Frankly, I think it would be foolish to expect any fossil fuel reserves to stay in the ground. Corporations are immortal, corporations own lots of drilling tools, and as long as there is profit to be made in mining and burning fossil fuels, corporations will do it, the Earth be damned.
A lot of solarpunk visions and ideas basically take our current culture and add more solar panels and respect for life. Which isn't bad, I appreciate it. But the world we can expect is far different from today:
- temperatures will be 14 to 20 above the current average
- Sea levels are hundreds of feet higher
- almost every one of today's major cities is underwater
- Greenland and Antarctica are ice-free and temperate
- all land masses with currently tropical climates are lifeless deserts, literally too hot for photosynthesis much of the year
So - presuming we don't trigger a runaway greenhouse effect and turn into a second Venus - what do you think the world will look like a few hundred years from now after everything's been burned? What kind of societies would form in the wake of such utter disaster?
With 10 to 20 billion climate refugees fleeing every coast and every tropical landmass on Earth, do you think a global war for land is inevitable?
How would you imagine keeping the flame of hope alive through such a war?
Or how would you change society so that the worst refugee crisis in human history - now inevitable - brings people together instead of tearing them apart?
Is the long term solarpunk strategy to build a space colony and repopulate the Earth after it burns to ash?
What does a sustainable society look like when all the fossil fuels have been burned and all the damage had been done? And how do we get there?
We probably should decide how much conflict we want to imagine happening here lol.
Wars from the 1700s-1800s (a couple hundred years ago from today) just aren't thought about much during my regular daily life, but none of those were global catastrophes right.
So if we can manage to avoid major nuclear destruction, then it could be pretty tame after 300 years!
Assuming we don't all destroy each other, then we mostly keep our knowledge base, so we don't need to restart from a basic agrarian culture lol. Someone saved wikipedia right??
There will still be an unbelievable amount of losses from starvation alone, so we're definitely restarting the population from small communities.
But 300 years of repopulation, and 300 years battery research might actually get us to something approaching the early 1900s again! (Around the 1930s is when about half of American households had electricity.) Cities are possible, we start getting back into shipping between countries or continents. If we add internet into this mix, we get even further!
Honestly, if we're talking about hundreds of years (and humans don't self-destruct) then I actually think we don't get set back too far on the grand scheme of things lol.