I am an environmentalist and concerned about climate change, which is why I support nuclear power, megacities, geoengineering, GMOs, and AI.
You will assume I am an idiot or a dilettante but I didn’t come to this lightly. I was involved in climate activism for many years, organizing and protesting and direct action. I lived off-grid for several years doing permaculture. I was one of the first people to hear about solarpunk and i decided to live it.
Biggest thing you learn living off-grid is how much technology defines your experience of reality. Have to build your own life support system from scratch: how do you get water? how do you make it hot? how do you make it clean enough to drink? how do you wash dishes and clothes and your body, and where does that dirty water go? where do you poop and pee? how do you deal with trash? how do you stay warm how do you stay cool where you get your food and medicine and sundry goods you are accustomed to?
Even when you get it all sorted You’re still not self-sufficient. You’re not smelting metals or refining petroleum, or even growing all your own food. it’s very hard to get all the calories for a modern diet! especially if you have to use your own calories to do it. That’s the whole story of human toil, to get out of this subsistence farming energy trap.
So you have to trade with other people which means with the industrial world and capitalism and all that. If you have a good setup you can reduce your “town runs” to like once a month. a few months if you’re really good.
and if you have to go to town then you need gasoline. by far the most efficient form of energy and power. If you have gasoline around you might as well have chainsaws, maybe a little tractor and now you’re part of industrial society.
There was one year we tried to be gasoline free and had to cut all the wood by hand. Like breaking down whole trees with one of those big two-person saws you see in the cartoons. and basically our entire society ran on wood! We used fire to cook, clean, and heat all of our buildings. We lived in a forest, this made sense, We were tending the forest and taking dead wood. But you don’t want to cut all the trees right in your village, so we had to go around the mountains finding wood. So we had to take the pickup truck. So we had to use gasoline. And then we already had these chainsaws, and all this bar oil and whatnot…
Ultimately I left that world because it was not capable of Doing enough life support (I’ve written about this elsewhere). the consistent pattern was this: a lot of ideological experiments and campaigns went on at the superstructure level but ultimately our quality of life was defined by our technology
So everything in society is about technology, except technology, which is about power.
And ultimately all the power we have on earth comes from the Sun. there’s way more of it in space too but we get a tiny bit of it and that fuels are entire civilization. currently we run on a lot of the stored solar fuel, and we’ve pumped a bunch of it into the atmosphere and mess with the feedback loops in the climate. But we didn’t even really know all this until my lifetime and there’s a lot of people who care and are trying to correct it. If we want to do that in the timelines we have, there are some like pretty obvious wins including the things I mentioned above. I can say more about that later
