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23 hours agoThat is a separate conversation from whether large industrial dozers are needed.
If you think they aren’t needed you are mistaking your desire for degrowth broadly with the idea we don’t need large dozers as tools.
What if I use a dozer to help install a new septic system that vastly reduces and essentially eliminates runoff into wetlands? Or a grid scale solar array? What if I use it to rebuild a bridge that has become unsafe? Like anything else it is complicated.
Electric drive heavy industrial equipment is absoulutely solarpunk though, not the least because it sets the conditions for further electrification because the drive train is powered by an electric motor.
You forget the two most important parts.
A lighter than air vehicle you directly have control over is far more resilient to attack, difficult to pin down the location of, and maintainable than a satellite either orbitting the earth in predictable trajectories that place them periodically completely out of your view or sitting there like sitting ducks in geostationary orbit, either way shooting them down is a difficult but entirely soft problem for the major aerospace powers of the earth.
The X-37b cannot fly up to your communications relay lighter than air vehicle while it is sitting in a lonely dark void with no one watching and reach into the insides and start fiddling… Through the use of aerobraking the X-37b can easily move in entirely unpredictable ways, so this is just an open question hanging out there in space for satellite based infrastructure.