It’s a movement insofar as it’s an aesthetic that people want to see around them, but have no ideological understanding of how to get there or if that’s even something people should strive for in general.

What other people have said.

What happens when your "movement" is an aesthetic with zero theoretical grounding?
It gets co-opted and commodified to be used for the consolation of the oppressed classes with the intent of duping them while robbing the movement of its revolutionary edge by vulgarising it.

Now, if only someone had written about this exact phenomenon in theory a century ago so that we would be aware of this and we'd be able to take steps to outflank it.

it's an online utopian fandom. anarchism without the an, the arch, or the ism.

Idk anything about solar punk, but i sure do know a lot of eco-fascists that use "there's too many people!" as an excuse to implement eugenics against minorities and developing nations.

Sodium ion batteries are the new up and coming battery technology that removes the need for lithium, sodium is abundant.

https://www.ft.com/content/826fb9bb-b27f-4c68-ad4b-a54ad74713c9

IMO it's good at its roots but can be easily coopted, it's like cottagecore in that sense.

I wouldn't say it's hitlerite adjacent, but it's full idealism - impossible under capitalism and unnecessary under socialism. Also most of solarpunk art is really bad if you look at it second time - shitty infrastructure, rotting plant matter everywhere, erosion of cityspaces, insane amounts of labour to maintain it, disconnected primitivism, strong postapo ruin vibes, and this is even before we talk about AI artefacts in said pics.

It's an aesthetic. And yes aesthetics are political, but I think this is one of those ones that can go either way, in fact I feel that way about most "Punk" genres. There's been progressive and reactionary cyberpunk, steampunk, whatever.

Some of solar punk seems to be "hey what if we did Soviet brutalist commie blocks but with more greenery", so a more naturalistic and whimsical version of dense, organized, urban-proletariat society, which I think is kinda cool. Other times it looks more like an idealized version of what "techno-feudalism" would look like, a quaint, pastoral, sustainable version of being petite-bourgeois.

I think it's fine. The societal changes necessary to address climate change are so wild that people literally lack capacity to imagine them. Solarpunk is an art genre to fill in that space.

Solarpunk is good this is internet poisoning.