With the future looking a bit grim of late, what with Trump and Farage’s hostility to most things green, coupled with BP’s retreat to fossil fuel, I thought I would look at some possible better energy futures. There is no shortage of well-developed technical scenarios, offering quantitative data on practical options, but that can be a bit dull, and rather than go back over them, I thought that I would try a different, possibly more subjective, approach, looking at some normative imaginative scenarios. Maybe they would be more convincing/motivating? For what it’s worth, here is what, a bit idiosyncratically, I found via a web search.
Being positive and perhaps whimsical, might we hope for some form of solar punk utopia? Solar punk is a newish movement that has followed on from the earlier ‘retro-futuristic’ steam punk movement, which, as an AI definition on the web has it, involved futures ‘based on the technology and aesthetic of the past, specifically the Victorian era with its steam-powered machinery’. So it was ‘more aligned with the past than the future; although it depicts a fictional future world with advanced technology based on those past concepts’.
By contrast, solar punk is all about the future - based on green energy technology. According to James Pethokoukis, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, ‘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’.
Some spectacular images have been produced, most of them cityscapes, although some are rural. Most of them are socially and politically progressive, with it being claimed that ‘Solarpunk is not about pretty Aesthetics. It’s about the end of Capitalism’. Well maybe, though that’s perhaps not what Pethokoukis would like- see his book ‘The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised’. But there are other perspectives, with Brink Linsey claiming that the ‘punk’ bit ‘suggests an oppositional, countercultural stance: egalitarian and anti-hierarchical, frequently anti-capitalist, or at least anti-consumerist throwaway culture’. So one way or another, I think it can be a fascinating area for political and technological speculation and debate, as is also the case for some good science fiction- I’m thinking of some of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels in particular, and his Mars trilogy especially.
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Obviously, though it is all very speculative. But I think it’s interesting to use AI generated images to allow us to play with the future. It’s not quantitative computer modelling, but it can be fun- as witness the popularity of computer games
Of course, in the event, we might not always get positive outcomes- something grimmer may emerge, with fossil fuel (and mining) still around. Some may see that as OK, but mostly it would be likely to be seen as dystopian. Certainly, I am having trouble trying to marry standard steam punk visions with green futures- and also with AI! Can AI be coal fired? Yes it seems so, at least for data centres in the USA. Oh dear - will they use CCS? Maybe not…
More likely though, in the sort of high-tech high-growth future some want, far from-punk technocrats might go for nuclear, as in some variants of ‘ecomodernism’, though perhaps leavened with some solar. Nuclear is certainly featured as a key option in the Adam Smith Institute’s recent study, which has on its front cover a neo-futurist urban image. So, not exactly punk, but something maybe to suit right-wing political and technological tastes!
We have been here before worrying about to the future at a point when it looked very uncertain. For example, in 1933 H.G. Wells produced an influential book ‘The Shape of Things to Come’, and in 1936 Alexander Korda produced a filmic visualisation of it in ‘Things to Come’, with powerful images of a technocracy-led metropolitan future, in a post-war utopia freed from violence and poverty by science. Actually though, that didn’t end well (there was a popular revolt against a space gun launch), although it’s left open what exactly happened next. And, certainly, what happened next in the real world was not good. We did (mostly) survive a bitter world war, but utopia didn’t arrive. There has been some social and technical progress, but now I am not sure we are doing too well. We are seeing the rise again of autocracies, and, potentially, a halt to progress: for a worrying example of backsliding, quite apart from all the cuts to green projects, funding for the US National Science Foundation is under threat.
Let’s hope some sense prevails, and that the positive futures offered by the technological advances in the sustainable energy field can be realised. Though I worry that, in addition to the renewed threat of war, given the present hi-tech leadership, as in Things to Come, we may end up too focused on fantastic escapist space technology- rather than responding to climate change on this planet…
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