234 Why would all cities look the same? There would be much more localized solutions coming from solarpunk, because that's one of the core concepts. Look around you, develop the systems needed and suited for your environment. The big corporations needs to pack their cookiecutter solutions and think of more suitable localized solutions. Basically, you're missing the point of what solarpunk is. It's not that everything should look a certain way, or all have the same solution. It's a framework for thinking about what kind of impact we want to have, and incorporate nature, tech, and humans into all systems we develop. That will require more local or community based systems since the environment and needs of the community will look different. Just because the artist thinking about this all paint similar things doesn't mean that that's how it will look like.
@@javierpacheco8234 That's absolutely untrue, because in a solarpunk society, buildings would be optimized for their local climate and environment. If you live in a wet climate, buildings might be build to prevent flooding and utilize that water. In a hot arid climate, architecture would be built with passive cooling and strong reliance on solar power. It's the opposite of modernist and contemporary architecture that looks the same everywhere and relies mostly on wasteful technology to solve all weather-related issues. Solarpunk architecture would also utilize recycled and sustainable materials from nearby places, giving it a unique and eclectic look.
As someone brought up when discussing solarpunk in a reddit discussion, there doesn't need to be exploitation to have 1-day shipping where it's necessary. They specifically brought up that as a disabled person, they do actually need 1-day shipping of vital items sometimes, and it can't be dismissed as "we just need to live slower" when there are people for whom it is a necessity. The emphasis needs to be on the lowering of unnecessary convenience but on the retaining of it when it is truly needed, all while removing the exploitation that only seems like a fundamental part of these procedures, when a well-managed distribution network could manage 1-day shipping of a decent quantity of items without any exploitation at all.
Well said. Wanna know a great way to add convenience? Create semi-autonomous communities where our shops provide everything for us. Everything's in walking distance, and you can go in and get what you need. Cut out Amazon, and rebuild an amazing network of mom and pop shops and cooperatives that fulfill both consumer and b2b needs.
I want the solar powered drones that come bring us our stuff from the fully automated warehouse while we don't have to work(but do practice trades and skills because we want to).
This is something that exsists in Rawanda example, at a small scale. The healthcare network is nationalized. The road network and their refergerated trucking isn't there though. To get around this they have a large drone delivery network that is able to airdrop essential medical supplies to remote and poorly connected community clinics. It's quite neat
Sounds like cherry picking and a lot of flexible argumentation to me. The sole questions is how this is in the end more sustainable. It is irrelevant how big or small the effort is.
This came at such a great time! One of my classmates started a group to discuss solutions to the climate crisis and other world issues, and of course I will be contributing with all the lessons I learned from you and Andrewism.
As someone who is disabled (type 1 diabetic), one day shipping is not only convenient but life-saving. Saying we need to “live slower” is convenient for nonessential items but we can’t ignore that millions if not billions of people will need important items quickly. Focusing on stuff like that is vital for and idea like solar punk to be successful.
Maybe in a solarpunk world there would be a nearby local store, one or two in every community, specifically for these essential items (made because we know people NEED them) and the workers could easily deliver anything u need to you quickly since its close by
Insulin and a lot of chemical treatments for lifelong disabilities can be synthetised on the spot with small apparatus, storable natural products and a dedicated chemists. Apoticaries used to work this way long ago, what's holding us now is restrictions of knowledge and patents : capitalism.
Solarpunk can be a local self-sufficient communities of abundance and prosperity with the spirit of Ubuntu Contributionism or sharing networks and libraries of things, etc. There is a small Canadian book published in 1992 that is so wise for the time and still relevant today called "No Place Like Home: Building Sustainable Communities" by Marica Nozick. It gives so many nice ideas that, if followed, we could create a Solarpunk community where we live and inspire others to do it, too. Some tools maybe useful: One Small Town, Zeitgeist Movement, and Transition Town movement.
Let's not forget that wooden sailing ships were, after smelting bronze and iron, the second driver of global deforestation. All energy and resource systems have to be managed in a way that maintains or increases the amount of the resources used.
I'm so glad this video featured earthships. I remember reading about them in like 2009-2010 and back then they gave me so much hope. Happy they have not been forgotten as a fad.
Excellent solutions focused video, Charlie! We need more of these visions of an optimistic future and work towards it to make it a reality. Great work!
For y'all French Canadians, I recommend reading "Le temps des récoltes" by Elisabeth Cardin which has a lot of similar ideas adapted to North American climate (it's more of an ode really but still worth the read). If you want to get political, "Ce qui nous lie" by Sol Zanetti is excellent too. I feel like a solarpunk future is attainable, but we gotta start somewhere and for me it begins with durable change in my country.
@@FujinKeima hey glad I could help! If I might add, first one is mainly about food, second one is about independance. If you want a book about technologies, there's "Demain, le Québec" which is a bit old (2017) but still has some nice things, basically a collection of companies that do green things
Local activism is super important! We need people to be more informed and involved with their community's challenges and needs, as well as more participation in grassroots unionizing and organizing. Start small and grow the movement!
Oooh, has Cardin's book been translated/do you have a translation you would recommend? It'd be great to get more English-Canadians familiar with Quebecois thoughts on this, I think. -A
There is a massive difference in environmental impact between high density (urban) dwelling and low density dwelling. Low density is inherently inefficient. The only way emissions get under control is by urbanizing densely and designing well to mitigate the challenges of living close together. Applying a few earthship efficiencies to suburban tract houses would be an improvement but it’s like putting a bandaid on an amputated limb. The same is true of putting solar panels on those houses. It’s focusing on the 1% harm reduction and being blind to the 80% improvement.
low density housing can work if its homesteads and the roads are small and only connect a walkable house area that has a combined parking garage, not every house. the houses should be build more verticaly rather than sprawling. basicly how old farms were build.
And for those that do not want to live in a dense neighborhood? Are we out of luck? Are we forced to live as others like yourself “deemed” “right and holy?”
I fell in love with sailing on the tallship seen in 9:12. It really makes you appreciate the powe of nature but still I think it could really be an awesome alternative to deliver goods locally, for example with those traditional carribean schooners on the small antills
One thing to be considered. Earthship-like solutions would be great in small scale, but cities are kinda unavoidable. If we spread the entire population that currently occupies cities into smaller communities built in a suburb-like system, that would necessitate a lot of space, which isn't feasible in many countries and possibly can be environmentally damaging (habitat destruction, deforestation etc). Building vertically to a certain degree can allow for other systems of heat transfer/management. Plus, centralization of population can reduce the logistics of both resource transportation and individual transportation to allow people to perform their roles in the community without requiring individual transport systems. And higher-density areas are key to maintain things like schools and universities, which don't directly produce goods but allow an output of highly trained citizens to help smaller communities with their tech needs. Another suggestion in integrating tech and nature: AI solutions for optimal logistics organization. Knowing the rate of use of resources, generating models of what is needed and where. This allows us to better plan the routes. In the long term, it can even be made partly autonomous, relieving a lot of the necessary work to maintain those logistics and allowing us to focus on the things humans do best.
Yeah, I was looking for more realistic comments like this. I really love the good vibe of solar punk instead of the depressingly one from cyber punk but we need to be aware that there physical limitations of the current technology to handle the amount of resources and energy required to offer the quality of life that most of the people expect. Even worse we don't realize how big is our population if we spread them out on 1-3 floor homes we will need a lot of land and new infrastructures. Any way is good to imagine different futures even if they are hard to make it real.
I was halfway through making a comment about retrofitting our current houses so that we never have to turn on heating or AC, but then you mentioned it yourself!
I unfortunately dosagree with a lot in this video. Mostly earthships and the comment on concrete buildings. What is better? High rise concrete buildings that don't take the space of a forrest or a bunch of earthships that do? We need to work on cities being dencer so that they don't take up so much natural space. I have read somewhere a good quote: you love nature by not living in it. I am sure that OCC doesn't mean to stop building concrete high rise buildings in favor of only building earthships but that's what you could think becouse this video. I think we need a mix of passive single family homes and high rise buildings also buildt on the principal of passive housing.
@@LilliD3 yea I agree. Denser housing is the way to go. It also brings loads of other urban planning advantages since it enables us to use way less cars. I think he was trying to mostly talk about how little power and utilities earth ships are setup to use, but didn’t quite stick the landing. Hard to tell for sure though.
@@LilliD3 Mixing the tech (and, of course, splashes of nature) with big cities and simply leaving most of nature to do it's work is arguably the best and most realistic way to do this. It also lets people who don't want to give up modern life live sustainably
@@LilliD3 Agreed. I personally don't think Earthships make sense, because they can only work in one climate really. Putting it somewhere like the Northeast US, it will fail. We have much better technology now, and it can be done with natural building materials. About the concrete skyscrapers, I'm personally interested in shifting toward wooden skyscrapers. But there's actually been recent research that found between 4 and 10 stories is really the most "sustainable," based on the amount of materials and efficiency, which I think is also better for human scale. But yes, we need denser development.
Community gardens don't work. I was in one with 30 people 90% of people are lazy and greedy and just come to the harvest. I did at least half of the day to day work.
@@habibikebabtheiii2037 from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. not everyone has the time to garden, the purpose of community gardens is to feed the ENTIRE community. if you don't enjoy helping provide for your neighbors, perhaps community gardens are not for you.
@@mybear_hands Plenty of the people had time. They had been neglectful. The university gave the garden 100,000 dallors. When I stopped the garden failed. I only did it because my dad made me do it.
I’ve visited and toured the Earthship village near Taos, and it’s amazing. There are homes there that have been self-sufficient for water for years, using only the seven inches of rain that fall there every year. The latest versions employ a venturi passive cooling system that pulls cooled air through the berm walls, and the one I visited was the most comfortable space in terms of temperature, humidity, and air movement… on the Taos Mesa, late afternoon in August. I don’t think Earthships are a global housing solution for a variety of reasons, but they are some of the most forward-thinking architecture ever made and deserve study.
Next, it would be cool to also do a video on lunarpunk, also a utopian environmentalist genre closely connected to solarpunk, but with a more contemplative spiritual side, focus on technologies like bioluminescence and bio-mimicry of night creatures, creative uses of fungi as materials etc. You can also see it as the nighttime of a solarpunk society, how is the city designed to accomodate its night dwellers. On the other side, that genre might not be developed enough yet and, except aesthetics, not distinct enough from solarpunk to need a video.
"Ideas & inventions that can't compete in the market, regardless of whether they are zero-carbon or build community health, are pushed to the margins". Such a great truth being spoken. During my time trying to become an entrepreneur, this is one of the sad things I've realized. This is ultimately one of the largest idea killers.
So Powerful! I am part of an NGO focussing on fair and sustainable electronics. These are the pictures I was unconsciously searching for! Hope to hear more of it in the future :)
modern architecture isn't filled with nature. it's made of prefabricated materials which are harmful to cities and to the environment such a concrete and glass. Traditional architecture is better because it's made of natural materials. Modern architecture made architecture worst not for the better.
Solar punk is just like a rebranding of permaculture. It’s great if it gets more people thinking. The art of solar punk is definitely inspiring and I hope we can all crush the capitalist ideals that occupy the masses mindset.
Yes I promote a solar punk present an future wherever I can. The more people that buy into a dystopian hunger games type future the mote they make that a reality we need hope for the future we need to let our imagination work for us not against us
Solarpunk always fills me with an overwhelming emotion of sentimental hope. It's the literal apex of humanity; prosperity, equality, and sustainability; all merged as one by the unity of the human race. The only thing blockading us from this future is...... us.
No. It's that solapunk is sci-fi, completely removed from reality and logic. It's designed to have you believe that if you simply green-code your dystopia resources and energy are going to spawn out of nowhere.
how would you create all these technlogies sutainably? you still need massive open pit mines. you still need people working them. and you still need oil for most of them.
What I love about solar punk is the vision. What I very much dislike about solar punk is the attitude of most punk movements of labeling. “You’re not punk if X”? “That’s not punk, that’s poser”, etc.
Earthships are just one example of alternative building methods. There are many others - cob houses, earthbag homes, rammed earth, etc. For more info do a search for vernacular architecture or indigenous architecture.
As a young person I hope that I could live a live of a worthy man, creating and not distructing, spreading kindness and knowledge, to be a better person that can build better future.
Plankton’s voice just screamed out “YeEEeess!” in my mind. This is something I can live and die for. Then again, and don’t take this as pessimism, but I still think our actual reality will still likely be a lot more painful and competitive than the Ghibli paradise we see in these visions. It will likely fail in just as many ways as it will succeed, and I believe there will still likely dystopic cyberpunk-esque fringes just as well as utopian solarpunk paradises -and it may not even be clear which is which across all planes.
This was wonderful, thank you! I was introduced to Solarpunk a few months ago and it's been changing my life for the better. I especially love the emphasis on imagination, having hope, and taking action right now.
Ehhh a lot of solarpunk art (including stuff in this video) veers into pastoralism in a really naive way. A lot of environmental activists have developed a naive idea that "green is good" that leads to people blocking really environmentally valuable and beneficial projects, like solar and wind farms, transit projects etc. Manhattan is way more environmentally friendly than lawn-filled suburbia, or even semi-rural places like sonoma county in california, but if people are focused on surface appearances, they might think the opposite. I'm happy to see cool technologies highlighted, but some solarpunk does lean really hard into pro-density / pro-urbanism / pro-growth messages, and I'm kinda sad to see that not being better represented in this video
This is is the comment I wanted to make, and I would like to add that the path to "solarpunkish" is likely to be achieved before we realize it. Watch a Tony Seba lecture and he'll show how many disruptive technologies are just around the corner; we'll have an enormous change in land use within the next five-to-ten years, and it will be done just by market forces bringing cost down in key sectors: food(precision fermentation), transport(self-driving and EV), energy(solar/wind/battery; California already achieved a 100% renewables grid for a 15 minute span this year). All three combined mean that all our material concerns get a lot cheaper; even dyed-in-the-wool transit junkies like myself will see a transformation as robotaxi fleets come online; if you can run a robotaxi, you can run a robobus, a robotruck or robocourier, and even a robobike. And with more being consolidated into shared fleets, the need for parking abruptly disappears, allowing more space to go to transit and bikes, green areas or development density. Simultaneously, there is a path forward to the anti-capitalist aspects in the merger of solarpunk ideas with cypherpunk ones into "lunarpunk". That is, the economic coordination problems we face are not addressed with a populist "we must all band together and make a sacrifice" type of statement that implies a power structure, but by embracing privacy and autonomy in modes that also allow for community. This is starting to be realized in earnest through a new wave of decentralized networking technologies, increasing interest in open, repairable and self-manufactured computing systems, and through developments in AI that allow computers to increasingly replace the entire concept of bureaucracy and office work, turning them into trusted agents and intermediaries on our behalf. Blockchains also factor into it as a means of creating shared records for organization; not one chain that rules the world as Bitcoin advocates would have it, but a latter-day version of the village account books which recorded everyone's credit. These are all things that are a bit nascent right now, still establishing their philosophical grounding, but are likely to come together into a disruptive societal tech in the not-distant future.
The urban exodus is kind of real, though. People ARE leaving big vertical cities and moving to smaller semi-rural and rural areas. These places that don't already have an infraestructure built on them are a great opportunity to build in an enviromentally friendly way.
@@somenameidk5278 Well a single family home is also much smaller than a apartment, and I'm pretty sure manhattan is full of cars, way more than a lawn filled suburbia
I find that building communities with those around us to be more profitable and provides humans with more tangible "profit" than money ever would. Not saying to abolish money as it stands, but I am saying it should be used as a tool, and those that prioritize money over people, lives, or their communities should have access to a therapist, and be able to get the help they need to steer them away from that being a focal point. Ultimately, I believe in a solarpunk future, and will do my best to try to build one, regardless if every card is against me.
My biggest issue with Solarpunk is that it's not run by Realists but Idealists. I like Solarpunk as a setting but it's ultimately unrealistic and i hate the whole "Abolish Capitalism" thing, like ok what do you propose we use instead, Communism? cause that went real swell the last century or so with stalin, mao, etc.
@@Foogi9000 I think the biggest issue here is thinking that its just run by idealists overall. Or thinking the movement is run by one type of individual, do you think that each subsequent individual is more idealist than realist? Technology, Culture, and Nature can work all in tandem, but apparently we, as a species are too afraid to step into that due to the normality's of these systems we call "home". There's other systems and other ways, and we don't need to look at past leaders and how they ran their countries with more of a dictatorship rule under the title of "communist", we need to find a system that works for as many as possible, and offers a hand to those that are just having a bad time. If that requires pulling from other systems ideas that work such as communism, capitalism, or other social structures that may not be listed here, then we should do that in order to further foster life on this planet, and each others lives. We should prioritize life above all, because we're just a snippet in the grand scheme, and we will all be forgotten, let's leave something for future generations, regardless if they remember or not, let's just make sure we don't leave them with this current system, or a more advanced version of it, because that's not fair to any of them, or even you and I. TLDR: Life is sacred, and we should prioritize it above all, but find a system that takes into account Nature, Culture, and Technological advancement, that is the beacon of Solarpunk, or at least how I see it.
@@MissSanctus Overall I agree with you, I honestly don't know what is the right path. It's hard and whatever system is put in place it actively needs to take into account human nature and that ultimately where Marxism and Capitalism fails. Marxism is susceptible to Envy and Capitalism is susceptible to Greed.
@@Foogi9000 I may not know the right path myself, regardless if I think solarpunk, as an idea and as a system can work with the right pieces. However, the current system as it stands doesn't benefit everyone, and that's a problem we must solve, and if that requires putting things together like a puzzle to find out what DOES work, let's do it, together. Without greed, without envy, but with abundance, and compassion. Not only for ourselves, but our environment.
@@Foogi9000 The solarpunk aesthetics are _used_ by left-leaning movements to lure people to them, but they are not exclusive to them! There are budding centrist movements which try to reach such futures by coordinating between capitalist and non-profit organisations rather than trying to get people to revolt against the idea of profit in the name of shiny.
7:53 this is just advocating for green washed industrial farming. You can’t offset geo carbons with plant respiration. Because the carbon isn’t going back into the ground like in carbon capture (which has its own myriad of issues), it’s going into the plant. Once the plant dies, what happens to the carbon? It’s released back into the atmosphere through composting or burning.
We don't have the technology, if you look deeper into what happens to our waste, how our electricity is produced and how the tools that produce our electricity our produced the answer becomes clear that we are living a lie. The ideas always look good on the surface, once you start looking at the nuances there are always gotcha moments or certain impracticalities. You did a good job talking about the imperial periphary which other utopian solarpunkists just choose to ignore for some reason. These Imperial peripharies are densly populated growing regions, there simply isn't enough material to build local. Huge amount of infrastructure needs to be built everyday which is not possible without concrete. Plus it will take time to get to zero GHG, by that time we would have already altered our climate so much that our cities would need to be moved to safer locations, which means... even more concrete. Vast majority of people in South-Asia, South-East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa currently live in areas that will very soon become uninhabitable due to wet bulb temperature, especially India with huge majority living in Gangetic plains that will soon become a hot-humid wasteland with 0 water supply. Good luck moving that many people into new cities built 'sustainably'. Not only that, the amount of electricity they use and will use in the future is colossal and batter powered solar-wind energy is not even close to providing half of the grid's supply. Talking about solar-wind energy, they are always built using rare materials and alloys which are like I said... rare. They are not recyclable and there is problem of waste, they are not environmentally safe either as they release toxic waste and are harmful to the environment on top of being very less energy dense. So what is the answer? Geo-thermal and Nuclear? I wish because our population is so darn big that we don't have enough resources for Geothermal and Nuclear (Latter also uses rare earth materials). India is focusing on Thorium reactors but their practicality is still to be proven and they will be made using even more rare earth materials. ITER's Nuclear fusion is still a pipe-dream. Let us go back to waste management and resources, our booming population puts a stress on available resources. Not only that but waste production and mining releases lots of GHG and harms environment in other ways. Circular economy would be ideal however it is not possible with current technology. We can recycle metals like Steel etc. however they are not completely pure and the growing demand means that we don't have enough scraps to produce them. Most chemicals themselves can't be produced without GHG. All Electronics are not recyclable at all, unless you are willing to ship some of them to poor workers in China who sort everything by hand, did I forget to mention that China put a ban on all the Electronics and Plastic imports because of health issues? Capitalism is definitely one reason why we are not seeing some revolutionary technologies in use (They are not profitable) but there is still a hint of truth to the solutions being not so scalable and practical. Even in Communism you are not going to see mass use of them because like I said, it is only when you research deeper you start seeing all those 'gotcha moments' and hidden impracticalities. We are far.. extremely far from being even close to technologically sufficient to a solarpunk future, it is still a pipe-dream to us. Remember that all those 'solutions' are themselves made to look 'Utopian' and 'Perfect' by those same greedy corporations you were bashing in this video. It is more profitable to make straw man solutions look better than actually making them scalable and economical. This is how startups like Gravity Vault get away with being so obviously unworkable.
This is a great critique. I think solar punk falls into the trap of being giftwrapped as a marketable aesthetic to corporations, and justifying unsustainable technology, unless it really digs deeper to honesty address those “gotcha moments” that the commenter above discusses.
I’m making a deep dive into this solar punk ideology and I am in love with it there’s just 1 problem. This is all very idealistic, and I wish everyone loved nature as much as us, and could push greed aside for the betterment of others but that’s just not the world we live in. That doesn’t mean give up, we should forever push a positive message to help get as many people on board as possible, but we do have to understand. Greed and selfishness will always exist.
I love this and I'm so happy to see more and more solarpunk content pop up especially in the climate parts of youtube. (cli-tube?) Solarpunk can happen if people believe it can happen and start working towards it!! We can all start by slowing down a bit.
I thought that this video would go techno-optimist and simplistic, but as soon I had a critique, in the following seconds the video highlighted the cons and associated problems to show that the problems doesn't have magic solutions. Good job!
One of SolarPunk's big changes that the modern world can't grapple with, is that the entire world is not a consumer supply chain. Communications with the entire world, but if you want something from the other side of the world, it would be bespoke, from a master craftsman. Production of necessities and commodity luxuries need to be short-haul or in-situ production, thinking 3D printers and decentralized production facilities.
"Hope is Something you give yourself. That is the meaning of inner strength." "Pride is not the opposite of Shame, But its source. True Humility is the only antidote to shame." "It is important to draw wisdom from different places. If you take it from only one place it becomes rigid and stale. Understanding others, and the other nations will help you become whole." Uncle Iroh- Avatar: Legend of Aang.
Excellent vid! Reduce, reuse, recycle - ordered by importance. Recycling is flawed and not enough. I guess earthships reuse, rather than recycle old tires.
It seems like earthships are best suited to places like the more southern prairie regions (like most of Kansas) than new Mexico. The temperatures are more stable, and the rainfall is higher but the humidity isn't too high.
As a society, eventually we'll need to talk about using technology in a more efficient way instead of abusing it for the sake of an unsustainable convenience. I'm glad this was adressed in the video, because often in our eco-friendly utopias we tend to think filling our roofs with solar panels and our streets with electric cars will solve our problems.
When you said that speed will be an issue in this imagined world, I started thinking that it will never come to pass without addressing this issue. Speed in the economy is not only about convenience. It can also enable certain ways of living and doing business. And by that I don't mean consumerism. Economic speed enables us to react to needs and crisis in a more timely manner and can vastly oncrease quality of living. Because slow processes accumulate and make not only individual orders arrive slower, but also complicates the entire lifecycle of a good or service. Picture a pandemic like covid without our ability to quickly supply labs or health centers.
One way to mitigate this is to do away with just-in-time supply protocols. Many processes rely on getting things at the last minute because it is most profitable to do so (it lowers upfront costs), but if profit isn't the priority, enough supplies can be kept on hand to weather a crisis or at least last until more can be delivered.
@@lynpotter6471 Sure you can mitigate it, but you can't not prioritise ecenomic speed. Any ecenomic system like that is just gonna loose out long term because it provides less utility.
One thing I've recently found out. The suburbs were originally intended to be solarpunk 😭. As in everyone gets a plot of land that they can take care of and make awesome but most just waste it.
Not to burst your bubble but i feel that someone lead you astray here. The suburbs were made, at least in large part, for white Americans to leave the cities due to racial "fears". On top of this, single use housing continues to be one of the biggest hindrances to ecological progress- bicycles and public transport aren't viable in America bc of urban sprawl; thousands of miles of asphalt are laid down for property development yearly, cutting off ecosystems and making an even larger footprint; and not least of all it's denying any sort of community when the nearest gathering spot or shops are 6 miles away across 6 lane highways. I could go on, but one of the first things we need to destroy for a solarpunk future is the idea of suburbia as an option for even a moderate size of the population.
@@yoskisaccount en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement This is the origin story of the suburb. It was sort of a proto-solarpunk movement at the start. Obviously it has since failed miserably and became a complete disgrace of the original movement to the point that it might not even be possible to redeem it anymore.
@@beskamir5977 yeah uh that Wikipedia page doesn’t really accurately portray the history of the suburbs, the first guy was spot on. It was in large part born out of white flight, and ended up being leagues more harmful to the environment than big cities.
@@Ismael-kc3ry The garden city movement is responsible for the idea of living in a hybrid of an urban and rural setting (aka suburb) so I'd argue that without it the suburb could not have existed.
Honestly, there are ways to do shipping without being so much at the whims of the wind, by including solar. A trimaran is like a catamaran boult around a ship, so basically buoys shaped like ships attached to the main ship on both sides. With that, you can have solar panels which can generate electricity for moving the ship during the day, if there is no wind, and those solar panels can be built on rails so they can be protected if heavy rain, hail, or storms, appear, and the windmills of the trimaran wind-boats could use a CVT (continuous variable transmission) to "change gears" without the inefficiencies associated with changing gears in a manual car. Also, flywheels can be used to make the speed of the underwater propeller(s) more constant, and in hurricane winds the windmills can be allowed to spin freely by simply decoupling the electricity generator from the turbines, or maybe even using hinges to fold the windmill blades forwards or backwards to significantly reduce the amount of energy produced by them. If that is not an option, then simply releasing the excess energy into the water (not grounding, but watering, in this case) could be used instead, or maybe the excess energy can be used to turn sea water into hydrogen and oxygen used in a jet engine which to propel the ship forwards. Because it is possible to use windmills to make ships sail directly into the wind, and to make trains accelerate directly into the wind, if there is wind and the structure to which the windmill is attached doesn't derail or sink. For building houses, we don't need to use recycled tires, just to use 5-8% cement, 2-3 times as much water, and the rest being local dirt, mix that well until it gets the consistency of a dough or clay ball, then use soil compacting machinery to compact it instead of using human labour, and that artificial stone will work as a heat battery which will not release greenhouse gases, while using a lot less cement and water than normal cement/concrete. Even in cold climates, you can use 4-stories-tall mirror walls and/or plastic fresnel-lens walls to concentrate sunlight onto greenhouses, in order to be able to farm cash crops and more food in general even in permanent-snow places, because that way you do not add extra heat (like by burning fossil fuels), you only move the sunlight and it's heat around, and you can still let some light pass through unchanged, just not all of it. And that would allow people to grow food easily even in the coldest places on earth, as long as they do get sunlight, including the arctic regions which get days and nights lasting entire months. Some say (me included) that this could be used for post-putin russia to recover after the war is over. And for combating desertification, it is possible to use concentrated sunlight to heat pipes going from sea beaches inland to desert places at a slight angle in order to create an updraft which to get more air into the large pipes (I'm thinking at least 1 meter (or 1 yard, or 3 feet) wide pipes, only splitting into smaller pipes to have the air inside heated again by concentrated sunlight, and to catch falling water into water reservoirs to prevent a water hammer effect), and at the destination you can do one or more of the following: (1) Split the humid air into multiple pipes and use large fans to cool them down, and power the fans with the compressed air leaving the pipes, (2) release the hot humid air directly without cooling it, (3) cool the air the same but use dew collectors to collect the air after it gets depressurized and use the depressurized air being released into atmosphere to power the fans cooling the pressurized air, (4) cool some of the pressurized air to harvest it's water content after depressurizing it and heat the rest of the air before releasing it into an updraft tower which to be used to generate electricity, the air humidity making the air rise faster than otherwise in order to get more electricity from it.
Solarpunk is a scientific approach, not a Utopia, the fact that people cannot imagine such a future to happen, especially from government officials. Then it means the community has to build that future themselves. This is easily achievable, if you have the community doing its part.
Great video! I will definitely like to work to make this solar punk future happen! As you said, even if it's an utopia, it is a future worth fighting for. A call to action, a motivation, an end goal. I think these ideas are really inspiring for all those engineers, artists and industrial designers (such as me) that are out there . Thank you for sharing this video!
What I love about Nausicaa is that in the backstory, the nuclear war didn't happen because some rival nations like America or China got jumpy and finally pushed the button. It was a bunch of climate scientists deliberately killing everybody with genetically engineered cyborgs equipped with nuclear weapons because they realized letting humanity live was even worse. See, Miyazaki didn't pull any punches about what needs to happen to change the world for the better.
Can you please clarify in another video why doing away with capitalism will enable transformations like this to take place? All Capitalism means is that people are allowed to trade their time/labour/resources for something else they value more in their given situation. While it is correct that labour regulations are important to account for the power differences that doesn't mean you should all of a sudden forbid people from making and keeping their own private contracts with each other.
Sounds like escapism to me. I appreciate everyone who tries to have a more balanced approach and I adore people who are willing to live low-tech and off-grid. But having the best of both worlds needs decades of calibration of communities and honestly communities are not stable or immune to stupidity and egocentricity.
Great video! Just in time so I can add this as additional "reading" for the Permaculture 101 course I'm writing for :D Also: Does anyone know where the b-roll scenes are from? Looks like anime? I'd love to watch them!!
Always wanted to build a solar punk like city just to demonstrate that a bright future like this is possible. One day ill when I'm rich I'll go threw with the plan. No cars; bike and public transport and that kinda stuff, high density community housing and communal gardens. PLS ♥️ this comment! edit: Typo.
I doubt anyone will see this but I have had my own vision of solar punk for a while now. It is a world that a lot of people would not be able to comprehend or would outright be against, because it goes against everything we have known. It is a future where companies or people in power do not exist, even money would not exist. It would be more about community-base societies working together with technology to live peacefully. Imagine a world where "products" are not made to sell, they are made simply out of kindness for others. There would be no cost but rather your own involvement within the creation itself. Using advanced technology that would be designed for the commons, we would come together to build whatever we need or want and could innovate and improve upon anything. This would obviously require quite a lot of intellect tho and extensive education from the community but I feel like it not impossible. In this utopia-like world, it would rely on people actually being kind though and I know currently there is too much hatred, corruption, and brainrot in the world for any of it to be viable but it's a nice thought... at the very least.
This is definitely a good video! But, as I comment on all "Solarpunk" videos: Solarpunk is mislabeled, and does not fit the "punk" genre. The "punk" genre explores the negatives associated with the ideals we hold as a society, and if a "punk" media includes a story, typically has the protagonist rebel- as a punk- against the system. Cyberpunk analyzes corporate takeover and human-tech integration, and how it is bad. Dieselpunk. Steampunk. Etc. Solarpunk would require examining the detriments such a society would have for us- perhaps a lack of luxuries, medical care, etc. But, its neither here nor there!
Well, maybe it's true in Cyberpunk. I fail to see the same in steampunk, as I always see people coming out with genius solutions and positive promotions to things /actions in the genre. I definitely don't not see steampunk as a negative thing except for the envr. pollution (at least not in my experience. As for solar, I guess the punk here is referring to some sort of rebel against the current system maybe? Because that is what I often see in solarpunk media when they refer to "punk".
Love this collab, two channels I really admire for your honesty, integrity, and calm. I aspire to make videos about solarpunk solutions but specific actions that might be taken in my community and how to network with government officials to make it happen in the confines of capitalism short term, and outside of government organization for the long term.
Thank you in the first place for giving space to artists on a profit-focused website. And thank you for for inviting people to dream, if anything it seems at first glance that solarpunk can fill that role of making one think of futures outside the capitalist system. However, technofixes are not the climate solution we need. We must be very careful about identifying what technologies are usefu and which only create other problems to require new technofixes. I appreciate your angle on imperialist structures manifesting itself yet again on the resources needed for transitioning to a net-zero carbon society, but it's not radical enough. I'll have to get more familiar with solarpunk as a form of art to see what they propose.
@@1elitegeek The issue is with relying on technological advances to help us out of the mess we're in. Climate catastrophe will hit the Western capitalist core within the next 10-15 years. Scientific advances need to employed NOW. We cannot afford to wait for better alternatives with more efficient this or that. I think controlled socio-economic degrowth is the way forward. Living less than exuberant lives spending fewer resources, putting less time into working for profit and more time into nurturing human relationships.
@@NewAge374 I don't think solarpunk needs to be "more radical". It's a framework for thinking about how we can live sustainably in the long term, and as such I agree with you it won't fix our current urgent problems. But it's also a false choice. Going solarpunk shouldn't hinder any larger scale changes that are required for our near term future, and can be implemented in small scale in every community. I think that spreading these kinds of ideas are important to get people to think and imagine practical solutions that might otherwise seem too large and daunting. Solarpunk is not about technofixes in isolation. It's about thinking how tech, nature and humans can co-exist sustainably. If one of these pillars contribute negatively towards the other, then it's not a viable solarpunk solution.
@@Ermude10 I do want to believe that we can live sustainably in a world where the internet still exists, albeit in a reduced form to facilitate information exchange and sharing arts and stories between people. But it's current format needs to degrow drastically because we already see that we don't have the mineral resources to have smart devices for the majority of people AND the energy infrastructure to maintain them. I'd love to hear about more concrete example of how things are implemented: that is, beyond the scope of art that actually explores the scientific possibility of hoover cars, mechanical prosthetics, less wasteful solar batteries etc...
6:02 And that's the beuty of the concepts of degrowth and the overall solarpunk movement, there's NO one-size-fits-all solution. It is at its core solarpunk is all about coming up with solutions that address local environments and their boundaries and keeps local contexts in mind such as needs and local whether patterns.
🔗 Check out Andrewsim's new Solarpunk video here: ruclips.net/video/Rz51PkJy2c0/видео.html
💡 What other Solarpunk climate actions/solutions get you excited?
👍 Consider commenting and liking the video!!! It really helps this video beat that unruly algorithm!!!
Lol seeing your view count drop dramatically in videos criticizing capitalism just shows how "free" and "democratic" our society is. Great videos btw.
atmospheric ecology
solarpunk is a meme. to survive the climate crisis only one solution will work: totally change the basis of production from profit for a few to the needs of us all
So I think I can answer what's holding us back. Once the infrastructure changes to a solarpunk style, specifically with decentralized manufacturing, capitalism's time is limited. However, we need a killer app to get us there. Something that makes that infrastructure transition profitable and necessary in a capitalist climate. Some sort of breakthrough in structural graphene is the only thing I've thought of so far that would prompt such a massive infrastructure transition in first-world countries but undeveloped and developing nations might be more open to alternative infrastructures.
@@gwgrivindar we need centralized production. decentralized is what we have now
Late to the party but for anyone that sees this: I'm disabled, and I rely on Amazon a fair bit... and *all of what I rely on it for* could be easily replaced by having a local community that supported my needs! A lot of what I get is stuff I can't stand up to shopping for, but another good portion are solutions to problems in my life that a talented friend in a shop could hack out for me in minutes... but my closest friend with a shop is half a state away, and struggling.
I think there is a huge untapped power in us working together, and not having everyone's energies caught up in struggles that serve primarily the capitalist class.
We can't expect that of each-other, I would not demand anything from the frayed and strained people I know, and am deeply touched by the help I do get.
But if they weren't fighting to cope, everything something like amazon does for me and more would be trivially addressed.
We are a huge force for local transformation on levels we may not even think of.
Well said, and also in a solarpunk future we could still have infrastructure in place for products that do need to be shipped quickly, just not all the time for everyone who doesn't really need it.
Please, don’t forget that it is ok to phrase a request as “if you can spare the time it would be great if you could help with XYZ.” We are built to take care of each other
The sad truth of this is, our winning evolutionary trait as human beings was cooperation. That's it. We're not particularly strong, fast or dangerous. We don't have huge fangs or claws, aren't poisonous or venomous and are confined to life on land. We can't fly or populate the waters.
But we CAN cooperate. We just seem to not really do that anymore.
@@KarlSnarks I agree and my team and I are working on a solution soon.
@@elizabethwong4255 Could you explain, what are you planning?
One of my top favourites of yours! Excellent work.
There you are!
Eyyy it's you
Where's your check? Is YT janking your check? I mean that's not cool.
You're here too!!☺☺😊 i love your content!
Look at Narcisse out here 🤣🤣🤣
Yesss
Feels like living in a Ghibli movie!
Not to take away from all the actual potential that this approach suggests
You're absolutely right! The work of Hayao Myazaki is a massive influence on Solarpunk and its visuals
Princess mononoke!!!
A lot of the clips shown are from a chobani ad that's very ghibli-inspired (the soundtrack is even by Joe Hisaishi!) it's called "Dear Alice"
I don’t think that takes away anything. If anything it adds to it
The animated video is from a milk comercial which I suspect was donde by studio ghilbi.
This is why I don't get it when he quotes a captalist milk comercial to say solarpunk is incompatible with capitalism XD
When engineering our environment, industrialists would have us believe that 'efficiency' and 'profitability' are sacrosanct. In particular, this creates a false barrier for alternative solutions that emphasize balance over efficiency. I've never heard asked, “How efficient is your relationship with your loved ones?”
but efficiency and sustaniblity are the whole thing that electric railways do
In actuality, the efficiency of the relationship with my family is currently running at 78.6% but I'd like to get it a little higher. Not sure how to do that tho.
I'm open to suggestions.
@@IndustrialParrot2816 trains are based, we should def replace highways with them
@@safir2241 train good car bad
Well, another way of saying "inefficient" is "wasteful". It is absolutely important to use valuable resources efficiently.
I don't think your analogy to family relations works. My personal relationships aren't resource management problems, where I have a particular resource and I am looking to use it to a specific effect. But many problems in the real world _are_ resource management problems. This includes agriculture, energy systems, transport and housing. Earthships can get by without external energy because they use the sun's energy efficiently. Sailboats don't need to burn fossile fuels because they use wind energy efficiently.
The "with nature" part is key. Most humans will say they care about nature. That they love nature.
But that care and love is only if nature is "out there". As long as they don't have to deal with it.
We are animals that evolved to live with all the elements of the current biosphere. Until we realize that and strive to nuture nature, we are doomed to extinction.
But nature is a murduerus beast who cares not for any of its children and has killed 99% of all species it ever created this romantization of Nature is coming from nowhere
Amen brother/sister! 🙂
Truly. Most people care about nature to the extent that they can benefit from it. This level of thinking and connection with the earth requires an entirely different ideology, one where our current values are completely shifted. It’s not necessarily a new ideology too. We only need to look at how indigenous people have related to nature for thousands of years.
Ya, cities have really created an idea that we are apart of nature not constantly living amongst it. Considering we literally came from it.
@@altonsafe Don't abandon cities though. Cities are great for the environment. They're much more efficient in a lot of ways, with respect to energy, land use, CO2. Just bring the nature to the city.
"Solarpunk without the abolition of capitalism is just greenwashed Cyberpunk" is such a powerful phrase
Savonius wind turbine may be worth looking into.
Could this be how Solarpunkt comes true?
@@loturzelrestaurant in fact the vertical axis turbines have proven to be more efficient than big standard wind turbines. If we apply small vertical axis wind turbines on every building, we will be making energy autonomous living units. If you combine that with solar, sea wave, geothermal energy and physically driven batteries, you can cut off the dependency on all other negative energy sources.
@@gaia316 Unless those "green" energy systems grow on trees, producing them is going to have an absolutely enormous impact on the environment, as they're extremely resource intensive to produce relative to some traditional energy generators, like nuclear a hydropower.
True. Another way to see it is that true Solarpunk is communism which will lead to mass starvation and poverty.
@@gaia316 if you combine all of those you will still get lots and lots and lots more of pollution caused by the materials needed to produce the batteries and build the power alternatives, and also the pollution caused by the maintenance of these.
The best we can do right now is go full nuclear power and try to "unlock" fusion, or massively cut back on power dependency, meaning we'd have to cut back on everything and worsen our quality of life. This means less innovation, less investigation and experimenting, so we'd come at a stalemate or start regressing, meaning we will fall behind and climate or virus/bacteria will eventually catch up to us and makes us go partially or fully extinct. People tend to forget climate change is way heavier on the natural side than what humanity has caused, due to botched, fake and alarmist studies.
These videos really make me want to help build this *Solarpunk* future
that would be horrible, because all cities will look the same. Analyze modern or the fake futuristic architecture of today and you will realize that all cities look the same.
@@javierpacheco8234 Why would all cities look the same? There would be much more localized solutions coming from solarpunk, because that's one of the core concepts. Look around you, develop the systems needed and suited for your environment. The big corporations needs to pack their cookiecutter solutions and think of more suitable localized solutions.
Basically, you're missing the point of what solarpunk is. It's not that everything should look a certain way, or all have the same solution. It's a framework for thinking about what kind of impact we want to have, and incorporate nature, tech, and humans into all systems we develop. That will require more local or community based systems since the environment and needs of the community will look different. Just because the artist thinking about this all paint similar things doesn't mean that that's how it will look like.
@@Ermude10 Well explained! It is WAY beyond just how things look.
@@javierpacheco8234 That's absolutely untrue, because in a solarpunk society, buildings would be optimized for their local climate and environment. If you live in a wet climate, buildings might be build to prevent flooding and utilize that water. In a hot arid climate, architecture would be built with passive cooling and strong reliance on solar power. It's the opposite of modernist and contemporary architecture that looks the same everywhere and relies mostly on wasteful technology to solve all weather-related issues. Solarpunk architecture would also utilize recycled and sustainable materials from nearby places, giving it a unique and eclectic look.
@@javierpacheco8234 all citys now look the same
As someone brought up when discussing solarpunk in a reddit discussion, there doesn't need to be exploitation to have 1-day shipping where it's necessary. They specifically brought up that as a disabled person, they do actually need 1-day shipping of vital items sometimes, and it can't be dismissed as "we just need to live slower" when there are people for whom it is a necessity. The emphasis needs to be on the lowering of unnecessary convenience but on the retaining of it when it is truly needed, all while removing the exploitation that only seems like a fundamental part of these procedures, when a well-managed distribution network could manage 1-day shipping of a decent quantity of items without any exploitation at all.
Well said. Wanna know a great way to add convenience? Create semi-autonomous communities where our shops provide everything for us. Everything's in walking distance, and you can go in and get what you need. Cut out Amazon, and rebuild an amazing network of mom and pop shops and cooperatives that fulfill both consumer and b2b needs.
I want the solar powered drones that come bring us our stuff from the fully automated warehouse while we don't have to work(but do practice trades and skills because we want to).
@@xQuandaleDinglex that isn't a reality in most places? Honest question
This is something that exsists in Rawanda example, at a small scale. The healthcare network is nationalized. The road network and their refergerated trucking isn't there though. To get around this they have a large drone delivery network that is able to airdrop essential medical supplies to remote and poorly connected community clinics. It's quite neat
Sounds like cherry picking and a lot of flexible argumentation to me. The sole questions is how this is in the end more sustainable. It is irrelevant how big or small the effort is.
This came at such a great time! One of my classmates started a group to discuss solutions to the climate crisis and other world issues, and of course I will be contributing with all the lessons I learned from you and Andrewism.
learn and research by yourself, people often get wrong information or don't know too much and either way make a video about it.
@@javierpacheco8234true
As someone who is disabled (type 1 diabetic), one day shipping is not only convenient but life-saving. Saying we need to “live slower” is convenient for nonessential items but we can’t ignore that millions if not billions of people will need important items quickly. Focusing on stuff like that is vital for and idea like solar punk to be successful.
Maybe in a solarpunk world there would be a nearby local store, one or two in every community, specifically for these essential items (made because we know people NEED them) and the workers could easily deliver anything u need to you quickly since its close by
Insulin and a lot of chemical treatments for lifelong disabilities can be synthetised on the spot with small apparatus, storable natural products and a dedicated chemists. Apoticaries used to work this way long ago, what's holding us now is restrictions of knowledge and patents : capitalism.
Solarpunk can be a local self-sufficient communities of abundance and prosperity with the spirit of Ubuntu Contributionism or sharing networks and libraries of things, etc.
There is a small Canadian book published in 1992 that is so wise for the time and still relevant today called "No Place Like Home: Building Sustainable Communities" by Marica Nozick. It gives so many nice ideas that, if followed, we could create a Solarpunk community where we live and inspire others to do it, too. Some tools maybe useful: One Small Town, Zeitgeist Movement, and Transition Town movement.
Thanks!
Let's not forget that wooden sailing ships were, after smelting bronze and iron, the second driver of global deforestation. All energy and resource systems have to be managed in a way that maintains or increases the amount of the resources used.
I'm so glad this video featured earthships. I remember reading about them in like 2009-2010 and back then they gave me so much hope. Happy they have not been forgotten as a fad.
Excellent solutions focused video, Charlie! We need more of these visions of an optimistic future and work towards it to make it a reality. Great work!
For y'all French Canadians, I recommend reading "Le temps des récoltes" by Elisabeth Cardin which has a lot of similar ideas adapted to North American climate (it's more of an ode really but still worth the read). If you want to get political, "Ce qui nous lie" by Sol Zanetti is excellent too. I feel like a solarpunk future is attainable, but we gotta start somewhere and for me it begins with durable change in my country.
Bless you comrade, I was looking for french books on the topic for ages!
@@FujinKeima hey glad I could help! If I might add, first one is mainly about food, second one is about independance. If you want a book about technologies, there's "Demain, le Québec" which is a bit old (2017) but still has some nice things, basically a collection of companies that do green things
Local activism is super important! We need people to be more informed and involved with their community's challenges and needs, as well as more participation in grassroots unionizing and organizing. Start small and grow the movement!
Oooh, has Cardin's book been translated/do you have a translation you would recommend? It'd be great to get more English-Canadians familiar with Quebecois thoughts on this, I think. -A
Yes!! I loved that book! That and "Rêver le territoire: vers une vision partagée de son potentiel" G. Dorval-Douville and J-F. Gingras.
There is a massive difference in environmental impact between high density (urban) dwelling and low density dwelling. Low density is inherently inefficient.
The only way emissions get under control is by urbanizing densely and designing well to mitigate the challenges of living close together.
Applying a few earthship efficiencies to suburban tract houses would be an improvement but it’s like putting a bandaid on an amputated limb. The same is true of putting solar panels on those houses. It’s focusing on the 1% harm reduction and being blind to the 80% improvement.
I always wonder how solarpunk wants to provide food for 8 billion... I guess you make a similar point regarding living space and efficiency
low density housing can work if its homesteads and the roads are small and only connect a walkable house area that has a combined parking garage, not every house.
the houses should be build more verticaly rather than sprawling.
basicly how old farms were build.
And for those that do not want to live in a dense neighborhood? Are we out of luck? Are we forced to live as others like yourself “deemed” “right and holy?”
solarpunk is such a vibe ✨
I fell in love with sailing on the tallship seen in 9:12. It really makes you appreciate the powe of nature but still I think it could really be an awesome alternative to deliver goods locally, for example with those traditional carribean schooners on the small antills
One thing to be considered. Earthship-like solutions would be great in small scale, but cities are kinda unavoidable. If we spread the entire population that currently occupies cities into smaller communities built in a suburb-like system, that would necessitate a lot of space, which isn't feasible in many countries and possibly can be environmentally damaging (habitat destruction, deforestation etc). Building vertically to a certain degree can allow for other systems of heat transfer/management. Plus, centralization of population can reduce the logistics of both resource transportation and individual transportation to allow people to perform their roles in the community without requiring individual transport systems. And higher-density areas are key to maintain things like schools and universities, which don't directly produce goods but allow an output of highly trained citizens to help smaller communities with their tech needs.
Another suggestion in integrating tech and nature: AI solutions for optimal logistics organization. Knowing the rate of use of resources, generating models of what is needed and where. This allows us to better plan the routes. In the long term, it can even be made partly autonomous, relieving a lot of the necessary work to maintain those logistics and allowing us to focus on the things humans do best.
Yeah, I was looking for more realistic comments like this. I really love the good vibe of solar punk instead of the depressingly one from cyber punk but we need to be aware that there physical limitations of the current technology to handle the amount of resources and energy required to offer the quality of life that most of the people expect. Even worse we don't realize how big is our population if we spread them out on 1-3 floor homes we will need a lot of land and new infrastructures. Any way is good to imagine different futures even if they are hard to make it real.
I was halfway through making a comment about retrofitting our current houses so that we never have to turn on heating or AC, but then you mentioned it yourself!
I unfortunately dosagree with a lot in this video. Mostly earthships and the comment on concrete buildings. What is better? High rise concrete buildings that don't take the space of a forrest or a bunch of earthships that do? We need to work on cities being dencer so that they don't take up so much natural space. I have read somewhere a good quote: you love nature by not living in it. I am sure that OCC doesn't mean to stop building concrete high rise buildings in favor of only building earthships but that's what you could think becouse this video. I think we need a mix of passive single family homes and high rise buildings also buildt on the principal of passive housing.
@@LilliD3 yea I agree. Denser housing is the way to go. It also brings loads of other urban planning advantages since it enables us to use way less cars.
I think he was trying to mostly talk about how little power and utilities earth ships are setup to use, but didn’t quite stick the landing. Hard to tell for sure though.
@@LilliD3 Mixing the tech (and, of course, splashes of nature) with big cities and simply leaving most of nature to do it's work is arguably the best and most realistic way to do this. It also lets people who don't want to give up modern life live sustainably
@@LilliD3 We can live in parts of nature if we don't ruin it so much. We used to be part of it
@@LilliD3 Agreed. I personally don't think Earthships make sense, because they can only work in one climate really. Putting it somewhere like the Northeast US, it will fail. We have much better technology now, and it can be done with natural building materials. About the concrete skyscrapers, I'm personally interested in shifting toward wooden skyscrapers. But there's actually been recent research that found between 4 and 10 stories is really the most "sustainable," based on the amount of materials and efficiency, which I think is also better for human scale. But yes, we need denser development.
I would be interested to hear your take on community solar gardens/agrivoltaics!
Yes.
seconding this!!
Community gardens don't work. I was in one with 30 people 90% of people are lazy and greedy and just come to the harvest. I did at least half of the day to day work.
@@habibikebabtheiii2037 from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. not everyone has the time to garden, the purpose of community gardens is to feed the ENTIRE community. if you don't enjoy helping provide for your neighbors, perhaps community gardens are not for you.
@@mybear_hands Plenty of the people had time. They had been neglectful. The university gave the garden 100,000 dallors. When I stopped the garden failed. I only did it because my dad made me do it.
The solar punk videos are definitely some of my favorite on this channel!
I’ve visited and toured the Earthship village near Taos, and it’s amazing. There are homes there that have been self-sufficient for water for years, using only the seven inches of rain that fall there every year. The latest versions employ a venturi passive cooling system that pulls cooled air through the berm walls, and the one I visited was the most comfortable space in terms of temperature, humidity, and air movement… on the Taos Mesa, late afternoon in August. I don’t think Earthships are a global housing solution for a variety of reasons, but they are some of the most forward-thinking architecture ever made and deserve study.
Next, it would be cool to also do a video on lunarpunk, also a utopian environmentalist genre closely connected to solarpunk, but with a more contemplative spiritual side, focus on technologies like bioluminescence and bio-mimicry of night creatures, creative uses of fungi as materials etc. You can also see it as the nighttime of a solarpunk society, how is the city designed to accomodate its night dwellers.
On the other side, that genre might not be developed enough yet and, except aesthetics, not distinct enough from solarpunk to need a video.
"Ideas & inventions that can't compete in the market, regardless of whether they are zero-carbon or build community health, are pushed to the margins". Such a great truth being spoken. During my time trying to become an entrepreneur, this is one of the sad things I've realized. This is ultimately one of the largest idea killers.
The only hope for a sustainable future, let's go!
Let’s go!
So Powerful! I am part of an NGO focussing on fair and sustainable electronics. These are the pictures I was unconsciously searching for! Hope to hear more of it in the future :)
Yesssssss I love modern architecture filled with nature!
modern architecture isn't filled with nature. it's made of prefabricated materials which are harmful to cities and to the environment such a concrete and glass. Traditional architecture is better because it's made of natural materials. Modern architecture made architecture worst not for the better.
Awesome stuff. Knowing the issues is important; but the vision and solutions might even be MORE important
these videos give me so much hope for the future
Yes! Outstanding presentation!
God, I love your solarpunk videos. They really help ease my anxiety about where the world is headed. Thank you for that.
Solar punk is just like a rebranding of permaculture. It’s great if it gets more people thinking. The art of solar punk is definitely inspiring and I hope we can all crush the capitalist ideals that occupy the masses mindset.
Yes I promote a solar punk present an future wherever I can. The more people that buy into a dystopian hunger games type future the mote they make that a reality we need hope for the future we need to let our imagination work for us not against us
Solarpunk always fills me with an overwhelming emotion of sentimental hope. It's the literal apex of humanity; prosperity, equality, and sustainability; all merged as one by the unity of the human race. The only thing blockading us from this future is...... us.
No. It's that solapunk is sci-fi, completely removed from reality and logic. It's designed to have you believe that if you simply green-code your dystopia resources and energy are going to spawn out of nowhere.
how would you create all these technlogies sutainably? you still need massive open pit mines. you still need people working them.
and you still need oil for most of them.
I love looking at real world solutions to bringing about a dream like solarpunk!
That thumbnail is amazing.
What I love about solar punk is the vision. What I very much dislike about solar punk is the attitude of most punk movements of labeling. “You’re not punk if X”? “That’s not punk, that’s poser”, etc.
Andrewism is pretty cool, I've been a bit skeptical of our ability to achieve solarpunk, but it's something we should work to nonetheless
Earthships are just one example of alternative building methods. There are many others - cob houses, earthbag homes, rammed earth, etc. For more info do a search for vernacular architecture or indigenous architecture.
Literally just discovered "Solarpunk" last week, this video could not have come at a better time! Such an important movement
As a young person I hope that I could live a live of a worthy man, creating and not distructing, spreading kindness and knowledge, to be a better person that can build better future.
This is an amazing video. I love the idea of solarpunk, which I didn’t know about until today. Thank you for the video.
remember, cargo sailing isnt just about amazon deliveries, its also about the entire logistics of how world, including food transportation.
Plankton’s voice just screamed out “YeEEeess!” in my mind. This is something I can live and die for.
Then again, and don’t take this as pessimism, but I still think our actual reality will still likely be a lot more painful and competitive than the Ghibli paradise we see in these visions. It will likely fail in just as many ways as it will succeed, and I believe there will still likely dystopic cyberpunk-esque fringes just as well as utopian solarpunk paradises -and it may not even be clear which is which across all planes.
This was wonderful, thank you! I was introduced to Solarpunk a few months ago and it's been changing my life for the better. I especially love the emphasis on imagination, having hope, and taking action right now.
Great stuff!
I’m so glad I came across this channel. Thank you.
Ehhh a lot of solarpunk art (including stuff in this video) veers into pastoralism in a really naive way. A lot of environmental activists have developed a naive idea that "green is good" that leads to people blocking really environmentally valuable and beneficial projects, like solar and wind farms, transit projects etc.
Manhattan is way more environmentally friendly than lawn-filled suburbia, or even semi-rural places like sonoma county in california, but if people are focused on surface appearances, they might think the opposite.
I'm happy to see cool technologies highlighted, but some solarpunk does lean really hard into pro-density / pro-urbanism / pro-growth messages, and I'm kinda sad to see that not being better represented in this video
This is is the comment I wanted to make, and I would like to add that the path to "solarpunkish" is likely to be achieved before we realize it. Watch a Tony Seba lecture and he'll show how many disruptive technologies are just around the corner; we'll have an enormous change in land use within the next five-to-ten years, and it will be done just by market forces bringing cost down in key sectors: food(precision fermentation), transport(self-driving and EV), energy(solar/wind/battery; California already achieved a 100% renewables grid for a 15 minute span this year). All three combined mean that all our material concerns get a lot cheaper; even dyed-in-the-wool transit junkies like myself will see a transformation as robotaxi fleets come online; if you can run a robotaxi, you can run a robobus, a robotruck or robocourier, and even a robobike. And with more being consolidated into shared fleets, the need for parking abruptly disappears, allowing more space to go to transit and bikes, green areas or development density.
Simultaneously, there is a path forward to the anti-capitalist aspects in the merger of solarpunk ideas with cypherpunk ones into "lunarpunk". That is, the economic coordination problems we face are not addressed with a populist "we must all band together and make a sacrifice" type of statement that implies a power structure, but by embracing privacy and autonomy in modes that also allow for community. This is starting to be realized in earnest through a new wave of decentralized networking technologies, increasing interest in open, repairable and self-manufactured computing systems, and through developments in AI that allow computers to increasingly replace the entire concept of bureaucracy and office work, turning them into trusted agents and intermediaries on our behalf. Blockchains also factor into it as a means of creating shared records for organization; not one chain that rules the world as Bitcoin advocates would have it, but a latter-day version of the village account books which recorded everyone's credit. These are all things that are a bit nascent right now, still establishing their philosophical grounding, but are likely to come together into a disruptive societal tech in the not-distant future.
The urban exodus is kind of real, though. People ARE leaving big vertical cities and moving to smaller semi-rural and rural areas. These places that don't already have an infraestructure built on them are a great opportunity to build in an enviromentally friendly way.
wait can you please explain further? How is Manhattan more environmentally friendly than a lawn filled suburbia?
@@somenameidk5278 Well a single family home is also much smaller than a apartment, and I'm pretty sure manhattan is full of cars, way more than a lawn filled suburbia
Grazie.
I find that building communities with those around us to be more profitable and provides humans with more tangible "profit" than money ever would.
Not saying to abolish money as it stands, but I am saying it should be used as a tool, and those that prioritize money over people, lives, or their communities should have access to a therapist, and be able to get the help they need to steer them away from that being a focal point.
Ultimately, I believe in a solarpunk future, and will do my best to try to build one, regardless if every card is against me.
My biggest issue with Solarpunk is that it's not run by Realists but Idealists. I like Solarpunk as a setting but it's ultimately unrealistic and i hate the whole "Abolish Capitalism" thing, like ok what do you propose we use instead, Communism? cause that went real swell the last century or so with stalin, mao, etc.
@@Foogi9000 I think the biggest issue here is thinking that its just run by idealists overall.
Or thinking the movement is run by one type of individual, do you think that each subsequent individual is more idealist than realist?
Technology, Culture, and Nature can work all in tandem, but apparently we, as a species are too afraid to step into that due to the normality's of these systems we call "home". There's other systems and other ways, and we don't need to look at past leaders and how they ran their countries with more of a dictatorship rule under the title of "communist", we need to find a system that works for as many as possible, and offers a hand to those that are just having a bad time.
If that requires pulling from other systems ideas that work such as communism, capitalism, or other social structures that may not be listed here, then we should do that in order to further foster life on this planet, and each others lives.
We should prioritize life above all, because we're just a snippet in the grand scheme, and we will all be forgotten, let's leave something for future generations, regardless if they remember or not, let's just make sure we don't leave them with this current system, or a more advanced version of it, because that's not fair to any of them, or even you and I.
TLDR: Life is sacred, and we should prioritize it above all, but find a system that takes into account Nature, Culture, and Technological advancement, that is the beacon of Solarpunk, or at least how I see it.
@@MissSanctus Overall I agree with you, I honestly don't know what is the right path. It's hard and whatever system is put in place it actively needs to take into account human nature and that ultimately where Marxism and Capitalism fails. Marxism is susceptible to Envy and Capitalism is susceptible to Greed.
@@Foogi9000 I may not know the right path myself, regardless if I think solarpunk, as an idea and as a system can work with the right pieces.
However, the current system as it stands doesn't benefit everyone, and that's a problem we must solve, and if that requires putting things together like a puzzle to find out what DOES work, let's do it, together.
Without greed, without envy, but with abundance, and compassion.
Not only for ourselves, but our environment.
@@Foogi9000 The solarpunk aesthetics are _used_ by left-leaning movements to lure people to them, but they are not exclusive to them! There are budding centrist movements which try to reach such futures by coordinating between capitalist and non-profit organisations rather than trying to get people to revolt against the idea of profit in the name of shiny.
7:53 this is just advocating for green washed industrial farming. You can’t offset geo carbons with plant respiration. Because the carbon isn’t going back into the ground like in carbon capture (which has its own myriad of issues), it’s going into the plant. Once the plant dies, what happens to the carbon? It’s released back into the atmosphere through composting or burning.
We don't have the technology, if you look deeper into what happens to our waste, how our electricity is produced and how the tools that produce our electricity our produced the answer becomes clear that we are living a lie.
The ideas always look good on the surface, once you start looking at the nuances there are always gotcha moments or certain impracticalities. You did a good job talking about the imperial periphary which other utopian solarpunkists just choose to ignore for some reason.
These Imperial peripharies are densly populated growing regions, there simply isn't enough material to build local. Huge amount of infrastructure needs to be built everyday which is not possible without concrete. Plus it will take time to get to zero GHG, by that time we would have already altered our climate so much that our cities would need to be moved to safer locations, which means... even more concrete. Vast majority of people in South-Asia, South-East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa currently live in areas that will very soon become uninhabitable due to wet bulb temperature, especially India with huge majority living in Gangetic plains that will soon become a hot-humid wasteland with 0 water supply. Good luck moving that many people into new cities built 'sustainably'.
Not only that, the amount of electricity they use and will use in the future is colossal and batter powered solar-wind energy is not even close to providing half of the grid's supply.
Talking about solar-wind energy, they are always built using rare materials and alloys which are like I said... rare. They are not recyclable and there is problem of waste, they are not environmentally safe either as they release toxic waste and are harmful to the environment on top of being very less energy dense.
So what is the answer? Geo-thermal and Nuclear? I wish because our population is so darn big that we don't have enough resources for Geothermal and Nuclear (Latter also uses rare earth materials). India is focusing on Thorium reactors but their practicality is still to be proven and they will be made using even more rare earth materials.
ITER's Nuclear fusion is still a pipe-dream.
Let us go back to waste management and resources, our booming population puts a stress on available resources. Not only that but waste production and mining releases lots of GHG and harms environment in other ways. Circular economy would be ideal however it is not possible with current technology.
We can recycle metals like Steel etc. however they are not completely pure and the growing demand means that we don't have enough scraps to produce them. Most chemicals themselves can't be produced without GHG. All Electronics are not recyclable at all, unless you are willing to ship some of them to poor workers in China who sort everything by hand, did I forget to mention that China put a ban on all the Electronics and Plastic imports because of health issues?
Capitalism is definitely one reason why we are not seeing some revolutionary technologies in use (They are not profitable) but there is still a hint of truth to the solutions being not so scalable and practical. Even in Communism you are not going to see mass use of them because like I said, it is only when you research deeper you start seeing all those 'gotcha moments' and hidden impracticalities. We are far.. extremely far from being even close to technologically sufficient to a solarpunk future, it is still a pipe-dream to us. Remember that all those 'solutions' are themselves made to look 'Utopian' and 'Perfect' by those same greedy corporations you were bashing in this video. It is more profitable to make straw man solutions look better than actually making them scalable and economical. This is how startups like Gravity Vault get away with being so obviously unworkable.
This is a great critique. I think solar punk falls into the trap of being giftwrapped as a marketable aesthetic to corporations, and justifying unsustainable technology, unless it really digs deeper to honesty address those “gotcha moments” that the commenter above discusses.
The low tech/high tech clarification was awesome. Glad to have you two polishing Solarpunk as it develops!
It would be amazing be part of solarpunk in the future.
Fantastic take, you two!
We can do it!
Yes, just need to organize and do it
Education is the key to unlocking a better world for all.
Another wonderful video!
I’m making a deep dive into this solar punk ideology and I am in love with it there’s just 1 problem. This is all very idealistic, and I wish everyone loved nature as much as us, and could push greed aside for the betterment of others but that’s just not the world we live in. That doesn’t mean give up, we should forever push a positive message to help get as many people on board as possible, but we do have to understand. Greed and selfishness will always exist.
I love this and I'm so happy to see more and more solarpunk content pop up especially in the climate parts of youtube. (cli-tube?) Solarpunk can happen if people believe it can happen and start working towards it!! We can all start by slowing down a bit.
how would the ressources needed be provided?
I thought that this video would go techno-optimist and simplistic, but as soon I had a critique, in the following seconds the video highlighted the cons and associated problems to show that the problems doesn't have magic solutions. Good job!
Thanks for your video. I love when people spread hope over fear.
Climate change is scary enough. I believe people want to see some real solutions.
One of SolarPunk's big changes that the modern world can't grapple with, is that the entire world is not a consumer supply chain. Communications with the entire world, but if you want something from the other side of the world, it would be bespoke, from a master craftsman.
Production of necessities and commodity luxuries need to be short-haul or in-situ production, thinking 3D printers and decentralized production facilities.
"Hope is Something you give yourself. That is the meaning of inner strength."
"Pride is not the opposite of Shame, But its source. True Humility is the only antidote to shame."
"It is important to draw wisdom from different places. If you take it from only one place it becomes rigid and stale. Understanding others, and the other nations will help you become whole."
Uncle Iroh- Avatar: Legend of Aang.
Excellent vid!
Reduce, reuse, recycle - ordered by importance.
Recycling is flawed and not enough.
I guess earthships reuse, rather than recycle old tires.
It seems like earthships are best suited to places like the more southern prairie regions (like most of Kansas) than new Mexico. The temperatures are more stable, and the rainfall is higher but the humidity isn't too high.
As a society, eventually we'll need to talk about using technology in a more efficient way instead of abusing it for the sake of an unsustainable convenience. I'm glad this was adressed in the video, because often in our eco-friendly utopias we tend to think filling our roofs with solar panels and our streets with electric cars will solve our problems.
cars as a whole are problem, not just electric
great Video!
Commenting for the algorithms. Thanks!
A match made in solarpunk heaven: OCC + Andrewism ! Amazing content.
This isn't the first time it's happened either!
Great video! I'm loving this solarpunk collab series with Our Changing Climate and Andrewism!
This reminded me of one of my favorite projects, Sailcargo in Costa Rica
Thank you for this video!
When you said that speed will be an issue in this imagined world, I started thinking that it will never come to pass without addressing this issue. Speed in the economy is not only about convenience. It can also enable certain ways of living and doing business. And by that I don't mean consumerism. Economic speed enables us to react to needs and crisis in a more timely manner and can vastly oncrease quality of living. Because slow processes accumulate and make not only individual orders arrive slower, but also complicates the entire lifecycle of a good or service. Picture a pandemic like covid without our ability to quickly supply labs or health centers.
One way to mitigate this is to do away with just-in-time supply protocols. Many processes rely on getting things at the last minute because it is most profitable to do so (it lowers upfront costs), but if profit isn't the priority, enough supplies can be kept on hand to weather a crisis or at least last until more can be delivered.
@@lynpotter6471 Sure you can mitigate it, but you can't not prioritise ecenomic speed. Any ecenomic system like that is just gonna loose out long term because it provides less utility.
Great video as always
One thing I've recently found out. The suburbs were originally intended to be solarpunk 😭. As in everyone gets a plot of land that they can take care of and make awesome but most just waste it.
Not to burst your bubble but i feel that someone lead you astray here. The suburbs were made, at least in large part, for white Americans to leave the cities due to racial "fears".
On top of this, single use housing continues to be one of the biggest hindrances to ecological progress- bicycles and public transport aren't viable in America bc of urban sprawl; thousands of miles of asphalt are laid down for property development yearly, cutting off ecosystems and making an even larger footprint; and not least of all it's denying any sort of community when the nearest gathering spot or shops are 6 miles away across 6 lane highways. I could go on, but one of the first things we need to destroy for a solarpunk future is the idea of suburbia as an option for even a moderate size of the population.
@@yoskisaccount en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement This is the origin story of the suburb. It was sort of a proto-solarpunk movement at the start. Obviously it has since failed miserably and became a complete disgrace of the original movement to the point that it might not even be possible to redeem it anymore.
@@beskamir5977 yeah uh that Wikipedia page doesn’t really accurately portray the history of the suburbs, the first guy was spot on. It was in large part born out of white flight, and ended up being leagues more harmful to the environment than big cities.
@@Ismael-kc3ry The garden city movement is responsible for the idea of living in a hybrid of an urban and rural setting (aka suburb) so I'd argue that without it the suburb could not have existed.
First Chanel I've set to notify on.
Honestly, there are ways to do shipping without being so much at the whims of the wind, by including solar. A trimaran is like a catamaran boult around a ship, so basically buoys shaped like ships attached to the main ship on both sides. With that, you can have solar panels which can generate electricity for moving the ship during the day, if there is no wind, and those solar panels can be built on rails so they can be protected if heavy rain, hail, or storms, appear, and the windmills of the trimaran wind-boats could use a CVT (continuous variable transmission) to "change gears" without the inefficiencies associated with changing gears in a manual car.
Also, flywheels can be used to make the speed of the underwater propeller(s) more constant, and in hurricane winds the windmills can be allowed to spin freely by simply decoupling the electricity generator from the turbines, or maybe even using hinges to fold the windmill blades forwards or backwards to significantly reduce the amount of energy produced by them. If that is not an option, then simply releasing the excess energy into the water (not grounding, but watering, in this case) could be used instead, or maybe the excess energy can be used to turn sea water into hydrogen and oxygen used in a jet engine which to propel the ship forwards. Because it is possible to use windmills to make ships sail directly into the wind, and to make trains accelerate directly into the wind, if there is wind and the structure to which the windmill is attached doesn't derail or sink.
For building houses, we don't need to use recycled tires, just to use 5-8% cement, 2-3 times as much water, and the rest being local dirt, mix that well until it gets the consistency of a dough or clay ball, then use soil compacting machinery to compact it instead of using human labour, and that artificial stone will work as a heat battery which will not release greenhouse gases, while using a lot less cement and water than normal cement/concrete.
Even in cold climates, you can use 4-stories-tall mirror walls and/or plastic fresnel-lens walls to concentrate sunlight onto greenhouses, in order to be able to farm cash crops and more food in general even in permanent-snow places, because that way you do not add extra heat (like by burning fossil fuels), you only move the sunlight and it's heat around, and you can still let some light pass through unchanged, just not all of it. And that would allow people to grow food easily even in the coldest places on earth, as long as they do get sunlight, including the arctic regions which get days and nights lasting entire months. Some say (me included) that this could be used for post-putin russia to recover after the war is over.
And for combating desertification, it is possible to use concentrated sunlight to heat pipes going from sea beaches inland to desert places at a slight angle in order to create an updraft which to get more air into the large pipes (I'm thinking at least 1 meter (or 1 yard, or 3 feet) wide pipes, only splitting into smaller pipes to have the air inside heated again by concentrated sunlight, and to catch falling water into water reservoirs to prevent a water hammer effect), and at the destination you can do one or more of the following:
(1) Split the humid air into multiple pipes and use large fans to cool them down, and power the fans with the compressed air leaving the pipes, (2) release the hot humid air directly without cooling it, (3) cool the air the same but use dew collectors to collect the air after it gets depressurized and use the depressurized air being released into atmosphere to power the fans cooling the pressurized air, (4) cool some of the pressurized air to harvest it's water content after depressurizing it and heat the rest of the air before releasing it into an updraft tower which to be used to generate electricity, the air humidity making the air rise faster than otherwise in order to get more electricity from it.
Solarpunk is a scientific approach, not a Utopia, the fact that people cannot imagine such a future to happen, especially from government officials.
Then it means the community has to build that future themselves.
This is easily achievable, if you have the community doing its part.
how will you make solar cells without massive open pit mines?
I really appreciate your video! It was very well made and informative.
Great video! I will definitely like to work to make this solar punk future happen! As you said, even if it's an utopia, it is a future worth fighting for. A call to action, a motivation, an end goal. I think these ideas are really inspiring for all those engineers, artists and industrial designers (such as me) that are out there . Thank you for sharing this video!
What I love about Nausicaa is that in the backstory, the nuclear war didn't happen because some rival nations like America or China got jumpy and finally pushed the button. It was a bunch of climate scientists deliberately killing everybody with genetically engineered cyborgs equipped with nuclear weapons because they realized letting humanity live was even worse. See, Miyazaki didn't pull any punches about what needs to happen to change the world for the better.
Great Job sir thank you
Can you please clarify in another video why doing away with capitalism will enable transformations like this to take place? All Capitalism means is that people are allowed to trade their time/labour/resources for something else they value more in their given situation. While it is correct that labour regulations are important to account for the power differences that doesn't mean you should all of a sudden forbid people from making and keeping their own private contracts with each other.
We can do this, together!
Sounds like escapism to me. I appreciate everyone who tries to have a more balanced approach and I adore people who are willing to live low-tech and off-grid. But having the best of both worlds needs decades of calibration of communities and honestly communities are not stable or immune to stupidity and egocentricity.
No one reasonable would say otherwise, that's not the point. The point is that such a possible future(s) is preferable to our current system.
Some of the artwork in this video was beautiful, wish we had the will to create communities like that right now!
I just want my kids to have a good future. we need this as soon as possible
this is not a good future unfortunately.
a solarpunk future?
@@oasisboi yeah a solarpunk future is a bad future.
@@javierpacheco8234 why ?
Love the thumbnail! Castle in the sky is one of my favorite films
Great video! Just in time so I can add this as additional "reading" for the Permaculture 101 course I'm writing for :D
Also:
Does anyone know where the b-roll scenes are from? Looks like anime? I'd love to watch them!!
The scenes are from an advert for yogurt called "Dear Alice".
More solar punk solution videos please! Would love a deep dive into specific solutions too :)
Always wanted to build a solar punk like city just to demonstrate that a bright future like this is possible. One day ill when I'm rich I'll go threw with the plan. No cars; bike and public transport and that kinda stuff, high density community housing and communal gardens.
PLS ♥️ this comment!
edit: Typo.
You don't need to be rich to take part in a permablitz or get involved with/start local groups.
I doubt anyone will see this but I have had my own vision of solar punk for a while now. It is a world that a lot of people would not be able to comprehend or would outright be against, because it goes against everything we have known. It is a future where companies or people in power do not exist, even money would not exist. It would be more about community-base societies working together with technology to live peacefully.
Imagine a world where "products" are not made to sell, they are made simply out of kindness for others. There would be no cost but rather your own involvement within the creation itself. Using advanced technology that would be designed for the commons, we would come together to build whatever we need or want and could innovate and improve upon anything. This would obviously require quite a lot of intellect tho and extensive education from the community but I feel like it not impossible.
In this utopia-like world, it would rely on people actually being kind though and I know currently there is too much hatred, corruption, and brainrot in the world for any of it to be viable but it's a nice thought... at the very least.
This is definitely a good video! But, as I comment on all "Solarpunk" videos: Solarpunk is mislabeled, and does not fit the "punk" genre.
The "punk" genre explores the negatives associated with the ideals we hold as a society, and if a "punk" media includes a story, typically has the protagonist rebel- as a punk- against the system. Cyberpunk analyzes corporate takeover and human-tech integration, and how it is bad. Dieselpunk. Steampunk. Etc.
Solarpunk would require examining the detriments such a society would have for us- perhaps a lack of luxuries, medical care, etc.
But, its neither here nor there!
Rename it to solarcore like cottagecore. Boom, problem solved.
Well, maybe it's true in Cyberpunk. I fail to see the same in steampunk, as I always see people coming out with genius solutions and positive promotions to things /actions in the genre. I definitely don't not see steampunk as a negative thing except for the envr. pollution (at least not in my experience. As for solar, I guess the punk here is referring to some sort of rebel against the current system maybe? Because that is what I often see in solarpunk media when they refer to "punk".
Love this collab, two channels I really admire for your honesty, integrity, and calm. I aspire to make videos about solarpunk solutions but specific actions that might be taken in my community and how to network with government officials to make it happen in the confines of capitalism short term, and outside of government organization for the long term.
Wind power should be phased out in most areas and we should be focusing on solar and nuclear power.
Thank you so much! Such an inspiring and touching video.
Savonius wind turbine may be worth looking into.
Could this be how Solarpunkt comes true?
Thank you in the first place for giving space to artists on a profit-focused website. And thank you for for inviting people to dream, if anything it seems at first glance that solarpunk can fill that role of making one think of futures outside the capitalist system.
However, technofixes are not the climate solution we need. We must be very careful about identifying what technologies are usefu and which only create other problems to require new technofixes. I appreciate your angle on imperialist structures manifesting itself yet again on the resources needed for transitioning to a net-zero carbon society, but it's not radical enough. I'll have to get more familiar with solarpunk as a form of art to see what they propose.
Very curious why you think solarpunk is not radical enough, do you think we should be emphasising social change as opposed to technology?
@@1elitegeek The issue is with relying on technological advances to help us out of the mess we're in. Climate catastrophe will hit the Western capitalist core within the next 10-15 years. Scientific advances need to employed NOW. We cannot afford to wait for better alternatives with more efficient this or that.
I think controlled socio-economic degrowth is the way forward. Living less than exuberant lives spending fewer resources, putting less time into working for profit and more time into nurturing human relationships.
@@NewAge374 I don't think solarpunk needs to be "more radical". It's a framework for thinking about how we can live sustainably in the long term, and as such I agree with you it won't fix our current urgent problems. But it's also a false choice. Going solarpunk shouldn't hinder any larger scale changes that are required for our near term future, and can be implemented in small scale in every community. I think that spreading these kinds of ideas are important to get people to think and imagine practical solutions that might otherwise seem too large and daunting. Solarpunk is not about technofixes in isolation. It's about thinking how tech, nature and humans can co-exist sustainably. If one of these pillars contribute negatively towards the other, then it's not a viable solarpunk solution.
@@Ermude10 I do want to believe that we can live sustainably in a world where the internet still exists, albeit in a reduced form to facilitate information exchange and sharing arts and stories between people. But it's current format needs to degrow drastically because we already see that we don't have the mineral resources to have smart devices for the majority of people AND the energy infrastructure to maintain them.
I'd love to hear about more concrete example of how things are implemented: that is, beyond the scope of art that actually explores the scientific possibility of hoover cars, mechanical prosthetics, less wasteful solar batteries etc...
6:02 And that's the beuty of the concepts of degrowth and the overall solarpunk movement, there's NO one-size-fits-all solution. It is at its core solarpunk is all about coming up with solutions that address local environments and their boundaries and keeps local contexts in mind such as needs and local whether patterns.