@pluralistic

When will we start moving dumps/landfills?

Even US military might is in decline. US military spending remains off the charts, but Trump and Hegseth are purging the forces, targeting Black and brown people (disproportionately represented in the US military because people from minority groups are typically poorer, and the US military recruits a *lot* of poor people without many other options):

https://theintercept.com/2025/10/01/pete-hegseth-war-pentagon-beardos-dei/

20/

It's true that American policy was once *very* important to the whole world, but that was largely down to the things that Trump is hell-bent on destroying. American dollar-clearing and the SWIFT system gave the US a massive, global structural advantage, but the weaponization of SWIFT, the deliberate weakening of the US dollar, and the destruction of American monetarism via cryptocurrency scams has put dollar clearing into terminal decline:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

19/

The EU is offshoring its *manufacturing* to China, but China has found a better way to manufacture Europe's *stuff*, without having to set old dead stuff on fire 24/7:

https://electrek.co/2025/09/30/solar-leads-eu-electricity-generation-as-renewables-hit-54-percent/

Reading *Here Comes the Sun* is a forceful reminder that there's a big old world out there beyond America's borders.

18/

Trump can subsidize fossil fuels and throw up as many structural impediments to renewables as he can think of, and it won't change the fact that as a planet, we're on track to replace all of the *embodied* energy in the *stuff* the whole world uses with solar.

So when you read that 54% of the energy in the EU is coming from renewables, that doesn't mean that they're cheating by offshoring their emissions to China.

17/

This may have been true back then, but things have changed *dramatically*. China is running away from coal as fast as it can, and solarizing *everything*. China lights up a new solar generation facility with the capacity of a coal plant *every eight hours*.

16/

China made an especially pointed case, insisting that their CO2 figures were grossly inflated because they made all the stuff that the rich world consumed. The carbon emissions from the appliances, consumer goods and industrial equipment and other exports from China were *really* the rich world's carbon, which had been offshored to "the world's factory" - China.

15/

Back around the time of the Paris Accords, there was a raging debate about national carbon targets, with poor countries in the global south arguing that because rich northern countries were responsible for nearly all the CO2 in the atmosphere, the rich world should make the sacrifices needed to decarbonize, leaving China, India, and other poor countries to continue to enjoy the benefits of burning coal.

14/

Here's one assumption I had to jettison after reading McKibben's book: I used to assume that whenever I heard about Europe or the US or Canada lowering CO2 emissions, that was mostly because these rich countries had exported their carbon to China, by shifting carbon-intensive manufacturing there.

13/

Making more solar involves digging stuff up and moving it too - but just *once*. Once those panels are on your roof (or over your parking lot or irrigation canal, or between the rows in your farm's fields) they convert abundant sunshine into efficient energy, without requiring *any* more materials:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

So it's definitely time we rethink our assumptions about the solar transition.

12/

Replenishing this fuel doesn't merely require us to dig up enough old dead shit to burn in the machine, we also have to dig up *tons* more old dead shit to shlep that old dead shit around. The gas and coal being set on fire all around you right now required *another* mountain of fossil fuel to power the mining rig, the refinery, and the ship and the truck that brought it to you.

11/

When you dig up coal, you *burn it* and all that's left behind is a bunch of planet-destroying carbon dioxide and earth-and water-poisoning toxic ash.

I can't emphasize this enough. Solar is a superior substitute for fossil fuels in more ways than one. Fossil fuels need to be continuously replenished, meaning that every fossil fuel-powered system in the world requires a continuous, ongoing stream of materials to produce energy.

10/

What's more, the material bill for solar is superior in *every way* to the material bill for fossil fuels. The amount of *stuff* we need to dig up in order to solarize *the planet* is equal to *one seventeenth* of the fossil fuels we dig up *every year*. Remember, when you dig up a bunch of stuff to make a solar panel, that solar panel produces energy for *decades* afterwards, and when it finally reaches its end-of-life, we make it into *another solar panel*.

9/

As more and more solar comes online, we can reclaim literal *tons* of material from existing, superannuated tech. There's a solar-powered factory that ingests old solar panels, decomposes them into their source materials, and makes new, hyper-efficient solar panels out of them, reclaiming 99% of their materials:

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solarcycle-to-recycle-10-million-solar-panels-yearly

Far from being an insurmountable barrier to a cleaner, better future, the material bill for solar is eminently tractable.

8/