What’s your reasoning for thinking its not gardening?The article goes into some detail to explain that a fair amount of gardening skill is involved and its a lot more than just letting your lawn grow wild.

I don’t think that’s a fair reading of the article, the three points it mentions are:

1. Invest in trees and green spaces. This ones achievable at a small scale.

2. Prevent new construction in risky places. This ones literally free because it’s just not doing stuff that’s harmful.

3. Employ nature-based and multipurpose facilities. I’ll admit this one could end up being pricey.

Then it has a whole bit about how these policies could save money.

Either way, I’m not reading this as suggesting expensive rebuilds.

Yup, this 100%!

If anyones in doubt, I was pretty horrified to learn meat reared chickens are sometimes slaughtered as early as 35 days old.

https://www.rspca.org.uk/webContent/staticImages/BroilerCampaign/EatSitSufferRepeat.pdf

I agree with you, but it’s worth mentioning that a lot of goverments (such as the UK) are classing burning wood pellets as 0 carbon energy. The argument being that burning wood releases recently absorbed carbon (from the last 20 years or so) so doesn’t increase overall levels of carbon in the same way as coal.

I kinda see the argument, but it does sound like a dangerous path towards “eco-accounting” like we’ve seen with offsetting, where calculations for carbon release are out of wack with the scientific reality.

Edit: I get that the writer is conflating two seperate terms btw, but think there’s a version of this argument that makes sense.

I think the pretty universal answer in all these comments is “no”- I think that’s fair but I’d add sone caveats.

There’s a lot of negative sentiments here around LLMs, which I agree with, but I think it’s easy to imagine some hypothetical future where LLMs existing without the current water/energy overuse, hallucinations or big companies stealing individuals work. Whether that future is likely or not, I think it’s possible.

The main reason vibe coding isn’t solarpunk is that, taken by itself, it’s not in any way related to ecological stewardship, anti-capitalist community building, or anything else that’s core to solarpunk. Vibe coding might or might not be part of some “cool techy future” in the same way as flying cars, robots, and floating cities but that’s not a reason to consider it as solarpunk.

If you’re into LLMs and solarpunk, instead of arguing that LLMs are solarpunk, you can make efforts to push them to being more solarpunk. How can LLMs support communities instead of coorporations? How can, through weights sharing and various optimisations, we make LLMs less damaging to the environment? Etc. That’d at least be a solarpunk way to go about LLMs, even if LLMs aren’t inherently solarpunk.

Just to make the case for the smart meter. The UK energy industry is trying to bring something called market-wide alf hourly settlement into play, which is meant to make more energy use data available and therefore make it easier and more efficient to respond to changing demand.

Assuming you think it’ll work, then smart meters will play a role in enabling greater renewables in a way that “dumb” meters can’t.

I don’t really like the idea of things being phased out so quickly either, but at least (unlike phones, TVs, computers, ebooks, smart watches etc) smart meters are being phased out to bring out to potentially lessen overall environmental impact.

Definitely not as good as an out and out no, but this is a big victory for environmental action! And, more importantly for the world and things that live in it.

The main pictured on looks pretty goofy, especially because of the bright green, but this sent me down a youtube rabbit hole of seeing a bunch of reallymawesome house tours.

Side note: I find ‘new build ecofriendly’ architecture liks this awesome, but wonder a lot about adapting existing homes which is surely the most environmentally friendly option. If you were to go all out on making an existing home solarpunk, what would that look like?

I have a Fairphone 4 and would definitely give them the biggest recommendation I could.

Any part can be replaced with a screwdriver which is an order of magnitude better than I’ve seen with other brands. I dropped and broke my phone screen and although I had to buy a new screen, after that I had a phone working as if it was brand new.

I also got mortar into my usb charging socket and was able to replace the charging socket.

You might be able to tell that I’m not the best at looking after things, I’m working on this but in the meantime, fairphone have saved me at least two situations where I’d normally need to buy a new phone. Can’t recommend them enough.

Thanks for such a detailed response! I’m planning on mainly using it for smallish trips, say heading into my local town. I’ve recently move to being just outside walking distance but it’s very short distance to drive for.

I also live around a lot of woods and it’d be good to be able to ride on a dirt path now and then.

From what I can see a ‘hybrid’ sounds like it’d be a good fit?

Thanks! Relieved it sounds easy enough to figure out

A lot of the comments here are, pretty fairly, sceptical of whether this is a viable idea.

My question is, what’s the advantage meant to be over just having an electrical railway and seperately some solar panels plugged into the grid? Especially since the article mentions the solar railway would be grid connected?

I don’t know specifics on this battery farm, but almost all are essentially fleets of shipping containers filled with smaller batteries, rather than some super-cool-mega-battery, so it’s probably a safe assumption that this is a landmark project in scale, rather than in technology specifics.

I sorta have three not entirely coherent and increasingly cynical feelings about this.

1. That’s neat! If redesigning bottles helps a little with emmissions then that’s cool!

2. Even though it might reduce emmisions, sometimes I worry that people think this is what ecological stewardship looks like. “Keep on burning fossil fuels and running an economy based on the exploitation of the earth, just change the shape of your wine bottles and we’ll be ok!”. We’re not ok and this isn’t enough, small actions like this don’t cut it and we need to hold fossil fuel companies to account for the destruction they cause because it’s too late.

3. Wait, it’s plastic!?!? Are we gonna pretend like CO2 is the only issue and killing millions of fish with plastic a year is something to ignore? Also, doesn’t that effect the global carbon heat pump? Seriously, why is it plastic!?!? My only thought here now is that this is some cynical greenwash of a decision that was made to maximise profits and reduce costs.

This is really beautiful! I think it’s pretty common if you’re switched on to the damage we’re doing to our world, but it’s important to remember that reducing climate change is not just about avoiding disaster, but building a utopia too. Thanks @NafiTheBear@pawb.social !

Germany definitely has a tonne of renewables, but then is still like 25% coal which is why it has high energy emmisions. It has much cleaner energy than it did before adopting renewables though, so still seems like a reason to think renewables are a positive?

It’s 100% untrue that Germany’s recent pursuing of renewables is the reason it pollutes so much per KW.

Then France has a similar amount of renewables to the UK but with a much cleaner mix after that (basically more nuclear and less gas).

I’m wondering if I’ve misunderstood your initial point because I’m not seeing any reason to suggest increasing renewables doesn’t reduce emissions? Only that there’s more to CO2 per KW than just categorising stuff as “renewable” vs “non-renewable”, which I don’t think anyone is doubting?

Sorry to go so hard on this, but this stuff really matters. We don’t have a lot of time left to reduce the most extreme impacts of global warming, and nobody benefits from muddying the waters on the clear benefits of renewables.

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I agree with all of what you said, apart from “without storage renewables aren’t that useful”.

UK and USA are good comparatives here, where the USA has better nuclear provision, but on average very little renewables (approx 10%). The UK obviously burns more fossil fuels when renewables aren’t used, but in spite of this still generates less than 1/3 of the co2 per KW overall as the USA (120g vs 390g).

So storage would be drive that down much further, but even without it, more renewables equals less CO2 overall in pretty much every real world case.

Data sources in CO2 per KW: UK: https://grid.iamkate.com/ USA: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11

I work in the UK energy sector, and that’s definitely not true! About 1/3 of our energy comes from wind which is somewhat but mostly not stored.

Fossil fuels end up doing the work of balancing the grid during times when wind and solar are low. That’s not ideal, but a world where fossil fuels are used to balance renewable provision is much better than a world where they’re the primary energy source.

We’re running out of time to prevent the worst effects of global warming, and any increase in renewables provides some mitigation to the impact. Very few, if any, countries are at the point where current battery tech should stop them increasing their renewables.

Yeah, but remember that data is live and it’s currently night time in the UK! (I think average solar is pretty liw in the UK though- something like 5%)