This map was made by French so it may have a bias there. But I know there is a very active lowtech community here in France. As a techno-utopian I spent a long time ignoring them until someone told me that the raspberry pi is lowtech and that I am doing lowtech robotics (wth?) . Here it basically seems to be a synonym for open hardware, with an emphasis on community rather than projects. It is actually pretty chill.

My feeling is that it is a label for anarcho-communists who got tired of explaining their relationships (or lack thereof) with marxist communism. Also used by “communistes libertaires” to emphasize they reject the authoritarian regimes that called themselves communist.

Ain’t humans cute by projecting their morality on everything they lay their eyes on?

Show me the calculation then. To me it is clear that we are heading towards 100% renewables now that batteries have reached prices that makes intermittence a solvable problem.

To me the switch to renewable, on the contrary, will remove many scarcity constraints from energy production. We will have peak production times where energy will have a negative cost. This will radically change the way we think about energy consumption.

There’s no way you can use the same amount of energy with solar and wind as you can with fossil fuels and nuclear.

Renewables keep reaching “impossible” milestones. Recently in many places, including places in the US, renewables surpass coal so to create an “impossible” milestone you need to separate wind and solar from other renewables and lump together fossils and nuclear (which is not a problematic source for the climate)

I mean, can you imagine telling people 15 years ago that even Texas, despite its toxic mentality of coupling fossil fuels and masculinity would produce more wind energy than coal energy by 2024? The trend is clear, the impossible thresholds are met one after the other and without electricity production dropping.

In the context of meeting the targets, I see little way to invest time in a more efficient way than switching to renewables. Changing mentality takes a magnitude more time and effort. I still think it is a worthwhile endeavor, but if we wait for that transition we will have destroyed most of the earth by then.

Space may not be completely renewable, some is lost

??? Square meters are square meters.

or the energy to remediate the space for use could be higher than the energy/utility we could gain from it.

In what scenario do you see the energy to recover a solar power plant’s space being higher than the energy gained from it?

I guess by “time” you mean “labor”. This is the first time I see this mentioned as a non-renewable resource.

How is “space” not renewable/reusable? You can destroy solar panels and put something else on its place.

All the materials used are abundant and in enough availability to multiply several times our current capacities, and as you point out, may even become reusable/recyclable at one point if it ever become economically profitable to do so. Or even before if we so desire.

Not when solar is generated. Creating and maintaining infrastructure, and using space for infrastructure.

So, what do you think gets exhausted when we are doing this?

What do you think gets exhausted when we generate solar energy?

The very point of renewables is to not consume resources to generate energy, but merely when installing capacities.

And our current problem is not of unmet needs, it is of climate damage done by fossil fuels. Climate-wise, the planet would be better off if humans used 10x more energy in a sustainable way rather than using half as much without changing their energy mix.

Reading the end of the manga Nausicaa told me everything about the actual reactionary-environmentalism of Miyazaki.

Renewable and abundant is what we are going full speed towards. No need to mention infinity but we will clearly end up with more renewable energy production than fossil energy we are using now. Renewables are going to actually end scarcity of energy.

There’s a difference between “renewable and abundant” and “infinite”.

The amount of energy required to heat bath water is not infinite.

More solar panels aren’t going to change that.

Well yes it will. That’s the whole point. To get out of fossil fuels. You get out of it by replacing things that require fossil fuels by renewable ones. You don’t get out of it by merely using less of it.

That’s the mentality I dont get.

Solarpunk is not about switching to a scrappy medieval lifestyle, it is about building a sustainable comfortable future.

Why do so many people always assume that energy uses are necessarily unsustainable or scarce? It is the first part of “SOLARpunk”. You can have renewable and abundant energy.

Yes, except this is of all lemmy users, not just slrpnk.net, which is just one of the instances measured.

Yes, but I find it interesting to see that despite having a theme, slrpnk.net is as spread as generic instances and less clustered as, e.g. programming instances, lgbt, anime or nsfw ones.

I also find it interesting to see which communities bridge users from several instances: /c/ubuntu is the link between the french-speaking world and programming? /c/dragonball is the most mainstream anime community. I also find it interesting that the tankies communities, despite a few bridges, look extremely isolated.

That’s really interesting! It shows which communities share users. I am part of jlai.lu, a french-speaking community that is relatively isolated by also slrpnk.net that seems very spread out!

Would it make sense to compute the standard deviation of each instance’s communities? It would give an idea of which are islands and which are more extended. Not sure if it makes sense to compute it more on 2 dimensions or on the original 21934 though.

Sorry I don’t have it handy, just read it, probably on /r/askscience a while ago. A quick search indicate that maybe this is not as true as I thought. That seems to be the case mostly for coal and for some forms of oil, but not all of it.

Not really IIRC. Modern bacteria are more efficient at breaking down organic materials and forests buried today won’t make oil anymore.

It is renewable in the sense that given infinite time, you can use it to grow infinite energy (for the nitpickers: assuming an eternal sun).

It is not infinite though and the amount of power you can extract from it is limited but that’s true for every renewable sources: you have a limited amount of places where you can put dams, where you can put windmills or even solar panels.

What is important is that it is not power generation that consumes a scarce good (as fossil power does) but that it is increases in power generation that consumes it, in a reversible way.

It was a Mexican who taught me to be careful with the word “American”

Most Europeans will accept that label, most Asians too. Countries like Russia or Turkey who are in-between are exceptions.

Not common but I hope it will become.

“Americans” can mean Canadians, Mexicans, Peruvians, etc. “USian” means citizen of the US.