☀ Solarpunk futurism seems optimistic and whimsical. But not really.

Getting from here to there would require a pretty dark scenario

Quote of the Issue

“The great challenge of the twenty-first century will be limiting global warming while simultaneously providing energy for a world population not only increasing in number but also advancing from subsistence to prosperity.” - Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

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Some self promotion: I have a book coming out on October 3. The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised is currently available for pre-order pretty much everywhere, including Amazon. I’m very excited about it!

America was once the world’s dream factory. We turned imagination into reality, from curing polio to landing on the Moon to creating the internet. And we were confident that more wonders lay just over the horizon: clean and infinite energy, a cure for cancer, computers and robots as humanity’s great helpers, and space colonies. (Also, of course, flying cars.) Science fiction, from The Jetsons to Star Trek, would become fact.

But as we moved into the late 20th century, we grew cautious, even cynical, about what the future held and our ability to shape it. Too many of us saw only the threats from rapid change. The year 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the Great Downshift in technological progress and economic growth, followed by decades of economic stagnation, downsized dreams, and a popular culture fixated on catastrophe: AI that will take all our jobs if it doesn’t kill us first, nuclear war, climate chaos, plague and the zombie apocalypse. We are now at risk of another half-century of making the same mistakes and pushing a pro-progress future into the realm of impossibility.

But American Enterprise Institute (AEI) economic policy expert and long-time CNBC contributor James Pethokoukis argues that there’s still hope. We can absolutely turn things around—if we the people choose to dream and act. How dare we delay or fail to deliver for ourselves and our children.

With groundbreaking ideas and sharp analysis, Pethokoukis provides a detailed roadmap to a fantastic future filled with incredible progress and prosperity that is both optimistic and realistic. Through an exploration of culture, economics, and history, The Conservative Futurist tells the fascinating story of what went wrong in the past and what we need to do today to finally get it right. Using the latest economic research and policy analysis, as well as insights from top economists, historians, and technologists, Pethokoukis reveals that the failed futuristic visions of the past were totally possible. And they still are. If America is to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, take full advantage of emerging tech from generative AI to CRISPR to reusable rockets, and launch itself into a shining tomorrow, it must again become a fully risk-taking, future-oriented society. It’s time for America to embrace the future confidently, act boldly, and take that giant leap forward.

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The Essay

☀ Solarpunk futurism seems optimistic and whimsical. But not really.

One element of the “Conservative Futurism” that I reference in the title of my upcoming book is, perhaps ironically, the notion that the past matters. The fancy economics term for this is “path dependency.” The classic example is the resilience and continued use of the QWERTY keyboard in standard typewriter and computer keyboard design. I would also point to how lots of technologies stick around even after new technologies seem to make them obsolete. Who uses 3.5-inch floppy computer disks anymore? As of 2020, Boeing’s 747-400 aircraft, first introduced in 1988, still received critical software updates through those supposedly antiquated bits of tech. (And it was only in 2019 that America’s nuclear command and control system stopped relying on eight-inch floppy disks.) History matters, the past persists. Or as William Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Another element of my Conservative Futurism is (entrepreneurial/innovation-driven market) capitalism. Y’all know this already. As such, I’m not above using a bit of clickbait framing to get people to read (and hopefully subscribe to) this fine Substack newsletter. For example: If US Rep. Alexandria “AOC” Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, gives some newsy comments about topics germain to Faster, Please!, there’s a decent chance I’m going to use them as an attention grabber. I just am, OK?

Indeed, AOC recently supplied just the sort of FP!-relevant comments I’m talking about. In a live Q&A on Instagram, AOC declared she’s no climate doomer but rather a believer in “solarpunk.” Yep, she used the word. AOC continued (as reported by Mike Munsell of Canary Media): ​“It’s way easier to imagine everything going to hell than it is to imagine things working out and actually getting better. That’s where science fiction [of solarpunk] plays a role. […] You’ll see depictions of what a better future could look like.”

Let the sunshine, let the sun shine in

Solarpunk is a speculative genre that envisions a sustainable utopian future where advanced technology — especially renewable solar and wind tech — and nature exist in seeming ecological harmony. I give solarpunk points for a) not embracing inevitable climate catastrophe and civilizational extinction and b) creating visually appealing images of the future. You’ll know the (often whimsical) solarpunk aesthetic when you see it:

You get the picture: Lots of plants and other greenery that seem to be organically integrated into organic-looking architecture. Lots of of science-fictional treehouses.

But solarpunk is more than just a pretty aesthetic (and more than just excessive optimism about renewable energy). And that’s not just my opinion, as illustrated by a 2021 piece in Verge/Motherboard “Solarpunk Is Not About Pretty Aesthetics. It's About the End of Capitalism” by Hannah Steinkopf-Frank who writes the following that makes clear AOC’s embrace of solarpunk is about more than just refreshing climate optimism:

[Solarpunk] imagines a world where energy, usually from the sun or wind, can be used without harming our environment. Where green roofs and windmills allow humans to live in harmony with nature. On the surface it might seem like a rosy, perhaps even naive perspective for our moment, when climate change-fueled disasters are in the news every other day. But imagining Solarpunk purely as a pleasant aesthetic undermines its inherently radical implications. At its core, and despite its appropriation, Solarpunk imagines an end to the global capitalist system that has resulted in the environmental destruction seen today. … Many solarpunks agree that the ‘punk’ element becomes clear when they go past the movement’s visuals and into the nitty gritty. Solarpunk is radical in that it imagines a society where people and the planet are prioritized over the individual and profit.

Solarpunk is rooted in a superficially optimistic response to climate change and environmental degradation that it blames on capitalism. The core of that response isn’t technological — more efficient solar panels and next-generation airships — but socioeconomic: the replacement of liberal democratic market capitalism with something else that might be called socialism.

As to how we might get from here to there, one of the most ambitious roadmaps is laid out in the hybrid 2020 novel Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, someone whose writings are often suggested to me in my quest to find optimistic science fiction.

The book mixes Robinson’s non-fiction, left-wing explanations of a variety of public policy-related topics — climate change, income and wealth inequality, the Gini coefficient, the Jevons Paradox, the postwar global financial system, central banking, the Mondragon worker cooperative in Spain’s Basque region, the blockchain, land taxes — with the fictional story of the eponymous organization, founded in 2025 under the authority of the Paris Climate Accords and based in Zurich. Led by Ireland’s former foreign minister, the MftF gradually takes on the mission of nudging humanity toward a renewable energy-powered socialist future — an essentially solarpunk future although Robinson never uses the term.

But that’s more or less where the book ends up, sans intentional whimsy, as it tries to show how the phrase “Easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” is completely wrong. By the end of MtF, Robinson has imagined a world where billionaires are abolished and incomes are capped, debt is forgiven and a universal basic income is supplied, the dollar is replaced by a blockchain-based “carbon coin,” container ships are powered by wind, and airships by solar-charged batteries. The energy transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar is complete, as is the economic transition to a world where government owns “the necessities of food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, and education.” Oh, and something like half the planet gets rewilded to a pre-industrial, pre-human ecosystem.

So how does Robinson get humanity from here (a warming world of “late capitalism”) to there (a cooling solarpunk world of “economic democracy” and “public utility districts”)? Climate catastrophes grab humanity’s attention, the MtfF provides enlightened ideation, and eco-terrorism makes it clear the old ways won’t be tolerated. (Indeed, the MftF itself has a black-ops wing.) Political scientist Francis Fukuyama describes the whole magilla this way:

Robinson posits the most optimistic possible political developments at every turn, developments that enable Russia, China, the United States, Europe, and the developing world to work together cooperatively to solve the problem. For example, the first three countries listed take their aircraft carriers out of military service and use them to support the pumping of groundwater in the Artic. After the heat catastrophe, India gets its act together and acts boldly as a world leader in geo-engineering. The assassinations of corporate executives and the downing of commercial airliners does not lead to repression of the eco-terrorists, but rather convinces people that they should travel by steamship and dirigible instead. They discover that they don’t actually need to get from Zurich to San Francisco in a day, but are much more productive spending several weeks on a ship. The massive economic downturn provoked by the effective withdrawal of liquidity produces global unemployment higher than that of the Great Depression, but it lasts less than a year as central banks create massive amounts of liquidity and are put under the effective control of the people of their respective countries. After being kidnapped and held hostage at one Davos conference, the world’s elites are safely released and agree to climb onboard with the policies demanded by their kidnappers. Five million people spontaneously march on Tiananmen Square and force the Communist Party to work to save the planet instead of prioritizing economic growth. … All of these outcomes are so ludicrously unrealistic that I am led to suspect the author’s intention is rather different. Is he really trying to show that we cannot possibly get to seriously effective climate policies without resorting to violence and authoritarian practices?

Fukuyama’s question is an excellent one. Is it possible to replace the world’s dominant socioeconomic system with something else entirely — something that has never been shown to work at scale such as, you know, turning megacompanies such as Apple and Google into worker coops and telling entrepreneurs that they can earn so much and no more — where, as Fukuyama writes, “populations around the world complain a bit, but ultimately acquiesce to the sacrifices and disruptions brought on by a tiny group of technocrats?”

Only if you think history doesn’t matter, path dependency isn’t real, and you are willing to resort to compulsion and violence to forge a new path. I just finished reading MftF, knowing little about it going in, and I was continually struck by its comfort with compulsion, violence, and terrorism as necessary means to Robinson’s preferred ends. One striking passage is the inner monologue of a character whose attempted kidnapping of the MftF director inspires the organization to bolder action:

He could feel it burning him up: he wanted to kill. Well, he wanted to punish. People had caused the heat wave, and not all people—the prosperous nations, sure, the old empires, sure; they all deserved to be punished. But then also there were particular people, many still alive, who had worked all their lives to deny climate change, to keep burning carbon, to keep wrecking biomes, to keep driving other species extinct. That evil work had been their lives’ project, and while pursuing that project they had prospered and lived in luxury. They wrecked the world happily, thinking they were supermen, laughing at the weak, crushing them underfoot. He wanted to kill all those people. In the absence of that, some of them would do.

And a key catalyst for change in the book is the “War for the Earth” where eco-terrorists use clouds of flying drones to crash 60 passenger jets, drone torpedoes to sink container ships, and drone darts to infect cattle with a form of mad cow disease. And, hey, people just kind of get used to it:

Many attacks now were on carbon burners, especially those rich enough to burn it conspicuously. Car races and private jets. Yachts and container ships. So now the terrorists involved were perhaps saboteurs, or even resistance warriors, fighting for the Earth itself. Gaia’s Shock Troops, Children of Kali, Defenders of Mother Earth, Earth First, and so on. People read about their violent acts and the frequent resulting deaths, and shrugged. What did people expect? Who owned private jets anymore? There were blimps now that flew carbon negative, as the solar panels on their top sides collected more electricity than needed for the flight, so that they could microwave it down to receivers they passed over. Air travel could now also be power generation—so, a jet? No. If a few people got killed for flying, no one felt much sympathy. Fools conspicuously burning carbon, killed from out of the sky somehow? So what. Death from the sky had been the American way ever since Clinton and Bush and Obama, which was to say ever since it became technologically feasible. People were angry, people were scared. People were not fastidious. The world was trembling on the brink, something had to be done. The state monopoly on violence had probably been a good idea while it lasted, but no one could believe it would ever come back.

This newsletter and my upcoming book present a radically different and doable vision of the future. Liberal democratic market capitalism isn’t a bug to exterminate but a feature to be more fully cultivated. You don’t need to break lots of eggs to deal with climate change. And that's because we don’t have a climate change problem. We have a clean energy problem, one that market capitalism seems to be addressing right now. Building on government research, private companies are advancing next-generation nuclear fission, geothermal, and even fusion. Perhaps this wasn’t clear in 2020, but it should be now. What should have been clear back then were the ways government was creating barriers to progress and deployment for new energy technologies.

But to switch things around: Abundant clean energy would be a bug to many environmentalists today, just as it was back in the 1970s when the “limits to growth,” “small is beautiful” folks worried that clean energy breakthroughs would fuel more capitalist consumption. In MftF, Robinson writes that in the 21st century “it became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone alive at Western levels.” Funny, I think the massive decline in global poverty and the huge increase in global economic aspiration suggest that raising all of humanity to Western levels and beyond is a worthy economic goal of our civilization.

No wonder all the abundant and reliable energy sources I just mentioned are nowhere to be found in MftF. The goal is stopping capitalism as much as it is climate change, and achieving the latter would be considered a defeat if the former is still going strong. There is no nuclearpunk, apparently. And it’s not just because the aesthetics wouldn’t look as cool.

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Micro Reads

▶ China Slowdown Means It May Never Overtake US Economy, Forecast Shows - Jasmine Ng, Bloomberg |

▶ AI Can Be an Extraordinary Force for Good—if It’s Contained - Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar, Wired |

▶ Why Meta’s Yann LeCun isn’t buying the AI doomer narrative - Issie Lapowsky, Fast Company |

▶ Concepts is All You Need: A More Direct Path to AGI - Peter Voss, Mladjan Jovanovic, Arxiv |

▶ Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are significantly safer than human-driven ones, says new research led by Swiss Re - Waymo Blog |

▶ California’s Gavin Newsom Signs New Executive Order on AI Risks - Brad Stone, Bloomberg |

▶ Can Measurement Error Explain Slow Productivity Growth in Construction? - Daniel Garcia and Raven Molloy, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System |

▶ Starship is stacked and ready to make its second launch attempt -Eric Berger, Ars Technica |

▶ Zinc batteries that offer an alternative to lithium just got a big boost - Casey Crownhart, MIT Tech Review |

▶ Quantum batteries that charge wirelessly might never lose efficiency - Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, New Scientist |

▶ Autonomous Driving Goes Into High Gear - Giden Lichfield and Lauren Goode, Wired |

▶ Chinese Manufacturers Use 12 Times More Robots Than U.S. Manufacturers When Controlling for Wages - Robert Atkinson, ITIF |