Discussion
Do that work, and maybe you'll be able to keep the lights on in the coming American Dark Ages. Practically speaking, it's unlikely that the rest of the world is going to accept 250 million American refugees fleeing the 50 million Trump diehards who've looted the country and torched its future.
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@pluralistic imagine if all that #AI hype money was invested into #solar 🤯
@patrickleavy @pluralistic
I mean, this isn't realistic.
The cost of fully renovating the entire power grid to solar is far less than the money spent on AI, so we'd need to find something else to spend it on. Housing every person in the US?
No, that's not very expensive either, on that scale. Hmm. Might have to figure something else here ..
@patrickleavy @pluralistic There isn’t really a much better example of how maladaptive capitalism is or at least has become.
@donaldball @patrickleavy @pluralistic
Rather than "maladaptive capitalism", I think solar is a great example of how complex it is to get the right balance between public goods and private markets.
"Imagine if these AI investments had instead been put into solar"... People tried to do this. Power companies could not and still can't build the required infrastructure fast enough. And before we blame that on capitalism, the not-for-profit Canadian Crown corporations that run power in several provinces also haven't been able to do this.
The US Interconnection Queue is twice its installed capacity. Billions of dollars have been put into power plants that are just sitting there waiting for local power companies to connect them. But nobody's going to put another $100 billion into building capacity while you're still waiting for the first hundred billion to come online.
Scratching the surface here, but the lack of solar has little to do with capitalism.
@pluralistic
Yes, but celebrating our wins isn't the secret sauce either.
One the characteristics of the fascists is their nonstop narrative of their victimhood, and it doesn't keep them from winning elections.
*Here Comes the Sun* is an extraordinary, beautifully told, exhaustively researched and argued book about the remarkable progress of solar energy over the past five or so years. McKibben is speaking as much to his fellow activists as he is to the people on the sidelines, trying to get them to understand the quiet, profound changes to solar, to "update their priors" about whether a solar transition is possible, and what impediments stand between us and decarbonization.
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For example, you may have read that the material bill for solar is simply too large to pay; that there isn't enough copper, enough conflict minerals, enough lithium for the panels, wires and batteries we'll need for a solar transition:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility
This is just not true, for several reasons.
First, the material bill for solarization is in freefall, with no end in sight. The amount of *stuff* we need to make panels, transmission lines and batteries keeps declining.
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Further: the efficiency gains of "clean" technology are *astounding* - meaning that, for example, it not only takes a lot less material to make a solar panel, the panel we make out of so much less stuff generates a *lot* more power. More: we keep finding ways to substitute more abundant materials for materials that are harder to find or refine (for example, swapping out lithium in batteries and replacing it with sodium, one of the most abundant minerals on Earth).
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Finally: we keep finding new sources of the materials that we can't readily substitute for. It turns out that when there's a *lot* more demand for a given mineral, people who've previously disregarded potential sources of that material suddenly pipe up with information about where (a lot) more of it can be found.
None of that is to say that extracting and refining these materials is without cost or risk.
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The realpolitik of extraction means that mining and refining companies will preferentially target poor and indigenous communities for their mines and factories. That's totally true and completely unacceptable, and it means that our task is to demand climate justice (letting those communities decide for themselves whether and how they will be a part of this).
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When will we start moving dumps/landfills?
That's important work, and it's very different from endlessly parroting 15-year old back-of-the-envelope calculations about the material bill for solarization.
The material story is a really cool and exciting one. There is *so much* solar energy out there for the taking. A lot of the time, when we characterize high-tech products as "non-recyclable," what we mean is "it would take too much energy to recycle this device."
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