Why an engineer talks about climate change (and what solarpunk is)
Why an engineer
Hi! Nice to meet you, my name is Sebastián, I’m a mechanical engineer, and I’ve come to the internetsphere to yap about climate change and capitalism. These are topics we usually leave to biologists and sociologists, but here’s the thing: engineers built this crisis, and it’s a systems problem, not a problem for any single discipline.
My undergraduate thesis was on carbon capture, and from the moment I started it I realized how deeply the climate crisis is tied, politically and socially, to the modern way we little humans organize ourselves. For a year and a half I led CarbonU, a student group that researches the climate crisis. I founded it because I felt alone, orphaned in the fight, and honestly, there was also so much to learn. I’m so glad I found friends to dig into the roots of the problem and its solutions with, without falling into the catastrophism or the hopelessness so many people are stuck in right now.
With CarbonU I made it to Santa Marta in April, to the first conference of countries that came together to move away from fossil fuels, and something happened there that I didn’t expect. I went to talk about technology and came back convinced that the technology already exists, and that what holds the transition back is who decides and who keeps the money. That’s where I got radicalized.
Why the planet is warming
In short: there is a direct relationship between how much carbon is in the atmosphere and how hot it gets. Climate change happens because we took carbon that had been locked in rock for millions of years, as coal and oil, and put it back into the air. We disrupted the cycle; I explain that properly in the next essay.
But the machines that did that didn’t build themselves: the steam engine, the combustion engine and the oil drill were designed by us, mechanical engineers. As the saying goes, “you break it, you pay for it”: whoever builds something has to answer for what it does. So it’s on us to fix it.
And swapping one machine for another isn’t enough, because climate change isn’t a tycoon game; it’s a system where physics and politics are tied together. Johan Rockström, the planet’s doctor, said a few weeks ago that the skill academia most lacks today is systems thinking. And in engineering I learned a lot about assemblies and systems, about seeing how one part affects all the others.
Also, I have to confess that, even if I don’t like the culture, I’m a gomelo, a privileged kid. And I believe it’s a responsibility, almost an obligation, to help solve the hardest problems and put our privilege at everyone’s service. Those of us who studied at the richest university have to build technology for the whole country, not for a few. Cough, cough.
Why it should matter to us
Another hard question: why should we care about climate change? There’s always someone who says the climate has always changed and that the biosphere has already survived five mass extinctions. But all of those were accidental, my friend.
Life has been on Earth for about 3.6 billion years, and the ecologist Timothy Lenton shows that over all that time the biosphere has been building its own stability, with changes becoming rarer and rarer. Today’s species are made for a very specific climate, the Holocene’s, which has been stable for ten thousand years. And in 200 years we’ve shaken that stability hard: faster than ever, we’ve already stepped out of the corridor of life.
I’m not a biologist. When I go hiking, I call rare species Pokémon (and Colombia has tons of Pokémon). But let’s think about the idea of diversity: if every culture is a different way of being human, every species is a different way of being alive. Every living being feels the world in its own way, so every species we drive extinct is a whole set of experiences gone, a way of feeling that never comes back.
And hey, we’re just one more species! We’re part of the same biosphere and we have no authority to decide which evolutionary story continues and which one ends. My friend Cata Reyes taught me this; I admire her a lot, and she’s driving ocean science forward in Colombia with OceanicoLabs. That argument is what moves me to act on climate.
We can see the Earth as a spaceship, as the economist Kenneth Boulding proposed in 1966 with his Spaceship Earth. We think we’re the pilot, but we’re one more species, and we depend on the health of the biosphere to thrive. As Doctor Strange would say, we’re an intelligent species, but we’re not wise yet. If we want to become a type one civilization on the Kardashev scale, we first have to learn to use this planet’s energy without destroying it. Otherwise, some lunatic is going to take us to Mars to live a shitty life full of dust and apathy.
What solarpunk is
That’s why I’m always talking about solarpunk.
Solarpunk is an artistic and political movement focused on imagining and designing a prosperous, sustainable and beautiful world, where technology, nature and humanity live in harmony. The idea is for it to be a eutopia reachable with what we have, from where we are.
- The solar part refers to clean energy: what already exists and is already the cheapest.
- The punk part is about rebelling against the status quo: this won’t happen on its own; we have to change the systems we organize ourselves in at a structural level. As the solarpunk manifesto puts it, we stop being the planet’s owners and become its gardeners.
The thesis of this essay
Back to the point. As an engineer, I’m obliged to talk about this and share what I’ve learned, because engineers built the machines of the crisis, because the crisis is systemic and multidisciplinary, and because it has to matter to all of us: we’re erasing a story that doesn’t belong to us.
In these essays I’ll show you solarpunk in theory, why we are where we are, and in practice: people who are already building it today. Hopefully one day I’ll have my own solarpunk venture, haha.
If you’d like the references, a theoretical reading list on the topic, write to me :D
Cover photo: Supertree Grove, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore. Mustang Joe, Wikimedia Commons (public domain, CC0).