If not for capitalist modes of production, would your home still be designed in a way so ill-fitting to the environment that you need a thermostat right now?

Tick populations explode because tick hunting animals like porcupines and voles need tall grass to avoid being hunted themselves. And because cars run them over and cats murder them.

Nice, saves money on rat poison.

Sure, if you’re a nice person who people want to help out of love. But what about the assholes who can’t get people to interact with them without the threat of homelessness?

Please, won’t someone think of the narcissists?

The only way not to die in miserable circumstances is to die suddenly, and retirement homes typically take away people’s ability to choose even that.

I would not wish my grandmother’s “well-earned retirement” on my worst enemies.

To be fair, a couple decades of temporary mitigation would save hundreds of millions of lives if (and only if) we also cut emissions and pollution enough to prevent human extinction.

It is absolutely used by politicians, corporations, and people in general as an excuse to continue poisoning the planet, but the information the research produces could help.

Hydrogen still produces water vapor which is only barely better for the environment than the carbon dioxide from gasoline emissions

This is completely incorrect. Even if we directed our entire industrial efforts to making water vapor, it would pale in comparison to a single hurricane. Anthropogenic water vapor is insignificant compared to evaporation from the oceans - which is incidentally why we need permaculture instead of industrially supplied water to fight desertification.

Water vapor in the atmosphere is part of how the greenhouse effect works, but not because humans put the water vapor there. As global temperature rises, the atmosphere can physically contain more water vapor per cubic meter without it turning into clouds or rain, and that causes there to be more water vapor.

Okay. Let’s go through Umberto Eco’s checklist for recognizing fascism.

The cult of tradition", characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.

True for lawn maintenance. Home Owner Associations often rigorously pin down the expected state of lawns and do not allow changes to procedure. Lawns derive from English manor houses and colonial homesteading. NIMBY-ism, grandfathered-in rights, always looking back to what people have earned because of how things used to be.

“The rejection of modernism”, which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.

True for lawn maintenance. Modern concepts like biodiversity, mulching, avoiding soil pollution, etc. are woke disruptions to the right to have an English manor-style grassy desert. Superficial technological advancement in the form of lawn robots and high-tech mowers is allowed.

“The cult of action for action’s sake”, which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.

True for lawn maintenance. Mowing the lawn is treated like an inherent virtue and privilege. Hiring people to spend their entire lives making lawns boring environmental catastrophes is considered a reasonable way to spend time. And again, scientific concepts like biodiversity, water shortages, and avoiding soil pollution are hated because it interferes with the right to have a pointless symbol of pointless labor.

“Disagreement is treason” – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.

True for lawn maintenance. Whether through HOAs or through simple social pressure from neighbors, it is considered treason against the neighborhood not to make your lawn look dead. With regards to the lawn itself, people are willing to spend a lot of money to hammer their soil into submission.

“Fear of difference”, which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.

True for lawn maintenance. On top of viewing it as social treason, those with lawns will typically be terrified that an unkempt plot of land will harbor all manner of dangerous pests that could spread across the neighborhood. Every infestation will be blamed on the non-lawn, regardless of justification. With regards to the lawn itself, it is always made homogeneous both internally and with respect to the neighborhood.

“Appeal to a frustrated middle class”, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.

True for lawn maintenance. Unkempt lawns will be seen as a blight on the neighborhood, lowering property values, and being a signal of incoming undesirables. With regards to the lawn itself, weeds and most animals are treated like a dangerous infectant to be removed out of fear.

“Obsession with a plot” and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson’s book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.

True for lawn maintenance. Unkempt lawns are often tied to ideological threats - hippies, commies, woke liberals, etc. - and folded into general conservative xenophobia. With regards to the lawn itself, obsession with weeds that are hard to root out.

Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak”. On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

True for lawn maintenance. Those with unkempt lawns are simultaneously lazy and attempting to destroy the fiber of the neighborhood. Weeds are simultaneously unfit for keeping the lawn healthy and so suited for the environment that they’re a constant threat.

“Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” because “life is permanent warfare” – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.

True for lawn maintenance. Lawns as a concept exist for the sake of fighting weeds forever. Giving gardens any shape that doesn’t involve constant maintenance is frowned upon.

“Contempt for the weak”, which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.

True for lawn maintenance. Those who can’t maintain their lawns are treated with contempt, regardless of why. They should hire a gardener if they can’t do it themselves, and if they can’t afford it then they are gross and lower class. With regard to the lawn itself, nature is subjugated even as that subjugation causes ecocide and tremendous long-term damage to society. Anything that could live on the lawn is beneath notice even if it costs us.

“Everybody is educated to become a hero”, which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, “[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.”

I honestly think Eco is being a bit sexist here with his use of “everybody”. In fascism, women are not educated to become heroes and die, they are trained to be heroes by producing many sons, metaphorically ‘dying’ by subjugating themselves to their husband, their culture, and their state. Likewise, in lawn maintenance, people aren’t trained to die per se, but to treat their unpaid pointless labor as a necessary submission to the public good. Thus, gardeners also “die” metaphorically for the sake of their neighborhood, their culture, and their state.

“Machismo”, which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold “both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality”.

This is a specific expression of fascism in the field of sexuality, just like lawns are a specific expression of fascism in the field of gardening. Sometimes a hoe is just a hoe.

“Selective populism” – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of “no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people”.

True for lawn maintenance. Lawns are treated as inherently American, regardless of the individual opinions of those who would rather have unkempt lawns. With regards to lawn maintenance, someone who mows the lawn will typically conceive of a lawn as “healthy” if it meets the predefined standard, regardless of the actual health of the plants or the environment.

“Newspeak” – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

A fait accompli in lawn maintenance. Before the industrial revolution, home gardens used to be a lot better understood and a lot better kept by the general population. Gardeners had tons of knowledge - almanacs, oral traditions, hands-on experience, etc. Over the course of the 20th century, the rise of lawns and the commodification of nutrition lead to garden maintenance simplifying to “eliminate everything that isn’t grass”.

So yeah, the cultural concept of lawn maintenance is fascist, both with regards to society and with regards to nature.

It’s strictly less work to let empty land become wild and have a diversity of flora and fauna. Why would someone spend dozens of hours per month keeping a lawn pristine just because they bought a house with empty land around it?

A) They actively prefer a lawn that nothing can live in over a space where unknown and unvetted species dwell. Your argument is invalid.

B) They would get fined or ostracized if they do not keep the lawn dead. Their HOA/neighborhood is fascist, and they choose to submit themselves to fascism rather than look for a house that isn’t located in a fascist neighborhood. Your argument may be valid if they didn’t have a reachable alternative, but OP still has a point that the lawn is dead because of fascistic demands.

The obvious alternative to this is touted to be open source, ie. people making things for free and sharing it with others.

Unfortunately, the amount of things you can achieve for free, possibly relying on donations, is very limited. If you want to become a serious business, you need a serious funding model.

That’s… obviously incorrect? Most important software is open source that was made for free. Most data centers run on freeware. And even with mass consumer facing software like youtube browsers the best options are freeware like Revanced. In academia, the whole concept of academic tenure is based on the empirical proof that professors do their job best when they don’t have any obligations and they can just get a basic income to do whatever.

The best way to organize the tech industry is to make copyright and patents illegal and to give everyone a universal basic income.

Here’s a mockup, including driving_crooner’s fix.

Okay, I will buy steal rare earth minerals from indigenous people. Thanks for the advice!

An inverted pyramid would make much more sense in terms of shape language. Put ‘buy’ at the lowest and narrowest point, like it’s the lowest/worst option you have that fewest people need to resort to.

If your city has N homeless people, the N best places to sleep will be occupied by homeless people. Crazy how most cities will choose to make everyone uncomfortable because they would rather see a homeless person sleep in the gutter than seeing them sleep on a bench or not seeing them because they have the human right of indoor shelter.

In the medieval city center I grew up in, there are market streets that are 6-10m wide, which are accessible for utility and delivery vehicles in the early morning. All the cars come and go before 9 AM, after which the area is pedestrianized. The market street can then be used for restaurant seating, public gatherings, market stalls, or just a spacious boulevard.

Residential streets are narrower, but still wide enough for one-way car traffic plus pedestrians (cyclists needed to dismount or go around). Utility and delivery vehicles can use these streets, blocking them for other vehicles while they’re unloading, but since pedestrians and cyclists can pass it doesn’t disrupt people from going about their day.

Ultimately the delivery vehicles do go to dedicated car roads, a two-lane 50 km/h ring roughly 1 kilometer in diameter around the medieval city, but that means you can walk to 3000 people’s houses, as well as markets and restaurants and schools for tens of thousands of people, without crossing a car street.

Annoying that western charity is so self-aggrandizing that such an addendum is necessary, but fair. Ideally “send X” just *means *“send X and the systems to make good use of X”.

I fear for induced demand. If electricity is cheap, why build more efficiently? Why not do bitcoin mining or AI training?

It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t plenty of places around the world that could desperately use solar panels, that are building fossil fuel infrastructure instead. Climate change is a global problem, so the obsession with getting your individual emissions down to zero is selfish and sometimes even detrimental to the climate if “your emissions” don’t include the cost of manufacturing and limited availability.

We should be sending solar panels to the developing world as fast as humanly possible, not making electricity so cheap in California that multinationals can open up a couple more data centers.

They’re using hydrogen to de-rust iron, and later let the iron rust again. I don’t have a degree in chemistry, but that sounds like a scam.

There are basically two sources of hydrogen that matter at an industrial scale: fossil fuel cracking (not clean energy) and electrolysing water. In the first case, if you want power it’s more green to burn the fossil fuel directly.

And if you’re electrolysing water and then using the hydrogen to chemically derust iron, it would (as far as i understand with high school chemistry) be strictly more efficient to electrolyse rust directly. The oxygen can dissipate into the environment or be reintroduced as necessary, like with a sacrificial metal for ship’s hulls.

It’s undoubtedly innovative that they have a relatively efficient way to store the latent chemical energy of hydrogen given an excess of hydrogen, but in terms of energy storage that is putting the cart before the horse.

People have survived “deadly” wet bulb temperatures long before electric refrigeration. Air conditioning is a patch for colonial societies and those that emulate them that have stupidly built western European style (Cfb climate optimized) housing in tropical climates.

Universal solidarity doesn’t just mean solidarity with the poorest US citizens, it means solidarity with the billions of people who don’t have AC or a car. Giving US citizens who already have AC and a car free electricity will probably be less effective and less equitable than a more egalitarian degrowth-based distribution of resources.The OOP mentions electric cars, which are simply a luxury when public transit and utility vehicles (kei trucks, vans) exist. Air conditioning likewise can be a luxury when passive design exists. Cisterns, shade, plant respiration, air flow management, high roofs, large communal spaces that reduce outer surface area, etc.

People have a right to live a cool and comfortable life, but that does not mean the right to live in a nuclear family suburban home with paper-thin walls and not a tree in sight, basking in full sunlight, with AC on full blast, using your electric SUV to drive half an hour to the grocery store or school. A tropical longhouse shared with your community, a natural or artificial cave system, or living somewhere that isn’t trying to kill you (as badly) can serve that purpose just as well.

So instead of pushing for free electricity for American citizens, I would much rather push for degrowth of the American economy, with smarter designs that simply need less electricity.

In fiction, you can pretty much always create a reason, and if you have a reason, then that is valid.

That said, the point of using wetlands as a buffer is that the area is too polluted for long-term human exposure, so you might as well give it to nature. Wetlands do nothing to filter out most pollution, the pollution is either removed through industrial processes or slowly allowed to dissipate out into the ocean. As for how wide wetlands should be - right now that’s just the area with an above-acceptable chance of above-acceptable pollution for human habitation or workplace exposure. It depends on where the pollution flows to, how quickly it dissipates and in which ways, etc.

So allowing human habitation in those wetlands is missing the point that caused our capitalist society to restore wetlands there: liberal environmentalists demanded a quota for natural area, and the polluted land is worthless for other uses, so by making them wetlands you satisfy the environmentalists at minimum cost to capital. The animals and plants suffering from the effect of exposure to pollution is not your problem, as long as it still looks pretty enough for photo opportunities and as long as you fund biologists who Monitor the Situation.

Hating to lose things can come from a place of sunk cost fallacy. Reusing existing buildings is often less efficient than building from scratch, and the reason it is so often worth it in the present day is because capitalism is horribly inefficient at land use because land ownership is basically an untaxed way to leech money off the efforts of everyone around it.

However, in your scenario as presented, you’re dealing with a neighborhood built by capitalists in the expectation that the neighborhood would be dry land. It seems very unlikely that the capitalists that built it would have paid the extra money to make those buildings able to handle flooding well. This means rotting drywall and insulation, waterlogged concrete, rusting metal frames, essential household infrastructure like fuse boxes and central heating and sewage pumps being destroyed beyond repair in flooded basements, etc. Using these places in spite of that would likely mean either massive maintenance cost or massive health issues.

It is plausible that in a capitalist society a place like this would be used as a shanty town. In most places in the US, shanty towns are demolished by police because “ew, gross” and because they prefer to send the people that would use them to for-profit prisons. However, it would be on-brand for California to officially endorse the shanty town as a capitalist pseudo pro-housing waffle. Between the lack of functioning infrastructure, the toxic pollution, the building damage, and everything else, quality of life would be pretty bad, but many people may choose it over not having a roof over their heads or becoming a slave to the prison industrial complex or even over the quality/cost of available regular lower class housing in California.

In a solarpunk society, I find hard to imagine that living in rotting flooded housing would be preferable to deconstructing the neighborhood and building adequate housing elsewhere. Reuse is only good if the cost of reuse isn’t greater than the combined cost of disposal and replacement or salvaging and reuse in a different context.

Maybe it could work if most of the reconstruction efforts were done as a capitalist shanty town. Put one or more decades of capitalism after the flooding, enough that a rich amphibious local culture has arisen, the bulk of the reconstruction costs have already been borne, and pollution has diminished so it’s no longer an active health hazard in most of the town. It could be an incrementalist history, where the emphasis on capitalist incentives slowly diminishes over time and people go from living in the shanty town because of work and rent and shelter to living there because of the people and the land, or it could be a revolutionary history, where capitalist structures in the shanty town are finally removed or reclaimed.

With the first option, you would have to be careful to show that this isn’t just the first step of the same cycle of gentrification that has affected successful shanty towns since the dawn of time. Many fashionable capitalist consumer things are cleaned-up versions of poor people managing to survive and thrive 50-100 years earlier. What decisions does society make that show it turning away from the cycle of externalization, exploitation, and commodification?

With the second option, you would have to be careful to show which parts are capitalist and which are postcapitalist. When they use something that is only sensible because of initial capitalist investment, how is it clear that they wouldn’t build it that way today and what other choices they would make? What makes their lives worse than those of people from flooded towns who immediately got a solarpunk response, and why do they choose this place anyway?