this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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I really do enjoy the Solar Punk aesthetic and the optimism it represents, but when I try to bring people to the reality of things like "we still need solar panel and battery factories" people seem to get upset.
Just to say, I see the reality of what Solar Punk could be and I want to take the practical steps needed. And to be clear, my goal is to make sure that the workers own the solar panel factory, not capitalist investors. I think the solar punk aesthetic, whatever version of it we all decide on, will naturally emerge if we can achieve that.
You need the factories, and you also need logging and mining.
Lots of people who want to support the environment are reflexively anti mining and logging, even when it's done responsibly. I think it's often nimbyism that they don't admit to themselves.
Great point, I also think that if we're more responsible about what we use those technologies for it would also make a huge difference in the environmental impact. If you get rid of all the useless extravagances of the rich we can have a much leaner society resource-wise and still have everyone have a good quality of life.
I think ppl forget that the steps to clean energy are merely bridge technologies. You don't get to industrial age to solarpunk future without some "unclean" steps in between.
Solarpunk is an utopia. If every step we continue making needs to be perfect, we'll never get there. Instead we have to improve each step we make to get there.
Solarpunk is also about salvaging technology and post-capitalism. It's supposed to be reached through a transition period. We just gotta make the first steps and introduce more circular economies. This will phase out most harmful mining practices eventually.
"No don't break those poor eggs! That's not how you make an omelette 😔"
What's the problem with the concept of 'a factory'?
Yup, and "clean" gets you right back to the 18th century. The vast majority of human history operated 100% renewable.
I think that depends on what you mean by history and what you mean by renewable. There is evidence that prehistoric civilizations caused lasting effects on the world around us, from mass extinction events caused from human expansion (see North American megafauna), including extinction of our closest cousins (other lines of homo sapiens, and other species of the homo genus), whenever our settlements encountered theirs.
Once agriculture came on the scene, ancient civilizations were modifying the land, domesticating animals, developing pottery and tools and making use of both renewable and non-renewable resources. With the rise of the bronze age, mining and other permanent resource extraction became the norm.
Plenty of what these ancient civilizations were doing were not sustainable or renewable. Almost every ancient civilization caused deforestation soon after developing agriculture. Plenty of societies relied on mining in an unsustainable way, exhausting the forests of fuel.
So if we're starting with "history" being human civilization and settlements in the neolithic era, I don't think that's quite right. Even if you're only talking prehistoric homo sapiens, there's still evidence that we caused mass extinctions before we developed agriculture.
Of course, we did allow for a lot of reforestation, replenishment, and other rehabilitation of the land at times, but often that was not by choice of humans. Disease, war, natural disaster, and famine could cause major population collapse in a way that caused settlements to be abandoned, but that isn't really what people mean by a renewable practice.
That's a flawed comparison, we're scientiffically far more advanced now, i dontthink it would be that big of a setback. We'd only change the way society operates. And if you complement the renewable technologies and fossils as bridge technologies correctly, the setback would be little /manageable.