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Solarpunk is happening in Africa

climatedrift.substack.com

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Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#391

Post by reedf1 »

MrsPeaches wrote: post #372

This revolution also has a dark side: People are paying off these devices and then once they have paid them off, they break and people in these areas don’t have the skills or resources to fix them. This has led to over 250 million of the units lying around broken in peoples homes, leading to solar being one of the fastest growing e-waste streams in the world. It’s hardly solar punk to sell people cheap crap at a 10x…

This is a far more negative comment than the linked article for those who wish to read it.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#392

Post by baq »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #383
safety1st wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah way too many tell-tale ChatGPT rhetorical devices in this article, which is a shame because the topic and premise are fascinating, but those turned me off from finishing it. AI slop hits 700+ upvotes on Hacker News. The Dead Internet and the triumph of quantity over quality loom. A sign of things to come.

> The Dead Internet and the triumph of quantity over quality loom always_has_been.jpg The Internet has drowned to death in garbage back when they coined the term "content marketing". That was long before transformer models were a thing. People have this weird impression that LLMs created a deluge of slop and reduced overall quality of most text on-line. I disagree - the quality arguably improved , since SOTA LLMs wri…

I’m old enough to remember people complaining about the exact same thing except they called it eternal September.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#393

Post by utopiah »

xbmcuser wrote: post #213

I have been saying this for a few years now that people are underestimating the change solar, batteries and electric transport/machinery will bring about im many of parts of the world. People are not going to just get access to cheap electricity but also a lot of machinery that they can run with that electricity that was not possible before.

Yep, a memory that changed my perspective on this was in a tiny island in Italy where a grandma was riding her electrical bike uphill with no effort in the middle of the Summer.

When I mean uphill I mean not Tour de France level but damn steep still. And yet, here she was with her grocery in her bag, no problem.

That was absolutely wonderful because, despite my envy, she was autonomous!

She didn't need no stinking petrol station, she could charge at home. She didn't need a humongous garage where streets were ridiculous narrow. She could park somewhere, charge the battery home.

This moment was genuinely wonderful... and my point is that I do believe even though it felt relatively new, I can easily imagine it to deploy at scale for the benefit of most.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#394

Post by rmunn »

mattclarkdotnet wrote: post #355
rmunn wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that being ordered by a judge to perform work, without pay, and which you would not have done absent those orders, does not fit the definition of involuntary servitude? Because while the precise definitions of servitude do vary from dictionary to dictionary, and some define it more harshly than others, in general it fits. One definition I found online (with no reference to which dictionary it came from…

The context for the 13th amendment was that slavery was legal in the US then. It mostly wasn’t in other countries, so they never had to try to find the language to allow judicial punishments while disallowing private slavery. If you are given a community service orders without labelling in the UK for example, nobody thinks it’s slavery or servitude, they just think it’s a valid sentence under the law. The grey area i…

> It [slavery] mostly wasn't [legal] in other countries [at the time the 13th Amendment was passed, i.e. the mid 1860's]...

The history of the 19th century and when slavery was abolished in each one is actually a fascinatingly complex subject, and there's tons of interesting history hiding behind your word "mostly", to the point where I can't actually tell whether "mostly" is a correct or incorrect description. Judging by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave... I would lean towards "definitely correct in Europe and the Americas, a lot murkier in Africa and Asia". Oddly enough, a lot of Spanish colonies in South America abolished slavery before the United States did, yet Spain itself didn't pass its law ending slavery until a year after the US's 13th Amendment came into effect.

If you're at all interested in the history of that era, the film Amazing Grace, though it takes a few liberties with the historical facts, is a mostly-accurate depiction of what it took to get slavery abolished in the United Kingdom. Interestingly, the part of Prime Minister William Pitt was played by a then-unknown Benedict Cumberbatch (Amazing Grace came out in 2006, and most people first discovered Cumberbatch when Sherlock came out in 2010). I recommend the film if you enjoy historical films; it's quite fun. (I love the "I would have been bored by botany" line).

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#395

Post by dustypotato »

yanhangyhy wrote: post #295
hotpotat wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trading uncrontrolled population growth for TikTok sounds like a deal with the devil.

i think no one can stop that from happening.. you have electricity, you have apps. people will have more thinking on the child thing. and more time on the internet and less time on the home.

One thing i think a lot of people forget is the effect of Porn on fertility rates.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#396

Post by Tade0 »

MrsPeaches wrote: post #372

This revolution also has a dark side: People are paying off these devices and then once they have paid them off, they break and people in these areas don’t have the skills or resources to fix them. This has led to over 250 million of the units lying around broken in peoples homes, leading to solar being one of the fastest growing e-waste streams in the world. It’s hardly solar punk to sell people cheap crap at a 10x…

The same report says that 90% of those kits are repairable and the most common failure point is the battery and also that the vast majority of users hold on to their devices in hopes of repairing them in the future, as there exists some kind of repair service, it just isn't up to scale.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#397

Post by Tade0 »

narrator wrote: post #288

All the back to the land decentralized survivalists solarpunk people can do just about everything except for rare earth refining. That's the part of solarpunk that can only happen in China because nobody anywhere wants that in their backyard. One of the more interesting political/economic questions is can a non-authoritarian country that values environmental protection do rare earth refining, or is the ecological har…

> All the back to the land decentralized survivalists solarpunk people can do just about everything except for rare earth refining. That's the part of solarpunk that can only happen in China because nobody anywhere wants that in their backyard.

You don't actually need rare-earths to produce solar panels, control systems and batteries - at least not in the amounts that require the scale China is operating at.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#398

Post by baq »

Ray20 wrote: post #363
griffzhowl wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What quality of life improvements are you thinking of that weren't based on mass electrification and mechanization of agriculture?

Those that happened in the USSR and China, no? After the start of electrification and active mechanization of agriculture, more peasants died of hunger there than in the previous 100 years (in Russia more than in the previous 200 years).

At least some of them died because they weren't allowed to consume what they produced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#399

Post by thegabriele »

MrsPeaches wrote: post #372

This revolution also has a dark side: People are paying off these devices and then once they have paid them off, they break and people in these areas don’t have the skills or resources to fix them. This has led to over 250 million of the units lying around broken in peoples homes, leading to solar being one of the fastest growing e-waste streams in the world. It’s hardly solar punk to sell people cheap crap at a 10x…

"Five billion phones to be thrown away in 2022"

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63245150

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#400

Post by kaon_2 »

jimnotgym wrote: post #379

Isn't it a shame that 90% of the comments here are complaining that AI was involved in producing this article, and none of the comments are from a tech nerd kid in Africa who has electricity because of the solar schemes mentioned in the article? I want to hear from the people affected.

I worked in this industry, visited several rural areas. Spoke to many people. Sunculture used to be a customer of our software company. The article doesn't quite do justice to the introduction of electricity; it claims that people replace kerosine or diesel with electricity.

From what i've seen this is rarely true. Most people just sit in the dark. This means you go from total darkness at night to electricity. Even the smallest 100lumen light is transformative. You can talk to your family at night. You can make love while seeing your spouse. You can see the spiders and the snakes. You are less afraid of bandits in the night. The biggest impact isn't made by the pumps or the larger systems, but by the significantly more affordable $5-$10 solar lanterns. The poorest of the poorest will get this and pay $0.20 per day or week for this.

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