Solarpunk

The article discusses the links between traditional sacred practices and care for the environment and the world, and then asks about modern secular societies:

Where does this leave secular societies in which technological or policy-focused solutions to environmental problems are not working, but where identification with the sacred has waned over time? Can something as deeply personal and experiential as the sacred be meaningfully shaped by design? Could mundane, often thankless tasks — cycling, tree-planting, recycling — be reframed not as chores, but as rituals of care and connection that inspire deeper commitment to environmental stewardship?

And continues, pointing out sacred spaces don't require religious belief:

The sacred need not be confined to formal religion. While the Grand Bassin’s significance is rooted in Hindu mythology and practice, the orientation it reflects — a sense of reverence, moral weight and emotional resonance — can arise in many forms. Sacredness emerges wherever people set something apart as meaningful beyond its utility: a forest grove, a war memorial, a national flag, a moment of collective silence. What matters is not the doctrine behind it but the way it shapes how people think, feel and act.

Of course, one might ask whether it’s even possible to promote rituals of care in the absence of care itself. Wouldn’t such efforts ring hollow or fail to resonate with those who feel disconnected from the natural world in the first place? But this is precisely where sacralization matters most. Sacredness does not only emerge from what people already revere — it actively helps generate that reverence. Rituals can bring people into a different frame of mind, one in which meaning accumulates through repetition, symbols take on weight and ordinary acts begin to feel purposeful. If environmental stewardship is to take root, it may not be enough to wait for people to care. Sometimes the path to care begins with practice.

Ritual helps people to care. Ritual, to put it another way, helps create empathy. And the natural world could definitely use some care and empathy these days.

Up Top Acres Is building Farms Above Our Heads

During DC Climate Week, we literally toured one of the freshest rooftops in the city. Up Top Acres is a national leader in rooftop farming and urban agriculture, managing over 40 farms and gardens across the East Coast.

We visited their rooftop location just blocks from the Capitol, where they’re harvesting lettuce, basil, tomatoes, strawberries, kale, herbs, and new ways of thinking about what a building can be. These rooftop farms help reduce stormwater runoff, cool buildings, and bring people together.

Might not fit perfectly with the theme here, but thought people might be interested anyway.

I'd recommend it to anyone who owns their house, has a reasonably accommodating roof (particularly south facing), and plans to be in their house for the next 10 years.

With the 30% US federal tax credit, I expect to make back the investment in roughly 13 years. I'm not counting either the rising price of electricity or the opportunity cost of just putting that money in an index fund.

After 13 years, everything should be profit after that. But it's not just for the financial reasons.

It's a 13.7 kw system. Peak I've seen it produce so far is around 12.3, with a little less than half the panels facing north. I'm not sure if or when I should expect peak production if not around noon on the summer solstice.

I do recommend having some kind of battery. I went with a Tesla Powerwall 3, partly because I spent so much time haggling and negotiating with my solar installer that I didn't want to make any further changes. Partly because I expect Tesla to be a name brand that will be around in ten years. Enphase is much better, but it's also much more expensive. There are probably better options.

I have the Tesla PW3 providing stats through the Fleet API to Home Assistant, which is where these graphics are from. One of the biggest reasons I'd recommend against Tesla is that you're dependent on your stats to pass through their cloud API and back to you. If your internet goes down, you lose stats. If Tesla gets annoyed with you, or just decides to stop providing the service, you lose stats. If the PW3 still had a local API like the PW2 did, I'd feel much more comfortable with it. I don't have a home solar installation so that I can be dependent on some company. For anything, if I can help it.

Theoretically, when the power goes out, the PW3 is supposed to switch over in a number of milliseconds low enough to keep all the computers and electronics running. It's supposed to be an advantage over a generator, which takes a few seconds. The one grid power outage we've experienced so far did have a noticeable blinking of lights and a server restart.

The battery allows us to continue to have power when the grid power is out, completely disconnected from the grid. At least in my area, if you don't have a battery*, your solar goes out when the grid goes down. They don't want your power feeding back into the grid while they're working on what should be dead lines. (You can get the cutoff system installed without a battery, but it's a significant chunk of a battery price, and you might as well just get a battery.)

During the spring, the battery was often lasting through the night. For awhile we tried to be as self-sufficient as we could. My utility company paid us about 10 cents per kWh (in credits only), and charged us about 23 cents per kWh. So early I was trying to minimize use of the grid as much as possible, with automations to use the battery at the early part of the evening and during the morning. Then I realized that, yeah, there's a difference, but it only settles up once a month. So the ratio is 1:1 until that one day when it settles. Now I'm much less concerned about being self sufficient, though the couple weeks of experimenting with it was fun.

I should have all the hardware, with the Tesla Universal Wall Charger to allow me to use a vehicle as a whole home battery. I just got an Ioniq 6, which I've really enjoyed, and has some Vehicle to Load capability. But even though all the hardware is probably there, the software certainly won't allow anything but a Cybertruck to do the reverse charging through the wall charger. For reference, the PW3 holds 13.5kWh of energy. The car holds 77kWh. So getting that to work someday would basically expand our battery capacity by 6x, and certainly get us through any night where we're not using AC, likely getting us through multiple cloudy days without AC. (AC uses about 3 kWh per hour, otherwise known as 3 kw.)

Uh, I've had this post open way too long, so I'll just post. I've learned quite a bit over the past year. If anyone's thinking about it or wants to fire off some questions, I'm happy to answer what I can.

Thermal insulation is a cornerstone of policies aimed at reducing the high energy consumption for heating and cooling buildings. 1 In many industrialized countries, building energy regulations require new and existing buildings to have insulated walls, floors, and roofs, as well as double- or triple-glazed windows. In cold weather, insulation slows down the heat loss from the interior to the exterior, reducing the energy use of the heating system. In hot weather, insulation delays the transfer of heat from the outside to the inside, thereby reducing the energy consumption of the air conditioning system.

Modern insulation methods involve the permanent addition of non-structural materials with high thermal resistance, such as fiberglass, cellulose, or mineral wool, to the building surfaces. Viewed in a historical context, this approach is unusual and stems from a shift in architectural style. 2 Preindustrial buildings often didn’t require extra insulation because they had a significant amount of thermal mass, which acts as a buffer to outside temperature fluctuations. Additionally, the building materials themselves could have high thermal resistance.

A return to vernacular buildings, which maintain interiors at a comfortable temperature through architectural design rather than energy-intensive technical installations, could significantly reduce energy consumption for heating and cooling. However, it’s not a short-term solution: it would require a large amount of time, money, and energy to replace the existing building stock.

Fortunately, history offers an alternative solution that can be deployed more quickly and with fewer resources: textiles. Before the Industrial Revolution, people added a temporary layer of textile insulation to either the interior or the exterior of a building, depending on the climate and the season. In cold weather, walls, floors, roofs, windows, doors, and furniture were insulated with drapery and carpetry. In hot weather, windows, doors, facades, roofs, courtyards, and streets were shaded by awnings and toldos.

This is an alt account. I doubt I will use it to post again.

A friend of mine leads a startup. They are beginning to draw attention and are soon to go for investment funding. They make something to be used in sports, medicine, and space.

My friend is frustrated with the ecosystem's current obsessions. 'AI B2B SaaS', making 10x returns in 3-5 years. None of it is sustainable. None of it solves real problems in a way that will keep them solved for decades to come. In a way that is truly new, and better than the old ways in consideration of social and ecological impact.

In your opinion, how might my friend best navigate their choices to positively influence the world? What actions would you take, in their shoes?

• Presented by @rolltime@freeradical.zone
• Recorded Fri 12 Jul 2024
• Uploaded Fri 22 Nov 2024
• Slides, references & links: https://rollti.me/hope2024

»For more than a year now, "AI" has been the tech world's most expensive obsession.

The scramble to burn money as fast as possible is both unprecedented and utterly familiar - but not every resource is as endless as venture capital funding. AI technology's energy consumption is beginning to approach that of a small country, and it shows no signs of shrinking.

How can we reconcile our hunger to compute with the need to avert ecological devastation? Is it possible for progress and sustainability to coexist? And how can hackers help computers save themselves?

This talk brings a fresh perspective to discussions on the problems, possibilities, and future of the human relationship to computing.»

Good discussion of two types of social movements: Inclusionary (building a wide coalition by appealing to many different groups) vs exclusionary (building group solidarity through us v them strategies). The challenges to both, and the ways the elite try to capture and appropriate inclusionary social movements to maintain the status quo.

Why is this "solarpunk"? Because solarpunk is a social movement, not just an aesthetic. If you want to make positive change (environmental or otherwise) you need collective action, and understanding the challenges to collective action helps you decide what orgs are worth committing to and see when those orgs have been appropriated.

The other articles in the series are “Widening the We” and “The Growth of Malignant and Exclusionary Social Movements” - linked at the bottom and also worth reading.

I found the boat + bikes solution pretty cool. Boats typically have much lower emission per kg.km of transported goods.

The AI focus is a bit odd, but ok 🤷

Given fascist, authoritarian takeovers in the US and heightened action against the people by the fascist-in-chief, I offer ways to resist. This is an update of what I sent in a recent newsletter.

Do you, like me, have strong feelings about the technofascist coup that’s in progress? (While this is largely a US-centric post, fascists are rising globally, so this can be broadly relevant.)

My anger competes with grief over what and who we continue to lose. Immigrants to the US and trans people are in the crosshairs. As are forests and natural areas. And anyone who speaks Truth to power.

Back in April, Daniel Hunter offered a good analysis and strategies for action. The analysis in short: they’d love our street actions to turn violent, a good excuse to declare emergency controls. Don’t take the bait. And watch for fascist instigators.

First of all, I love you, slrpnk admins. You handled it all like champions! Happy to have you back.

Someone said in one one of the matrix chats during the outage that the fact that this instance is selfhosted and went down is like true experience of a solarpunk world; there won't always be power and that's okay!

Just wanted to write it down in a post since that message was so spot on.

The rise of doomers, preppers, and antinatalists on the Left reveals something deeper than the hollow posture of rebellion: a collapse of belief in tomorrow. A Left that chants “No future” isn’t just demoralized — it’s unserious, misanthropic, and bound to lose.

Tldr: How do you inspire people to work for a better tomorrow if you don't believe tomorrow can be better? Trump and the American right have a vision of a future America that they claim will be great and glorious. The American left - and the global left - have lost sight of the future entirely. Instead of promising a bright future, they merely seek to endure the crises of the present - and some on the left have given up even that.

The article speaks to the desperate need for hope - for a clear, compelling, leftist vision of the future to serve as a guiding light for left-wing activists and politicians.

And hey, what political slash environmental slash aesthetic movement focused on a hopeful future just got its instance back up?

(Welcome back, everybody!)

Tldr: go forth, imagine shit! Lest the doomerism fungus consume us!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30711375

People just need to get used to paying for the web. Monthly subscriptions for Spotify or Netflix are widely accepted, so a fee to fund the rest of the net doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility. It could even be made part of the ISP fee (perhaps this could be forced on all ISPs by govts under the guise of 'supporting local websites').

The technical solutions already seem to exist, but have been shut down 1) due to lack of use and 2) by the entrenched business model (in the case of Scroll). Therefore, the challenge currently lies in bringing the masses over to this business model (IMO easier than it may seem, as the masses never consciously opted for their current method of paying anyway and hence feel no attachment to it), and stopping regulatory capture by the entrenched business model (an even deeper root problem whose solution would solve many issues beside this one).

So assume that everybody switched to this model of funding overnight. I don't think it would stop surveillance capitalism entirely since the surveillance technologies that the current business model lead to being developed (AI, cookies, etc) have since been adapted for use in other settings (facial recognition CCTV etc.) whose investment sources are now entirely separate from the web’s. What's more, websites would probably keep spying on paying users anyway, simply because they already have the technology to do so, and it would make them extra money on top of their allocated subscription money. Despite this, I still think it's a change worth working towards.

Archived link of the article

why i left the left the left the left

I want only portable devices like solar, and hand-crank chargers. I want to be able to boil water, charge my Laptop and phone, run my induction stove for a few minutes thrice a day, want it rugerdized at some point, and want to depend on my equipment for day to day life as preparation for having no support.

How am I doing so far? Did I waste money?