Your garden example is exactly it. I call this American Solarpunk.

Regular solarpunk is the happy version. Everyone has panels, the cities are green, the fight is over and the good guys won. Nice to look at. Not where we live.

American Solarpunk is the fight … happening right now. The sun is free. Rain is free. Dirt is free. And every single thing between you and those free things has a toll booth on it. Permits. Inspections. Interconnection agreements. 25-year leases where some investment firm owns the power coming off your own roof. Utility fees you pay even when you make your own electricity. And now they’re pulling the ladder up for farmers too.

It’s not that they’re against solar. They’re against you having it without them. Same reason they’d come for the garden. A tomato plant doesn’t feed a family, but it teaches you that you don’t need them, and that’s the dangerous part.

So the “punk” in solarpunk should mean what it meant in cyberpunk: the people on the ground finding their own way around the system. Buying panels direct from China. Putting them on a pergola instead of the roof so it’s not a “solar install.” Building a battery bank in the garage without asking anyone. Learning to crimp your own wire. Is this the real movement? It’s not a pretty future. It’s a fight.

Ok, so here is my summary of this… Everything you own is really a promise about the future. Those promises only hold if two things stay steady: the climate and the economy. AI is pulling at the economy by replacing workers. The heat already in the atmosphere is pulling at the climate. So the ground every investment was built on is moving, and the old ways of finding an edge are already dead, most just haven’t noticed yet.

People are selfish, and Indy isn’t asking them to change. He’s saying the smart selfish move is to put a slice of your money into the stuff that keeps the ground still, like cooling cities, stabilizing the Arctic, and keeping land from burning. Think of it as fire insurance for everything else you own. The catch is everyone wants someone else to pay for it…and the people with the most money might just buy a bunker instead. His answer is that no bunker works in a world where everything is connected.

(repeat as I mistakenly posted from my testing account) Anyone catch where Indy mentioned something about … capital flowing into AI is justified by replacing labor, but that’s the cover story…The real search is for something deeper. Do you agree? And with replacing labor: This will cause so much pain and suffering… how do we justify doing that? Its like a deal with the devil?

This is such a profoundly important connection to make. This heating event will unravel many social structures … and sadly be the end of huge numbers of innocent people who never got a chance to live.

In prepping for the heat, I slammed my roof with an additional 18x 400watt panels … even putting them on the north side (n.america). And because this house is older… the AC could not keep up in the 100 F + / 37.7 C + extended heat wave. It didn’t keep up, but it still kept us relatively cool. And I still felt it… not to add to the sense of helplessness describe in this.

In this heat, I also installed solar and batteries on my parents home, 41 panels / concrete tile roof… I did the work myself but had an electrician do the wiring of the inverters/batteries/mid/subpanel. Doing the work on the hot roof made me feel like I was on mars missions… go up during curtain hours and for a limited time.

I share this because I wanted to learn how to do this… because we’re all going to have to learn how to survive this. It’s entirely unrealistic to think that someone would be able to afford or even physically do what I did, but I do think we will need to figure out how to overcome the exploitative markets and previous generations bad decisions to protect each other and humanity’s future.

Great call out on the irony. So true. Welcome to the future.

All part of the plan to destabilize and take power. Solar is self sufficiency and dictators don’t want that for anyone.

What OS are you running?

I get that no one wants to put money in the Zucks pocket… but there is a dirty game being played and the consequences of loosing are harsh.

~500 watts continuous.

This is good EU related info. Ugh - now I’m going to spend the time thinking about this. Good info though TY. I use proton mail btw … but I’m considering running my own mail server again for non essential domains I own.