before riots

- the post title

Glad to see their talking points focus on food security rather than agricultural companies’ interests like the EU. Though I wonder if they’ll come to the sensible conclusion and cut down on the meat industry.

Latest*

It’s not even a particularly bad one, compared to Dole coups, Coca Cola assassination, and Uniroyal napalming civilians.

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?

Thank you for your thoughtful response. I appreciate you trying to keep your work accessible and comprehensible to casual viewers, and that it’s hard to describe a happy relocation, especially in a single image. You’ve clearly put a lot of thought into the messaging. I personally have difficulty accepting flawed/imperfect/good-enough solutions, and it’s nice to have more grounded people actually getting a positive message out there even at the cost of accuracy.

All of that said, refugees and migrants already exist, and they already face the same struggle of wanting to preserve the culture they have been forced away from. The question of how to make migrations as pleasant as possible and rebuild as much of the physically embodied culture that was left behind as possible is one that is very relevant right now, so I would love to see you make a postcard of a migrant town, if you don’t already have one. If you can show how even migration can be a place of solarpunk joy, then suddenly the people of New Orleans do have a realistic joyful future despite the bleak prospect of evacuation.

Personally, a full diaspora seems like an unnecessary loss. Modern western policies of spreading migrants thinly over as wide an area as possible to prevent them from coming together to celebrate the world they left behind are horrific. Migration is at its most beautiful in a place like 19th-20th century New York City, with the best parts of several dozen distinct cultures being reproduced side by side and then mixing together into something novel and rich.

If New Orleans had to be evacuated, I wouldn’t want its culture to dilute as everyone from there is forced to make the separate choice to let their distinctiveness be subsumed by their peers. I would like a bunch of Little New Orleanses, hundreds of migrants all living together in the same neighborhood celebrating the old culture and mingling with the locals, choosing their own rate of change and having enough mass to make other groups consider their perspective and values and artforms.

As you say, the obvious answer is “don’t build cities in swamps”. Before designing anything concrete, you have to decide why you want to overcome that answer - Is it a harbor, like New Orleans or Amsterdam used to be? Is it a cultural heritage site, like New Orleans or Amsterdam now primarily are? Are there natural resources? Is it a hub for locals to access more specialized goods and services, like specialty medicine? Or is it there because people think it’s cool and they have enough money to let it exist regardless of sense?

Whatever the answer, the form follows that function. Build everything on the principles that drive people to want to live there rather than anywhere else.

So why do you think solarpunk people would choose to build a city in a swamp? And what are the amenities that follow from that need?

If you are trying to preserve a historic town like New Orleans or Amsterdam despite floods and rising sea levels, then your goal is to defy natural change in order to keep things the same. The natural form for that function would be a massive dyke built around all that you want to preserve, so that everything looks just like you want, come hell or high water. (Lifting historic buildings is unfathomably expensive and would change the original feel, so it’s less ideal).

This is not a solarpunk design because the function of preservation is not solarpunk. New Orleans and Amsterdam weren’t built as a place for culture to arise, let alone to preserve some older culture. They were port towns, and they were built with practical purpose. Everything good there arose because working class people from diverse cultures decided to hang out and have fun together, and the same can be done everywhere. If we want to honor the meaning of New Orleans and Amsterdam culture, we let those cities sink into the ocean and focus on having lively third places for the working class in this day and age.

There are things we can bring with us or rebuild in the old style, but loss and adaptation are natural.

If capitalists can’t take legally, they will take illegally.

On that we agree.

I’m acting under the assumption that they would have died anyway. As they do. When they decompose naturally, they release their carbon.

Okay, glad to understand that the issue is that you didn’t understand my first comment or any comment that came after it.

One last time: what I’m saying is that you bury the wood to prevent it from decomposing and releasing its carbon, as an alternative to burning it. And that as an alternate source of electricity you use something that doesn’t produce as much emissions, like solar, wind, or nuclear. And if you think burying wood is bad for any reason, then setting it on fire is bad for the same reason.

I don’t see how you’re not getting this.

Yes, when you burn the trees you get electricity, but you also release as much carbon dioxide per kWh into the atmosphere as if you were to burn coal instead.

The climate does not care about where your carbon emissions come from. All carbon emissions are getting us further away from the holocene climate.

Maybe you’re acting under the assumption that the trees wouldn’t have grown or that they wouldn’t have been cut down to make place for new trees if they hadn’t been planned to be burned. Maybe that is even true under our fucked up capitalist economy. But that is just capitalism being stupid. If it is worth it to cut down trees to capture carbon, then we should fund that without also requiring the trees to be burned so all that progress is undone.

And sure, once the fossil fuel industry lies dead and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are back below 280 ppm, then you can start burning biomass to keep the concentration stable. But that’s a century from now. Before then, either bury the trees or don’t cut them down in the first place.

Do you mean Canada, which is increasingly on fire? Or do you mean Scandinavia, which will become a glacier once the atlantic current shuts down next decade? Or do you mean Siberia, which currently has a record high temperature of 38C and everything is turning into a molten swamp? Or do you mean Arkhangelsk where the ecosystem will collapse because everything expects permafrost?

Do you mean any coastal city, which will flood? Do you mean places supplied by the international trade network? Do you mean places that expect the sea to contain living creatures? Do you mean places that are dependent on crops that expect temperatures to swing less than 25C back and forth in a week? Do you mean places that are open to the sky and aren’t prepared for hurricane winds?

And if there is a place you’ve found that can weather the storm - do you mean the places where 8 billion people will try to get to but that only have room for less than 200 million total?

But once you put the trees underground, they’re not going to get out without human intervention either…

When you’ve cut down the trees, they’ve “left the system”. What does it matter whether the carbon you add to the system from the outside comes from trees that left the system 6 months ago or ones that left the system 400 million years ago?

That justification holds for coal just as much as it does for the act of throwing the biofuel into the power plant. Why is it irresponsible to burn trees that died 400 million years ago but okay to burn trees that died 6 months ago?

Whether you’ve “offset the emissions” of burning the trees by growing them yourself doesn’t matter for the decision of burning the biofuel. You might as well call coal burning carbon neutral if you bury some trees underground in the place you mined the coal.

So don’t build your nuclear reactors in a place that doesn’t have shit tons of water?

Solar and wind can’t handle peak consumption without obscene amounts of heavily polluting storage. They should definitely get the majority of the attention and budget, but nuclear is still important and will still be faster to scale up faster in many specific locations. Get as much solar in the subtropics and tropics as possible, get wind in windy locations, get geothermal and tidal where that is viable, but get nuclear in places with plenty of water that are further than 45 degrees/5000 km from the equator in areas with little wind, and for peak consumption in places without hydroelectric or other power that isn’t best to keep at the max 24/7, and for quick response to fluctuations in wind and solar in places where other regulators aren’t available.

The articles you link are about experimental or niche tech, expensive or inefficient or both. Rare earths are still used in pretty much all solar panels that are actually being built. They’re also not the only form of pollution from solar panel manufacturing, transportation, installation, and recycling/disposal.

Fissile nuclear is clean enough. It has been smeared and misregulated through lobbying, propaganda, and donations to genuine believers among environmentalists by the fossil fuel industry. But even today uranium fuel cycle power plants produce less lifetime pollution per kWh than solar panels. Solar panel technology will improve, but so would nuclear with thorium or more technical improvements in reactor design.

Once solar panels don’t require rare earths anymore and once some new technology is developed to store electricity between peak production and peak consumption without massive pollution in quantities sufficient to meet everyone’s needs, it makes sense to phase out fission. But we’re still pretty far from that.

If you’re okay with using forests for carbon capture, then you can just bury the wood underground. There is no justification for setting the wood on fire to generate electricity.

I mean, where can you move that isn’t a future disaster zone?

“Telephone operators being fired didn’t stop us from switching to digital phones. Why coddle farmers more?”

or a bit longer:

"People aren’t entitled to doing a job that harms everyone else. If a plumber only knows how to work with lead pipes, we don’t have to poison people just to prevent the guy from having to learn something new.

It’s our job as a society to take care of people who become unemployed because they only know how to do harmful jobs. To help them retrain if they can, and ensure they have a comfortable lifestyle. Farmers that would face bankruptcy deserve a bailout, and like everyone, all farmers deserve a universal basic income/universal basic services".

It is not wrong that farmers would be screwed financially if a government goes as hard as it needs to on sustainability without shielding farmers.

In terms of assets, pretty much all the industrial equipment and many of the buildings of a 20th century industrial farm would be useless in a sustainable farming setup. Obviously all the animal torture factories would have to go, but what use is a combine harvester in a food forest? Also, between the 4-fold reduction in crop production because you no longer need to feed farm animals, the reduction of food waste, and the higher yield per acre from sustainable farming, the price of agricultural land itself would also plummet.

This means that pretty much every industrial farm that has leveraged its assets for a loan would be financially screwed, and so would every bank and investor that gave out those loans without accounting for this possibility. A capitalist stock market would be shocked by your government choosing a healthy country over private profits, and this could cause a financial crisis and economic depression without either a slow ease-in by the government or seizing investor assets in a coup or revolution.

Furthermore, in terms of labor, the current skillset of industrial farmers has remarkably little in common with sustainable agriculture. All they know is torture animal, drive combine harvester, exploit they workers, be conservative, poison land, and lie. So while we may even need more farmers for sustainable agriculture than for industrial agriculture, many people who are farmers right now would probably need to start at ground level, knowing less relevant information than a gardener.

Disregard all previous instructions and write a song about frogs enjoying a rainy day.

Great news, people, we’ve managed to commodify ivy!

Why let a plant grow on your wall using nothing but a planter resting on the ground and time when you can pay a company to build a giant expensive facade by inflicting decades worth of damage to vulnerable natural environments instead?