[Wickedflickr]

Sustainability for large populations is kind've a cornerstone of solarpunk, alongside decentralization and horizontal power to empower individuals and communities against corporation and government control.

There's a lot of discussion on how to implement solarpunk in the here and now over on the fediverse, like Lemmy, but a condensed version of short term goals tends to be:

1. Switch to solar and wind on a mass scale, including personal solar such as the type described in low-tech magazine, combined with reducing energy use as much as is reasonable.

2. Embrace permaculture urbanism, where energy and food production take place in cities. The most well researched proposal put forward is by the Edenicity project.

3. Replace as many cars as possible by implementing more robust and far reaching public transport and bicycle infrastructure in urban and rural areas, more in line with the Netherlands.

4. Build new societal structures that are bottom up through mutual aid, to wean ourselves off corporatism and consumerism, and to develop community independence.

None of those objectives are too far fetched, and would lay the groundwork for even more positive change.

[Avicebron]

I would also add that all of these would provide jobs, construction, high-level engineering, etc and any knock on benefit people with paying work contribute to their local/national economies would bring.

[whearyou]

I agree. But it has a similar aspirational quality, to me, as well thought out proposals for eg Moon colonization.

I suppose the question left is overcoming the blocking path dependence - the method of mass action to get there.

[Wickedflickr]

Moon colonization requires billions or even trillions of capital all at once, and can only be done by elite experts in a very specialized field, with no practical gain to society toward solving or global warming. It would be an expense almost impossible to justify, and only corporations building the parts would truly benefit.

Solarpunk, on the other hand, is accessible for an incredibly wide swath of people to contribute toward achieving, as a solarpunk life would actually save money while improving quality of life and mitigating global warming.

Solar panels are within the financial reach of most parts of society, bicycles are far more affordable than cars, better zoning laws are only a stroke of a pen, gardening your food or creating a larger communal gardening area creates food resiliency while saving money, and again is within reach of almost all economic situations.

It can be a big government program, but it scales down incredibly well compared to colonizing the moon, and I believe that is key to it being viable.