To Save The Earth, Are YOU a Solartopian?
In the global campaign to save the Earth, a shared vision is vital.
“Solartopia” foresees a democratic, green-powered 21st Century civilization. Our economic and ecological survival depend on it.
Technologically, the vision rests on four simple pillars:
1. Total renunciation of all fossil and nuclear fuels. In a sustainable, survivable future, they are a 20th Century pox, neither green nor clean.
2. All-out conversion to renewable energy, led by the “Solartopian Trinity” of wind, solar and bio-fuels. Mother Earth gives us the natural power we need.
3. Complete commitment to maximum efficiency, including revived and solarized mass transit and passenger rail systems. Our automotive “love affair” is a hoax.
4. Zero tolerance for production of anything that cannot be re-used or recycled, including chemical-based food. Solartopia is an organic, post-pollution world.
Along with wind, solar and bio-fuels, Solartopian energy comes from the waves, currents, rivers and tides; from the geothermal heat beneath the earth’s crust; from the interplay of solar-heated water at the oceans’ surface and the frigid deep.
Hydrogen and electricity are the chief power carriers, but they are always produced by clean Solartopian means.
The efficiency revolution drives Solartopian energy consumption levels ever downward. Compact fluorescent bulbs are transcended by Light Emitting Diodes. An evolving armada of efficiency devices, many invented in backyards and garages, spreads at warp-speed through a hyper-linked global community.
Advanced methods of organic food production get us past the “silent spring” of chemical pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and genetically modified crops.
The ever-evolving Internet fuels a geek-driven torrent of Solartopian innovation—and the raging e-network of green grassroots democracy (http://solartopia.org/Links.php).
In our 21st Century global economy, renewable technologies are already on the whole more profitable than the obsolete King CONG “alternatives” of coal, oil, nukes and gas.
But from bio-fuels to wind, from hyper-efficiency to organic farming, no green technology is without costs and limitations. All demand vigilance, limitation, regulation and innovation to stay clean, current and useful.
When done right, the Solartopian revolution spawns the decentralized wealth, full employment, and community-based economic power of a prosperous, socially democratized society.
Homes, buildings, communities and farms control their own energy. Power and prosperity are widespread, not concentrated in the hands of King CONG and its corporate minions.
Indeed, Solartopia can’t happen without transcending some primary barriers:
5. Corporations can no longer enjoy human rights without human responsibilities. Revised corporate charters must break the grip these giant economic organizations have held on our political, economic and ecological systems.
6. Population is the province of women, who in Solartopia are empowered, educated and equally paid. In synch with Mother Earth, they bring us the number of children She wishes to accommodate.
7. Where everyone has a right to the basic necessities of life, including free education, nobody starves. The Solartopian rich may be plentiful, but no civilization thrives unless all have access to sustenance and dignity.
8. Big Money is barred from the campaign process. Free and fair elections and referenda power non-violent community-based evolution. The universal right to ballots on recycled paper means accurate vote counts and recounts for all.
Solartopia demands that business serve society and the planet, rather than vice versa. Capitalism may be one thing, but Enron cannibalism is quite another. Balancing competition and the profit motive with human and ecological need, the Solartopian vision demands accountability, efficiency, service and justice.
The switch to renewables defunds global terrorism. Atomic reactors are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction. Shutting them ends the fear of apocalyptic disaster by both terror and error. Transcending coal and cars cures much of global warming.
But everywhere we turn, the King CONG corporations build barriers. They use government subsidies and media disinformation to prolong their failed investments in obsolete technologies and the fossil/nuke fuels that run them.
Inseparable from those fuels are authoritarian power structures that produce wars for oil, financial imbalance and social chaos, leading to biological extinction.
By contrast, Solartopia is the diverse, democratic, organic place we go to survive and thrive.
Born of hyper-linked grassroots non-violence, empowered by post-pollution prosperity in synch with Mother Earth and all her children, Solartopia is the 21st Century vision of our necessary future.
Are YOU a Solartopian?
Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.
It may well be that the environmental/energy policy is limited to be a substructure of the political superstructure. May well require a Green Party take-over of D.C. in order to pull this off. Big Oil, Big Nukes, Big Ag, Big Money etc. will have nothing to do with responsibility if it sees short-term profit loss. Or the end of massive and juicy government subsidy.
I’d only make a couple quibbles above:
1) Don’t forget geothermal. And redesigning homes in general. Here in Minnesota it’s cold a large portion of the year. I could well imagine a vent system or kitchen redesign that would mitigate the need to run a refrigerator for 5 months out of the year or so.
2) Biofuels require monolithic crops and probably are a boon to Big Ag, the GMO crowd, etc. They also require intensive refining and still rely on the carbon molecule. If we’re going to continue with the internal combustion engine, the answer may be hydrogen power. Some have argued that we’re already on the hydrogen economy. That the transition from wood->coal->gas->??? for locomotion/power has been about lowering the relative carbon/hydrogen molecular ratio.
3) The love affair with the car shouldn’t be poo-poo’d. While mass-transit is wonderful, it’s been nothing short of a corrupted private boondoggle across many US metro areas over the past 50-75 years. The alternative is a state-run/socialistic system.
But there’s something to be said for the idea of privately owned, cleaning burning hydrogen/electric hybrid cars. Ideally, I’d like to have my own hydrogen power plant in my yard, somehow capable of separating H2 O from rainwater in an efficient manner, and pull myself off the energy grid entirely.
paul bramscher. agreed. i don’t see wind or solar as viable because it will not be put into the hands of the ‘people’. it will be controled by large corporations. and what kind of results will come from controling waves, currents, rivers and tides which i see as the distruption of natural cycles in nature. yes..i seem to have a dark view. but, i believe what wasserman said is possible.
Don’t forget INDUSTRIAL HEMP. It’s NOT marijuana as there’s no THC in it and it requires ZERO petroleum when it comes to producing biodiesel from it no matter what lies get fed to you that hemp requires petroleum. I guess that’s why BIG OIL and their vested interests teamed up to ban it and RIG the market calling it “free”.
I am afraid that Solartopia is a Utopian dream. We are too firmly entrenched in our self-gratification ways to embrace a philosophy which requires us to share the toys on the common playground. Our current system requires the inequal distribution of wealth and the copious consumption of finite resources. Just as cancer cannot suddenly decide it will become benevolent, we cannot switch tracks overnight. It’s a lovely dream, but unrealistic. Anything which requires collective action is, in this society, and in my humble opinion, doomed to failure.
Solar and wind don’t have to be corporate-run. Solar and wind powered fuel cells could be locally owned and operated to produce enough power for a neighborhood or a small town.
Some fuel cells have even been made small enough to power a cell phone!
If you research how plants do photosythesis, it’s similar to how fuel cells collect electrons. If mother nature knows best, then we should follow her directives.
common: The free and open source software movements.
On the contrary, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that collective action is actually the norm, people ordinarily come together and build projects, help one another, etc. It is our bizarre economy that forcibly splits people apart, each waging a 30-year economic battle with the banks to pay off a mortgage, etc. We’ve been divided and conquered, and this takes an awful lot of national/political/propagandistic effort to sustain. But one thing’s for sure: it’s not natural.
“And then a miracle happens…”
8. Big Money is barred from the campaign process. Free and fair elections and referenda power non-violent community-based evolution. The universal right to ballots on recycled paper means accurate vote counts and recounts for all.
commonman03: “anything that requires collective action is doomed to failure.”
Traffic laws require collective behavior and they work fairly well in many parts of the country. Maybe I don’t understand what you’re saying.
Why would any initiative require absolute collective action in the first place?
Pass a law requiring people to recycle and be done with it. Fines for refusing to recycle, and increased tax incentives for cooperating with environmentally sound technologies.
If we don’t do it, we will all lose in the end.
“it’s been nothing short of a corrupted private boondoggle across many US metro areas over the past 50-75 years. The alternative is a state-run/socialistic system.”
Can you clarify what you mean here?
As someone who lived in the city and relied on public transportation, I found it to be no more a “boondoggle” than water, sewer, paved streets or electricity.
If there are any boondoggles it is the whole automotive-highway-suburban-industrial complex. The first thing that has to go is suburbia, it is utterly unsustainable and cannot be made sustainable.
The convienience of the car is illusory, once you’ve lived in a community where a car isn’t required, you will never want to live any other way again.
Sounds like something the Green party could adopt.
Something that could only come about with an alternative to MSM on our public airwaves.
I agree with everything except the inclusion of biofuels. A social democratic green society powered by solar and wind, “fueled” by an organic plant-based diet which uses only public transportation, feet, and bicycles is possible and doable.
http://www.dreamingearth.net
Does anyone have any good numbers for Harvey’s proposals? Anything that I’ve seen or calculated indicates that there are no substitutes for fossil fuels. We have built our industrial society by burning the accumulated solar energy that has been gathered and stored for millions of years in the form of oil, gas and coal — kind of like blowing your pension on a hand of blackjack.
Energy that we can extract from sun, wind, tides, etc is exceedingly diffuse and would require us to drastically change nearly every aspect of our technology in order make massive use of them. You can’t do large scale farming, for instance, without the heavy equipment that replaces hand (historically, slave) labour. And you can’t run machinery like that on anything but highly concentrated fuel. So does the biofuel equation work out, or are we going back to a primarily agricultural society, where everyone grows their own food? Or back to slavery?
Solartopia requires much deeper and radical change than Harvey is proposing. There can be nothing like the current manufacturing, agricultural, or transportation system. Seems like no one has even begun to imagine what will take their place, certainly not what’s being proposed here.
Sorry, but this is Utopian dreaming and bares no relation to reality. There are no magic bullets out there which will lead to the age of Aquarius. Difficult choices need to be made. At the very least, no thought has been given to the hardware required for this solar utopia. Unless you have some kind of dramatic change in living styles and consumption, it’s going to take a lot of hardware to go Solar. The panels, etc, are going to require petroleum products, considerable energy to produce, and will probably give off pollutants in the process. It will also need to be hauled across the country to install, etc, which will also consume resources. This whole thing reminds me of the Fifties notion that nuclear would be so abundant and cheap, they wouldn’t even have to meter it. Anyway, this is social and political commentary, which has it place, but with no understanding whatsoever or thought about the dirty technical details involved in taking us to the golden solar age.
Solartopia = the Green Party
“Or back to slavery?”
Wher did you get this idea that food production in days past relied on slavery? Didn’t Seneca write, around AD 30 that farmers were “blessed to excess” (even without mechanization).
There are self-sufficient farming communities in SE Asia and India, which, if oil dissspeared, very little would change in their lives.
A Utopian dream? That is what one poster call this. I would like to remind everyone that a little over 200 years ago “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was a Utopian dream.
Sign me up, Harvey. It all does begin with a dream! I’m grateful that Harvey can be a dedicated pragmatist when it came to uncovering the idiocyncrasies of the Ohio vote, and a visionary when it comes to helping to set the ideal template for a more evolved global society. Face it folks, the clock’s running out on the current one… whether that prediction is based on oil, the US debt, the cancer of US politics today, and/or aberrant and growingly unstable climate events. People laughed at the Wright Brothers… “that thing will NEVER fly!” The visionary, by virtue of his vision, sees what others are yet to understand or conceptualize.
Solartopia = just another religion.
Tell me, what do you intent to do with the unbelievers?
I think this could be practical, but I’d like to see more details - what are the first concrete steps?
I also don’t think women should have as many children as they want to. I think they should have one or zero. Except for native ethnic minorities who are dedicated to their culture. If women have more than one child they should lose their rights to state health care etc etc like in China.
I also think the “pursuit of happiness” is bad. People should just live their lives without trying to get anything out of it.
I also think it’s stupid to capitalize “mother” earth. I went to a graduation ceremony and some religious fanatic “invoked” the “spirit of the dove” to stop the war. What a load of hooey.
We should just ditch the government we have now just like Incas and Aztec’s walked away from theirs. Our government now is just a bunch of sick bastards that aren’t helping us at all get ready for the future. They have bet all the marbles on stealing Iraqs oil. That their plan. It was a stupid plan destined to fail from the start. At least they could have set us on a course for a more sustainable economy, but no, the opposite.
We can’t even inspire others to boycott even one corporation in mass, even when their economic terrorism is obvious and consistent. Exxon, for example. $34 billion PROFIT, and still going strong, when it’s obvious they gouge us every summer, holiday, and whenever they just damn well fell like it.
There a reason Solartopia sounds so much like Utopia. Because both are pipe dreams completely detached from reality. SUV sales are UP, get it? What, people STILL don’t realize the planet is melting? STILL? McDonald’s sales still up. STILL? Cigarettes - steady. STILL? After all we know?
Like some comedian said a few years back, the only way to solve our energy and global warming crisis is the lease the Sun to ExxonMobil for 99 years - then we’ll have solar powered everything by Friday.
Are you willing to see poor people starving to death to support converting food production to Bio-fuels?
What about clearing out rain forests?
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/16/1238/
Most of US energy consumption is wasted, either in energy production (it takes 1.25 gallons of gasoline to make another gallon), or energy conversion (central power plants and internal combustion engines both waste 75% to 85% of fuel inputs), or in gluttonous food choices (it takes ten times the energy to produce meat as vegetables). Oh yes and consider that wild carob trees have three times the yield as petro-corn for animal feed, and oil palm has three times the yield as petro-corn for biofuel. Look outside the good old US of A and you’ll find that people everywhere are utilizing sources and methods that are three to twenty times more efficient than those common here. No surprise - we are taught to be gluttons - it’s the “American Way”. And it’s a dead end - so let’s look beyond the petro-corpo -propaganda and follow our own built-in common sense.
PJD: I can only speak about Minnesota’s history of public transportation. The pulling out of the street car lines in the 1950’s was conducted under an intensely corrupt administrator (who served a jail sentence — curiously, only after the damage was done). Isadore Blumenfeld, a Jewish mobster also known as Kid Cann. He was basically under the thumb of the new boondogglers (the auto manufacturers, eager to sell fleets of buses to the cities). Our expensive (and highly limited) light-rail system links, basically, the airport with the Mall of America — and does little or nothing to ease real commuting issues for most taxpayers around the St. Paul/Minneapolis area. We’ve bailed Northwest Airlines out time and again. Insult to injury, they’ve recently given their top managers like a $26 million bonus, while demanding wage concessions from rank-and-file. In a nutshell, the history of public administration over private contracts with regard to transportation at least here in Minnesota, is little more than a corporate give-away program. So there’s merit to the idea of privately-owned electric/hydrogen cars versus the public/private tradition of corruption.
rafael: The nature of engineering/science/IT/invention/progress is a middle-ground somewhere between (easily straw-manned) utopian idealism on the one hand, and little better than corporate apology for the status quo on the other. Dualistic arrangements make no sense in an analog world, reality is somewhere in between. Hence, we can and should do much more to lean on renewables (specifically solar, wind, geothermal), better home and community/urban design, better zoning laws, more affordable housing, and probably electric/hydrogen transportation, more durable goods, less disposable crap, etc.
America has lost it, we’re so under the thumb of deadweight plutocrats that even one of our earlier claims to fame (auto industry) has now been eclipsed by Toyota. We’ve got nobody to blame but our own apathy, lack of imagination, decayed political/economic systems which no longer offer any sort of meritocracy, and the like.
A 1000 sq ft (100 sq m) low-profile solar thermal field receives 122 kWh (kilowatt-hour) solar radiation on a clear winter day in mid latitude. Double that for summer, and reduce to 15% on cloudy days. A solar-thermal system may produce from this 24 kWh electricity per day at 20% efficiency, with another 43 kWh of high quality heat recoverable for thermal applications. A 1 acre field produces 1000 kWh per day of electric and 1870 kWh of thermal.
The total annual energy consumption in the US is 2.93e13 kWh (100 quad BTUs), but roughly 60% of this is wasted in central power plants and internal combustion engines, so eliminating these with cogeneration and electric drive, the total size solar-thermal field required in the US is 40% x 2.93e13 kWh / [(1000 kWh + 1870 kWh) x 365 days] = 11 million acres. This equals 0.6% of total US land area minus AK, or 1.1% of total US farm/range land, or 7.6% of currently developed US land. This is for winter, worst case, and in summer twice the amount of energy is available, so by shifting high-energy industrial production to the summer the total land requirement may be cut by about 30% to 7.7 million acres, or 0.4% of US land area minus AK.
Various issues preclude construction of a 7.7 million acre solar thermal field to supply all US energy needs: Materials cost is significant (about the same as in the current 100 million automobiles). The energy has to be stored for night use and for mobile apps. Some regions are too cloudy or too far north. The energy isn’t versatile enough for certain specialized apps. Diversity of sources has other merits. Current US energy consumption should be curtailed for a multitude of other reasons.
And so, given feasibility of wind and biofuel, a reasonable Solartopia may include 25% of energy from solar-thermal, 25% from wind, 25% from biofuels and 25% from other sources. The solar-thermal fields would be 1.9 million acres, or 0.1% of total land minus AK, 1.3% of developed land. The biofuel production would use much more land but still a tiny fraction of the several hundred million acres currently used for meat/dairy production. Much of the current energy/industrial infrastructure would become obsolete. Good riddance. These renewable energy sources are great opportunities to move energy/industrial production to the local level, in small independent enterprises, benefiting local economies, to keep economic and political power at the local level where it belongs.
Mr. Bramscher,
I am aware that Minneapolis-St. Paul is largely a “sunbelt” style city as far as it’s sprawling suburban development. But I have trouble believing transit is so little used or usable. What about regular bus routes?
Her in Pittsburgh, more than half of all downtown commuters rely on transit to get to work, maybe 30% of them by the one LRT line to the south, the reast by bus. In addition, the bus is used for day-to-day transportation for a large number of people, either by necessity (not everyone can afford a car here in the rust belt) or by choice (who needs a car if you live where everything is a short walk or bus ride away). If you have lived like most Americans, in an area where car-oriented development has taken over, you probably consider the notion of car-free cities as wildly utopian, but it can’t be that “utopian”, since it is how most people lived only 70 years ago. Pittsburgh, still preserves some neighborhoods where such a car-free lifestyle is still possible. My old townhouse neighborhood remains the quietest place I’ve ever lived.
Check this site out:
http://www.carfree.com/
Since the domestication of animals and earliest watercraft, humans have been able to haul their belongings, families, etc. long-distance at whim (within the limits of seasons & mountain ranges). Arguably its a throwback to the middle-ages that we’d advocate a modern-day immobility or complete subservience to the state.
Things change when you become a parent, start caring for an older parent, cannot afford to live in the city, and would have nothing to do with at all if land was cheaper in rural areas. Most large cities since the Industrial Age, in both the West and East have been built somewhat on a forced exodus of people from the country, from traditional lands, into the city. A good labor pool is a captive labor pool. That’s Oppression 101.
So to answer your question the roundabout way, sure buses are used here. But if you can’t afford that quarter-million dollar starter home reasonably close to work, and don’t like the idea of spending 2 hours/day on a bus, transfering, waiting at frigid stops in the winter months, etc. then there’s a problem.
Solar power is a marvelous contribution and could provide energy independence from foreigh oil in the not so distant future. However, any energy source must be seen in a larger, macro contezt. In order to maximize energy efficiency and effectivenes, energy must be seen within the context of the largest things that we humans have ever constructed–the city. Currently, cities are built to service the petro-guzzling automobile culture, and this is one of our gravest human afflictions. Cities of the past have been built to a human scale, for a pedestian society of high density and mixed use. People walked to their work place or to the market place. They had plazas in which to congregate and enjoy one anothers company. There are remnants of these pedestrian city centers preserved worldwide even today. To reverse the terribly deleterious effects of the city built for the auto, the ecocity movement sprung up in the 1970’s and has recently bloomed into a more effective movement, due partly to the public’s growing disenchantment with long commutes, pollution, ill health, social isolation, and further disintegration of the family and social networks. However, the general public have little inkling of the concept of the ecocity and its crucial and critical role in addressing and solving our ecological crisis. The public is much more aware of the threat of global warming and climate change, but do not understand that the way our cities are built is the major contributer to this crisis. The point I’d like to make here is that this crisis cannot be resolved by only addressing the sources of energy that we rely upon. We must include these solar energy sources in the re-built city environment,cities re-constrcted using ecological principles–ecocities built in balance with nature, built for the pedestrion who runs on food fuel, bicycles that run on human energy, and solar-electric transit systems that carry us from city to town or village in outlying areas. By doing so we can conserve vast amounts of energy and materials. For example, rather than servicing long lengths of streets and highways, requiring equally long stretches of electric lines, telephone lines, pipes, drainage systems, building materials, and all the energy required to mine, fabricate, transport, assemble and construct, we will do little of any of those things since most everthing will be available locally. Solar energy systems, integrated into ecocities makes much, much more sense than attempting to integrate them into our present cities. In an ecocity they would need provide only a fraction of the energy required in our present day cities. Another advantage of the ecocity is that it re-connects us to nature, as well as bringing us back into face to face contact on a much wider scale, thereby lending itself to closer social networks, no longer isolated from one another, driving around alone in our automobiles. Buildings would have rooftop gardens and green houses, there’d be window boxes with flowers or food growing, community gardens would flourish, plazas rebuilt, surrounding areas would return to the natual world. I could go on indefinitely. But instead, let me recommend a book written by Richard Register, one of the founding members of the ecocity movement. His book is titled: Ecocities, and is subtitled, Building Cities In Balance With Nature. His book is highly recommended, is well written, and passionately addresses this most critical issue at this crucial time in our historiy.
An addendum to the above composition: another point to be made is that by bringing us into greater contact with one another, in general we tend to maximize human potential, whereas our present day cities have a tendency toward minimizing human potential. In order for us to begin the process of rebuilding cities, there is a great deal of political work to be accomplished, as well as instituting an educational process that addresses not only the general public, but more specifically politicians, city planners, university educators, and educators in general. City planners in particular need to understand that the way they plan…..affects not only people but all the species on earth. The built environment must take not only culture to mind but also the ecosystems in which they reside as an integral part of that ecosystem. Our politicians must realize that the policies they propose must likewise take these issues under consideration. Educators must begin the effort to teach their students that the way we build is the way we shall live, happy or unhappy, ecologically sane or ecologically disfunctional and a danger to ourselves and others.