#can bitcoin be solarpunk

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

If technology wasn’t such a central aspect of solarpunk, we’d all just be hippies redux. Yet not all tech, right? Because solarpunk is also about living the good life while building a just, inclusive, and sustainable society. So, what is solarpunk’s attitude toward and relationship with tech? How do solarpunks decide what’s worth it and what’s beyond the pale? And what’s all this about appropriate technology?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How finfluencers destroyed the housing and lives of thousands of people

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The crash of 2008 imparted many lessons to those of us who were only dimly aware of finance, especially the problems of complexity as a way of disguising fraud and recklessness. That was really the first lesson of 2008: "financial engineering" is mostly a way of obscuring crime behind a screen of technical jargon.

This is a vital principle to keep in mind, because obscenely well-resourced "financial engineers" are on a tireless, perennial search for opportunities to disguise fraud as innovation. As Riley Quinn says, "Any time you hear 'fintech,' substitute 'unlicensed bank'":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

But there's another important lesson to learn from the 2008 disaster, a lesson that's as old as the South Seas Bubble: "leverage" (that is, debt) is a force multiplier for fraud. Easy credit for financial speculation turns local scams into regional crime waves; it turns regional crime into national crises; it turns national crises into destabilizing global meltdowns.

When financial speculators have easy access to credit, they "lever up" their wagers. A speculator buys your house and uses it for collateral for a loan to buy another house, then they make a bet using that house as collateral and buy a third house, and so on. This is an obviously terrible practice and lenders who extend credit on this basis end up riddling the real economy with rot – a single default in the chain can ripple up and down it and take down a whole neighborhood, town or city. Any time you see this behavior in debt markets, you should batten your hatches for the coming collapse. Unsurprisingly, this is very common in crypto speculation, where it's obscured behind the bland, unpronounceable euphemism of "re-hypothecation":

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/10/rehypothecation-may-be-common-in-traditional-finance-but-it-will-never-work-with-bitcoin/

Loose credit markets often originate with central banks. The dogma that holds that the only role the government has to play in tuning the economy is in setting interest rates at the Fed means the answer to a cooling economy is cranking down the prime rate, meaning that everyone earns less money on their savings and are therefore incentivized to go and risk their retirement playing at Wall Street's casino.

The "zero interest rate policy" shows what happens when this tactic is carried out for long enough. When the economy is built upon mountains of low-interest debt, when every business, every stick of physical plant, every car and every home is leveraged to the brim and cross-collateralized with one another, central bankers have to keep interest rates low. Raising them, even a little, could trigger waves of defaults and blow up the whole economy.

Holding interest rates at zero – or even flipping them to negative, so that your savings lose value every day you refuse to flush them into the finance casino – results in still more reckless betting, and that results in even more risk, which makes it even harder to put interest rates back up again.

This is a morally and economically complicated phenomenon. On the one hand, when the government provides risk-free bonds to investors (that is, when the Fed rate is over 0%), they're providing "universal basic income for people with money." If you have money, you can park it in T-Bills (Treasury bonds) and the US government will give you more money:

https://realprogressives.org/mmp-blog-34-responses/

On the other hand, while T-Bills exist and are foundational to the borrowing picture for speculators, ZIRP creates free debt for people with money – it allows for ever-greater, ever-deadlier forms of leverage, with ever-worsening consequences for turning off the tap. As 2008 forcibly reminded us, the vast mountains of complex derivatives and other forms of exotic debt only seems like an abstraction. In reality, these exotic financial instruments are directly tethered to real things in the real economy, and when the faery gold disappears, it takes down your home, your job, your community center, your schools, and your whole country's access to cancer medication:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/08/greek-drug-shortage-worsens

Being a billionaire automatically lowers your IQ by 30 points, as you are insulated from the consequences of your follies, lapses, prejudices and superstitions. As @pixelpusher220@dmv.community says, Elon Musk is what Howard Hughes would have turned into if he hadn't been a recluse:

https://mamot.fr/@pixelpusher220@dmv.community/112457199729198644

The same goes for financiers during periods of loose credit. Loose Fed money created an "everything bubble" that saw the prices of every asset explode, from housing to stocks, from wine to baseball cards. When every bet pays off, you win the game by betting on everything:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_bubble

That meant that the ZIRPocene was an era in which ever-stupider people were given ever-larger sums of money to gamble with. This was the golden age of the "finfluencer" – a Tiktok dolt with a surefire way for you to get rich by making reckless bets that endanger the livelihoods, homes and wellbeing of your neighbors.

Finfluencers are dolts, but they're also dangerous. Writing for The American Prospect, the always-amazing Maureen Tkacik describes how a small clutch of passive-income-brainworm gurus created a financial weapon of mass destruction, buying swathes of apartment buildings and then destroying them, ruining the lives of their tenants, and their investors:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-05-22-hell-underwater-landlord/

Tcacik's main characters are Matt Picheny, Brent Ritchie and Koteswar “Jay” Gajavelli, who ran a scheme to flip apartment buildings, primarily in Houston, America's fastest growing metro, which also boasts some of America's weakest protections for tenants. These finance bros worked through Gajavelli's company Applesway Investment Group, which levered up his investors' money with massive loans from Arbor Realty Trust, who also originated loans to many other speculators and flippers.

For investors, the scheme was a classic heads-I-win/tails-you-lose: Gajavelli paid himself a percentage of the price of every building he bought, a percentage of monthly rental income, and a percentage of the resale price. This is typical of the "syndicating" sector, which raised $111 billion on this basis:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-housing-bust-comes-for-thousands-of-small-time-investors-3934beb3

Gajavelli and co bought up whole swathes of Houston and other cities, apartment blocks both modest and luxurious, including buildings that had already been looted by previous speculators. As interest rates crept up and the payments for the adjustable-rate loans supporting these investments exploded, Gajavell's Applesway and its subsidiary LLCs started to stiff their suppliers. Garbage collection dwindled, then ceased. Water outages became common – first weekly, then daily. Community rooms and pools shuttered. Lawns grew to waist-high gardens of weeds, fouled with mounds of fossil dogshit. Crime ran rampant, including murders. Buildings filled with rats and bedbugs. Ceilings caved in. Toilets backed up. Hallways filled with raw sewage:

https://pluralistic.net/timberridge

Meanwhile, the value of these buildings was plummeting, and not just because of their terrible condition – the whole market was cooling off, in part thanks to those same interest-rate hikes. Because the loans were daisy-chained, problems with a single building threatened every building in the portfolio – and there were problems with a lot more than one building.

This ruination wasn't limited to Gajavelli's holdings. Arbor lent to multiple finfluencer grifters, providing the leverage for every Tiktok dolt to ruin a neighborhood of their choosing. Arbor's founder, the "flamboyant" Ivan Kaufman, is associated with a long list of bizarre pop-culture and financial freak incidents. These have somehow eclipsed his scandals, involving – you guessed it – buying up apartment buildings and turning them into dangerous slums. Two of his buildings in Hyattsville, MD accumulated 2,162 violations in less than three years.

Arbor graduated from owning slums to creating them, lending out money to grifters via a "crowdfunding" platform that rooked retail investors into the scam, taking advantage of Obama-era deregulation of "qualified investor" restrictions to sucker unsophisticated savers into handing over money that was funneled to dolts like Gajavelli. Arbor ran the loosest book in town, originating mortgages that wouldn't pass the (relatively lax) criteria of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This created an ever-enlarging pool of apartments run by dolts, without the benefit of federal insurance. As one short-seller's report on Arbor put it, they were the origin of an epidemic of "Slumlord Millionaires":

https://viceroyresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Arbor-Slumlord-Millionaires-Jan-8-2023.pdf

The private equity grift is hard to understand from the outside, because it appears that a bunch of sober-sided, responsible institutions lose out big when PE firms default on their loans. But the story of the Slumlord Millionaires shows how such a scam could be durable over such long timescales: remember that the "syndicating" sector pays itself giant amounts of money whether it wins or loses. The consider that they finance this with investor capital from "crowdfunding" platforms that rope in naive investors. The owners of these crowdfunding platforms are conduits for the money to make the loans to make the bets – but it's not their money. Quite the contrary: they get a fee on every loan they originate, and a share of the interest payments, but they're not on the hook for loans that default. Heads they win, tails we lose.

In other words, these crooks are intermediaries – they're platforms. When you're on the customer side of the platform, it's easy to think that your misery benefits the sellers on the platform's other side. For example, it's easy to believe that as your Facebook feed becomes enshittified with ads, that advertisers are the beneficiaries of this enshittification.

But the reason you're seeing so many ads in your feed is that Facebook is also ripping off advertisers: charging them more, spending less to police ad-fraud, being sloppier with ad-targeting. If you're not paying for the product, you're the product. But if you are paying for the product? You're still the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#adfraud

In the same way: the private equity slumlord who raises your rent, loads up on junk fees, and lets your building disintegrate into a crime-riddled, sewage-tainted, rat-infested literal pile of garbage is absolutely fucking you over. But they're also fucking over their investors. They didn't buy the building with their own money, so they're not on the hook when it's condemned or when there's a forced sale. They got a share of the initial sale price, they get a percentage of your rental payments, so any upside they miss out on from a successful sale is just a little extra they're not getting. If they squeeze you hard enough, they can probably make up the difference.

The fact that this criminal playbook has wormed its way into every corner of the housing market makes it especially urgent and visible. Housing – shelter – is a human right, and no person can thrive without a stable home. The conversion of housing, from human right to speculative asset, has been a catastrophe:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Of course, that's not the only "asset class" that has been enshittified by private equity looters. They love any kind of business that you must patronize. Capitalists hate capitalism, so they love a captive audience, which is why PE took over your local nursing home and murdered your gran:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

Homes are the last asset of the middle class, and the grifter class know it, so they're coming for your house. Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is" and We Buy Ugly Houses defrauds your parents out of their family home because that's where their money is:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor

The plague of housing speculation isn't a US-only phenomenon. We have allies in Spain who are fighting our Wall Street landlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#fuckin-aardvarks

Also in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights

The fight for decent housing is the fight for a decent world. That's why unions have joined the fight for better, de-financialized housing. When a union member spends two hours commuting every day from a black-mold-filled apartment that costs 50% of their paycheck, they suffer just as surely as if their boss cut their wage:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

The solutions to our housing crises aren't all that complicated – they just run counter to the interests of speculators and the ruling class. Rent control, which neoliberal economists have long dismissed as an impossible, inevitable disaster, actually works very well:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

As does public housing:

https://jacobin.com/2023/10/red-vienna-public-affordable-housing-homelessness-matthew-yglesias

There are ways to have a decent home and a decent life without being burdened with debt, and without being a pawn in someone else's highly leveraged casino bet.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

Image: Boy G/Google Maps (modified) https://pluralistic.net/timberridge

[fortheloveofluxuryxo]

Get paid in crypto to read and write content on Publish0x

YOUTUBE EPISODE 6

Hello everyone! I'm back with another way to earn money, specifically cryptocurrency, from reading and writing content: Publish0x! I've been on this site for about 2 weeks now and I highly enjoy this platform! The earning part is a certainly a plus, but ultimately I find the biggest pro to this platform is learning about cryptocurrency and everything that comes with it! If you've been interested in potentially trading or earning crypto this platform is highly educational when it comes to researching various coins, wallets, exchanges, security, and more! Since I've been on this site I've learned way more than I knew before I discovered it (thanks Reddit!). This platform is similar to platforms like Medium and Steemit, and Publish0x does not intend on making their own coin in the future.

How it works is Publish0x has a tipping pool (you don't pay a cent) and you can tip the authors whose articles you read, while also collecting a percentage. Both the reader and writer get paid!

Image: screenshot of the tipping system on Publish0x.

As of right now they are paying in two coins: Basic Attention Token (BAT) - recall my post about BAT and Brave Browser - and stablecoin DAI. Not only can you learn further about those two coins on Publish0x, but also from Coinbase Earn as a beginner's introduction, which I discussed on last week's post! They are incorporating more coins as time progresses this year and you will need a wallet to store your coins. I will be covering soon what kind of wallets are available and the pros and cons of each type.

Another way to earn on Publish0x is through their ambassador program. You and others interested in crypto can earn from referring others and reading/writing content for the platform. You earn 5% per every tip given from your referrals. If this is something you'd like to immerse yourself in - reader or writer, I highly recommend this platform. It's been nothing but educational, including ways to avoid cryptocurrency scams amongst other topics on crypto and security. I'd like to note that MY CHANNEL HAS ONLY BEEN UP FOR TWO WEEKS and I haven't even made a dent in the topics I intend to cover surrounding cryptocurrency, amongst other ways to make money online. As the weeks continue, I am covering security based topics on getting into this because as of right now, cryptocurrency as a whole is "The Wild Wild West" and is in a gray area because it is decentralized.

I cannot stress enough how much potential I see in cryptocurrency. It is going to change a lot of things. The way our system of currency works as a whole, social networks, and even gaming. As of right now there are already social networks that incorporate blockchains in beta testing, as well as games where in-game currency can be converted and has monetary value! No longer will you be spending countless hours on social media or gaming without earning at the same time. There are multiple coins out there separate from Bitcoin, some who don't even require the mass amount of energy or process of mining! I very much see the potential in future (hopefully) eco-efficient, solarpunk societies that use crypto as currency. It will be here to stay and that is why I fully intend on diversifying my portfolio with such! Although things are not perfect (are they ever when it comes to "money" and making it?) I can only hope that things like this will become more accessible to everyone, no matter the income bracket or background. I believe technology cannot be innovative if it's only for one group of people.

Although I am posting content and information on these topics, it is ultimately UP TO YOU to do YOUR OWN research even further to find out if these things align with what you want. I cannot possibly generate all this information about every single thing surrounding these topics for you! It is up to you to do your own research! I've had a number of people complain I'm "not doing research" because I didn't cover everything when - like I've said - this channel is barely two weeks old and I've JUST BEGUN! What that indicates to me is that people expect me to produce all this content so they can be spoonfed the information without doing any of the work themselves. That is simply unrealistic and unreasonable. Please, please, please do your own research on these topics. Engaging with cryptocurrency HAS ITS RISKS, just like investing in stocks - except this is very fresh and new territory. It may or may not be for you, but I am providing this information nonetheless for those who have been interested and don't know where to start!

Publish0x has a FAQ page if you're interested and need more information about their platform. Check out the new widget on my blog page to read some featured articles! Happy earning! ✨

[witchpunkboy]

We Need To Talk About NANO

Despite my username, I don’t normally do a whole lot of posts that unite my solarpunk beliefs and agorist praxis. Personally, I'm just as big on mesh networks and sustainability as I am on green p2p trade networks. However, this post will do both, because both communities need to be talking about NANO.

But why should an anti-capitalist solarpunk care about a cryptocurrency, and how energy efficient is it, really? 

To answer that, we need to first look at where Bitcoin failed, and where NANO is fixing the problem. 

As many people have probably heard by now, Bitcoin is excessively energy-inefficient and is not nearly as decentralized as it claims. It had potential, for sure. With its original lack of central authority, low transaction fees mostly utilized to pay its miners, and fast transaction speed combined with relative anonymity in purchasing, Bitcoin could have been the cryptocurrency to demolish the central banking system once and for all, and transform currency and our entire market structure into a free community-owned-and-led barter system. 

But it didn’t. 

In fact, where fees were originally less than a cent, even a $40 transaction can now have the equivalent of a $4 fee attached. Where there was a lack of central authority and general equality, there are now bitcoin whales and banks. Where there were near-instant transaction speeds, there are now sometimes days of waiting for trade confirmation. 

For explanation of what a blockchain is and what miners do, a video: 

For my deaf readers, the video does have closed captions. 

And while all this is happening, Bitcoin is so energy-inefficient that it 950 KWH (kilowatt-hours) per transaction. To most people, that’s just a number. So for comparison, the average American household consumes 867 KWH per month. 

Enter NANO. 

NANO does not have the same problem of centralization as Bitcoin does, or even a regular blockchain-based cryptocurrency, because NANO uses a system called the block-lattice. With the block-lattice, every person has their own blockchain. In simple terms, think of blockchain like a book that, whenever you buy something, gets passed around to other people, who all try to make sure your trade actually happened like you say it did, while you wait patiently for them all to come to a consensus, and then pay them a few bucks when they’re all done. 

NANO doesn’t need the consensus or the fees, because NANO just gives you the book. It’s very similar, in that respect, to mutual credit - a term the left-libertarians may recognize. In fact, it’s extremely similar, because it practically only exists between the sender and the receiver. 

(There is an actual mutual credit cryptocurrency, which I will do a post about later.) 

So how do they avoid someone lying about how much NANO they have? Like regular blockchain money, NANO does have a puzzle that the computer has to solve in order to validate. However, it’s been set up to be both energy-efficient for your computer and made extremely hard and time-consuming for someone to try to spam or hack the network. Here’s a video explaining it a little better, also with closed captions.

So how energy-efficient is NANO, and why do I call it a green crypto? NANO, unlike bitcoin, only consumes 0.000032 KWH per transaction. You may need a comparison for that, as well. An LED light-bulb takes an hour to consume 0.005 KWH. Essentially, you would need to be making about 150 NANO transactions an hour to consume the same energy as an LED. 

And because all the coins that are in NANO are still there, and will not be added to, it will never get less energy-efficient. 

And right now, that makes NANO over 8,467,023 times more efficient than Bitcoin, which surprisingly is still more energy efficient than the Federal Reserve. 

The whole network is so energy-efficient that it can work off one wind turbine, and the NANO community is working to buy a small 14 square kilometer forest so that they have a negative carbon footprint rather than just a neutral one. 

It's not perfect, sure, but it's great news in working towards a sustainable future.

[possumcorpse]

If there's ever a cyberpunk future in the near future, the only places I can think of that would really advance a lot is San Francisco and Japan. I dunno any other big fancy schmancy cities or countries that are like super technologically advanced or anything. It's like those two places- and there'd obvipusly be more, I just can't think of any other places rn- would be super advanced. Meanwhile other cities like LA would be not as advanced

its like diifferent regions. Silicon Valley would have the latest and greatest technology ever. their economy is solely relied on bitcoin and other forms of online currency. robots are setient and are citizens. all/most vehicles run without gasoline or fossil fuels. Fossil fuels arent even a form of power or fuel in the valley anymore.

Then LA or Orange County isnt like that. theres still vehicles thatd run on gas. other methods of fuel arent used as much, but it's still common to see. robots are only seen in big cities, and even then theyre mostly workers rather than citizens. those that are citizens are mostly visitors going on shopping sprees or taking tours in Downtown LA. architeture has changed to make buildings more stable as well as more beautiful.

In OC, while still futuristic, there's an abundance of trees and plants, mixing between cyberpunk and solarpunk. plant-based fuel is more common here. solarpower is also used frequently. i dunno much bput the OC area; ive only been there for the Orange County Fair a few times honestly

but something like that!

[solarpunks]

REAL LIFE SOLARPUNK: SCUTTLEBUTT AN OFF-GRID SOCIAL NETWORK

Dominic and James are a few key figures in a community of eccentric open source hackers gathering in a social network independent from mainstream internet. The unique properties of Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) make it possible for digital information to spread easily even in the absence of Internet Service Providers (ISP) and the internet’s backbone. What makes that possible is a decentralized protocol based on the mechanics of word of mouth.

Scuttlebutt is decentralized in a similar way that Bitcoin or BitTorrent are. Unlike centralized systems like PayPal or Dropbox, there is no single website or server to connect when using decentralized services. Which in turn means there is no single company with control over the network.

—

In Scuttlebutt, the “mesh” suffices. With simply two computers, a local router, and electricity, you can exchange messages between the computers with minimal effort and no technical skills. Each account in Scuttlebutt is a diary (or “log”) of what a person has publicly and digitally said. As those people move around between different WiFi / LAN networks, their log gets copy-pasted to different computers, and so digital information spreads.

What word of mouth is for humans, Scuttlebutt is for social news feeds.

(via André Staltz - An off-grid social network)

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

How Do We Power Down?

ICYMI, here’s a post I put up on our Patreon back in March that, in anticipation of Season 5 (which we’re now partway into), considers the environmental problems posed by the use of cryptocurrencies and generative AI and the general problem of how do we power down our societies a bit without being overrun by societies that opt not to power down?

Christina here... I don’t know if any of you caught it, but Elizabeth Kolbert, who specializes in writing about climate change and our efforts (or lack thereof) to stop driving it, recently had another interesting article in the New Yorker. This article explored, to quote the title, the “obscene energy demands of AI,” or more specifically, of AI, like ChatGPT and Midjourney, that processes astronomical amounts of information every time it is used.

To take a moment to be totally self–centered about this, how interesting—and how timely! Ariel and I just discussed solarpunk’s use of and attitude toward AI, especially the image generating kind, when we recorded THE FIRST EPISODE OF SEASON 5—WOOT!—which you’ll have early access to toward the end of this month. But, for all that we found to consider about it, we didn’t touch on the enormous electricity consumption associated with AI image generation. Which now puts me, personally, far more solidly in the this is a bad idea camp, even if people are using AI to put POC into amazing imaginings of a super future. But Elizabeth Kolbert’s article—which you should definitely read!—gives me this chance to broach the subject, even if it is a few weeks before Season 5 begins, and explore it briefly further.

To give you a brief sneak peak: in our Season 5 opener, Ariel and I talk about solarpunk’s relationship with tech. Because solarpunk is both highly tech–centric and highly tech–skeptical, which is kind of a cool combination. Solarpunks are always asking should we or shouldn’t we use that tech and wouldn’t the world be a better place if we weren’t all always asking that question! Meawhile, the should we or shouldn’t we of AI and cryptocurrencies are already points of, if not contention, then at least deep disagreement between solarpunks. Again, I’m pretty much in the NOPE camp, all the more so now after reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s article.

As Elizabeth Kolbert explains, along with cryptocurrencies, AI like ChatGPT and Midjourney are shocking electricity hogs and... which I hadn’t previously realized... prolific producers of e–waste (because there are so many servers involved and they need to be replaced as they age). As she points out in the article, a single Bitcoin transaction produces the equivalent amount of e–waste as an iPhone. If that’s the case, there’s no way that all but a tiny fraction of the world can switch over to using digital currencies. Even worse, if that’s the case, shame on people making their fortunes buying and selling them. The world just doesn’t have the resources to sustain that! Not without environmental and ecological devastation and a heavy price in human lives and well being. But I think the most important thing Elizabeth Kolbert points out in her article stands already in the subheader: “How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy?”

One of the interesting things that certain historians (and the evolutionary biologist Geerat Vermeij, of whom I am a big fan) have pointed out is that there is a directionality to history. If you over look the bumps and wiggles and occasional serious crashes, over time, populations that use lower amounts of energy per capita per year have given way to (or been crushed by) populations that use higher amounts of energy per capita per year. You can see this in the general takeover of Earth’s ecosystems by human beings and you can see this over the course of human history. Our trajectory has taken us from manpower only, to using animals and burning wood to get work done, to moving on to fossil fuels, solar, wind, and nuclear energy and hydropower to increase our productivity and our ability to move ourselves and our stuff around. For centuries already, no other animal on Earth has had as much power per capital at its disposal as we do. Meanwhile, the countries with the highest per capita uses of energy have come to rule the world politically, economically, and even to some extent culturally.

If you looks at the shifts from using our own hands to get work done (back until the Neolithic sometime), to using wind and animals to get work done (like milling grains and ploughing) to burning wood and then later coal to run steam engines and the on to burning fossil fuels in internal combustion engines, it’s easy to see that each one has been a big step up in our per capita energy use. It’s also easy to see that we have not yet reached the ceiling! Throughout our fossil fuel phase; even as we improved our machinery and made it more energy efficient, this never resulted in a drop in per capita power expenditure. Instead, we used the increased efficiency to get more power out of our machines, making them bigger, faster, stronger, more complex, and less expensive, and therefore more widely available to more people. All of which led to massive increases in per capita energy use. We have always been as powerful as we can literally afford to be rather than using increases in energy efficiency to lower our per capita use of energy.

Even now, as our vehicles and toys and tools have become more energy efficient, we’ve responded by buying more of them and doing more things with them. At this point, who doesn’t have a computer or a laptop, plus maybe a tablet, and definitely also a smartphone. Who doesn’t upload photos and documents to “the cloud” of distant servers that guzzle up enormous amounts of energy? Who doesn’t do Google searches at the drop of a hat instead of hauling themselves to the book or library that would also hold the answer? We take advantage of all of these possibilities because they are there (and in part because we don’t want to be left out or left behind). But, most importantly, we use all of the extra energy it takes to fuel these things because we can afford to pay for it. ChatGPT and image generators like Midjourney guzzle increasingly incredible bundles of electricity, but, still, chatting with ChatGPT or getting it to write an essay for you is a hell of a lot easier on the personal budget than reading by candlelight was 200 years ago... even though it consumes orders of magnitude more energy.

The problem with all of this inventing of new ways of consuming power is, of course, the climate is in crisis thanks to our continuing pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in large part via our production and consumption of energy. For our own good and that of the rest of Earth’s surface biosphere, we ought to have hit net zero greenhouse gas emissions yesterday, or better yet ten years ago already. Instead, the goal keeps receding into the distance, even as we develop our capability to generate electricity via renewable, low–carbon means, because our per capita energy use just goes up and up and up. That’s where this idea that shifting toward a lower per capita power consumption is, on some level, inherently impossible rears its very ugly head. Shifting to a lower energy use is against the way systems naturally evolve and totally counter to the way human beings inherently operate (which is to say, we tend to do what’s possible—and push that envelope—rather than doing what’s wise). Another great obstacle to lowering our per capita energy use per year is that the society that powers itself down a bit puts itself at the mercy of the societies that keep striving for more power per capita. At some point, they’ll have the machinery, weaponry, wealth, and resources to wipe the powered down societies off the map. So why would you open yourself and your fellow citizens to that sort of existential risk?

Our failure to power down our societies is not inevitable, of course. We are animals capable of reason. Dilemmas like these are why we have governments, negotiations, diplomats, international law, and treaties. But treaties only work until someone decides to break them—case in point, Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons in 1994 for promisesnot to be invaded by Russia, the US, or the UK.

This means right now, humanity is in terrible situation with difficult options. We need to power down our lives because the way we live and the way we consume things, including power, is unsustainable. It would take three Earths and all that and we really need to stop emitting greenhouse gases to the atmosphere NOW. We’re already in pretty serious hot water on the climate change front. But to do so is counter to our tendency to innovate and adopt new technologies and to do absolutely the most we can afford to do (and buy absolutely the most we can afford to buy). Meanwhile, powering down would very possibly leave us at the mercy of societies that chose not to go that route.

Who is trying to steer us through this mess toward a better rather than worse out come? Honestly, where is the global leadership on this front? Nowhere in sight. Because no politician in the world is going to suggest that we need to become less powerful. And no country in the world is going to rein in AI and cryptocurrencies, not unless all the others and all the big businesses and all the tech companies agree to these things. I hate to say it, it’s really, really hard to see that happening. There’s simply too much power and money to be made.

If there is a role for solarpunk here, it is in imagining pathways out of this mess. How could we come to power down the world a bit and begin living actually sustainably? Because right now really, all this talk about sustainable technology is just a silly, soothing bit of mumbo jumbo. Not when, at the same time, cryptocurrency and AI use is going through the roof.

Get on it, solarpunks! We need visions, and even, simply, to get the word out that this is a serious problem.