How We Create True Abundance (Through Solarpunk, Ecosocialism, and Degrowth)

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In this Our Changing Climate climate change podcast, I explore how solarpunk, ecosocialism, and degrowth are the path towards true abundance. Specifically, I examine how Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's politics of Abundance is mired in neoliberal, reformist, and austerity politics that won't ultimately bring the solarpunk-esque world that they envision in the first chapter of their book. We need to looking towards the visions of solarpunk for inspiration and steep ourselves in the political and economic strategies of ecosocialism and degrowth to find a path towards true abundance. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Lush landscapes of green coat the once barren asphalt streets. Communal neighborhood dinner tables bring bountiful local harvest to anyone who are hungry. Wintry wonderlands of solar panels and wind turbines churn out abundant energy, filling every home with light and heat, and kids play in parks giggling with laughter alongside their caretakers, many of whom work just 20 hours a week free to live a fulfilling and relaxing life. This is the future of true abundance. A future not of oppression, but of deep connection with community and the natural world. This future could be at our fingertips, but snap back to the here and now and our reality today seems worlds away from that one. So then, how do we get from here to there? How do we build a world of true abundance, one of plenty, both in the material and spiritual sense? For that, we need to look to the visions of solar punk, eco-socialism, and degrowth, political tendencies that might just paint paths away from the horrors of capitalism and towards a rich and fulfilling future where everyone and everything can enjoy a good life. Visions of the future are crucial to the struggle in the here and now. They light a fire under us, inspire us, and give us something to fight for, not just against. Imagining better worlds has increasingly become a radical act under capitalism, where the deadly missiles of imperialism and the energy-sucking code of AI erode our creativity and agency. When we are run ragged from work, from fleeing settler colonial genocide, from our art getting stolen by corporations, imagining a world outside the confines of capitalism becomes harder and harder. The classic saying, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism becomes more and more true every day. So it's crucial then to imagine what the future could look like without fossil fuels, without the smothering grip of endless growth and profit seeking of capitalism, of endless wars, of racial oppression. Not just to fill our cup in dark times, but as Troy Vitesse, co-author of Half-Hirst Socialism, explains.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Having this utopia, this end goal is very useful because that actually glues together your coalition. That actually binds you together. And I think that's missing because we we refuse to actually talk about what we want, and we have only short-term fights.

SPEAKER_03 4:01

Or as The Conscious Lee argues, capitalism has cornered the market on our imagination to make it where a lot of us feel like we are only limited to imagine a world that history already gave us.

SPEAKER_02 4:11

Imagining radical anti-capitalist futures then gives us direction and claws back some form of agency under the all-consuming maw of capitalism. And within all those radical anti-capitalist futures, for me, lies abundance. But what exactly does that mean? Abundance of what and where. If you're at all keyed into political conversations these days, the word abundance might send a shiver down your spine. Or if you're an Ezra Klein-loving liberal, perhaps a cry of ecstasy. But sorry, Klein-loving liberals, the abundance I imagine and many others on the eco-socialist left envision is not the same abundance Ezra Klein is hoping will hatch into existence. For me, abundance means organizing our global economy and social systems so that everyone has not just the bare minimum, but all they need to live a rich, fulfilling life in both material and spiritual senses. Notably, this must happen in such a way that allows for the flourishing of the natural world. I would hope this future is pretty uncontroversial, but if you do somehow find grievance with everyone living a good life and planetary life flourishing, please smash that and subscribe button. But that future vision of abundance is of course very vague. It doesn't include how we get there and what socioeconomic systems will foster that abundance. And it's here that visions of abundance on the wide world of left politics begin to split apart. A split that I'm going to simplify into two general camps: liberal abundance and radical abundance. Flip through the pages of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's 2025 book, Abundance, and you'll find a running theme throughout. There's too much red tape and bureaucracy holding back innovation, housing construction, renewable energy, and to a larger extent, a future of abundance I just described. Their argument ultimately is an eco-modernist argument that hopes that scientific discovery and technological innovation spurred on by efficient government will drag us out of the ecological destruction we're living through.

SPEAKER_04 6:04

Klein and Thompson write, The only way for humanity to limit climate change while fighting poverty is to invent our way to clean energy that is plentiful and cheap, and then spend enough to deploy it.

SPEAKER_02 6:16

Liberal abundance, then, can be seen as an abundance built on capitalist growth, one that funnels public dollars into private hands through a muscular governing body to spur more construction, more scientific discovery, and more technological advancement. Klein and Thompson see the problem holding back an abundant world not as capitalism itself, but the way in which the state currently interacts with capitalism. In a much broader sense, their liberal abundance is driven by more and more growth under capitalism.

SPEAKER_04 6:45

Sometimes government has to get out of the way, like in housing. Sometimes it has to take a central role, like in creating markets or organizing resources for technologies that do not yet exist and that we need and that are too risky for markets to fund.

SPEAKER_02 7:00

Klein and Thompson narrow in on America and look at its hulking mass of government and say that it needs to slim down in order to be a better governing body for the people. Less regulation, fewer audits for scientists, less environmental red tape for high-speed rail. They ultimately want a government that builds, seemingly by unleashing the private sector in some arenas and directly building in others. To me, these two are neoliberals cosplaying as woke authors for the people, trying to couch what is at its core, trickle-down economics, in the language of everyone will get a piece. I genuinely do think they are interested in fixing the American system to work for all people. But I think the problem is not a broken gear here and a clogged pipe there. The problem is the American system itself. The problem is a capitalist economy whose foundation is built on the endless exploitation of humans and the planet for the enrichment of the few. An economy that rewards destruction and plunder. Because in the pursuit of profit and ultimately more and more capital, corporations rip minerals, fuel, and organic matter from the earth and then extract the labor of billions of people through dismal wages in order to lower cost and turn a profit. In doing so, they offload the waste of their production, the emissions, the toxic runoff, the pollution onto surrounding sacrifice zones, further destroying the land and the very people they exploit to build their wealth. So if this is the foundation of capitalism, why should we hope to find abundance by tinkering around the edges? How can we live in abundance if we are still grinding under the precarity of wage labor? Where the endless growth of capitalism will always seek to gobble up the finite resources of the planet and the wealthy abundance of the few is built on the scarcity of the many. So, if not liberal abundance, what would true abundance look like? In the imaginaries of so many talented artists, true abundance comes alive. From my standpoint, these are not glimpses into a future of trickle-down capitalist abundance, but instead something else. Collected under the umbrella of Solarpunk, art like this or this describes to our eyes a world of radical abundance. A radical vision that discards the capitalist bullshit abundance and manufactured scarcity and instead embraces the communal, the natural, and the joyful. Solarpunk is a full-throated embrace of a world that prioritizes human beings and the planet they live on over profit. But right now we live in a world of a different kind of abundance. An abundance of smartphones pile up in landfills as planned obsolescence and make our corporations churn out new models every year. An abundance of microplastics permeates our waterways, our bloodstreams, and our food. An abundance of traffic, an abundance of consumption, and an abundance of fossil fuels are turning our entire planet into an oven. I'll say it again because I feel like this is important. Liberal abundance will not solve these ills. These are not problems that can be solved by tinkering around the edges of capitalism with smart policy or techno fixes. They must be solved by directly hacking at the root. And that root is capitalism. Our imaginations then must stretch beyond the shackles of capitalism. Reform is not enough. As Kaliga Kuno, founder of Cooperation Jackson, argues, We need to be clear that we need to be organized and building for a revolution, not reform, and crisis avoidance. Because the bullshit abundance of capitalism comes hand in hand with manufactured scarcity. Capitalism's enclosure of almost every common good, whether that be land, food, shelter, transportation, music, or entertainment, means that we now need to work for a wage in order to live and have fun. Leaving your job or getting fired from your workplace immediately puts you on the path towards precarity. We no longer have connections, the means we need to live. Our food is sequestered in corporate grocery stores, and landlords make us pay obscene amounts just to guarantee a roof over our heads. Meanwhile, the capitalist class enjoys an abundance of ever-accumulating riches at our expense. As Karl Marx wrote over 150 years ago, the accumulation of wealth at one pole is therefore at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole. So to build that solar punk future, to build radical abundance, we need a world, and specifically an economic and social model that looks a whole lot different than capitalism. And yes, that includes the liberal capitalist reform of Ezra Klein's abundance. In my mind, this requires radical transformation towards an anti-capitalist model, which, more specifically for me, means eco-socialist degrowth. I have made many a video about eco-socialism, but to lay it out once again, eco-socialism imagines a worker-controlled economic system that emphasizes a democratically planned economy based on social and ecological constraints. Eco-socialism does away with a system of production based on profit and instead reprioritizes what is made and distributed based on use and need. Importantly, eco-socialism is a transitional stage away from capitalism. It is the first step towards the ultimate goal of a stateless, classless, abundant world based on mutual respect for each other and the planet. Eco-socialism revolts against the chaos of capitalist markets, which blindly hope that a techno fix will save us, or that oil barons will have some spiritual epiphany and shut down their planet-destroying activities. Instead, eco-socialism asks the question: what if workers and you and your neighbors, not some fat cat fossil fuel capitalist on his 40,000-acre Montana ranch, decide what gets made and how? And also, the things that get made are then accessible to you and your neighbor. The workers, the communities, the people decide, not a boardroom of executives thousands of miles away. And the way in which this could happen is manifold. The authors of Radical Abundance point towards the prefigurative power of public common partnerships as one answer to build democratically planned worker and community power right now. This is an insurgent economic and social structure that can be built within capitalism as a means to construct not only worker power, but also the first kernels of a system that could replace capitalism. In its most simple form, a public common partnership can be thought of as a juiced-up co-op that goes beyond the workplace. If a regular capitalist company takes the surplus workers create and puts it in the hands of shareholders and owners, who then control and decide the course of the company, a co-op spreads the surplus among the workers, and it's the workers who decide the direction of the company. Public common partnerships take the vision of the co-op one step further. Instead of disseminating the surplus amongst workers, public common partnerships put some of that surplus into the hands of what the authors of Radical Abundance call a common association, which is a democratically run group of community members. This body then decides where that surplus goes to better the community as a whole. As the authors explain, this structure recognizes that work and the surpluses generated through it is never done by employees alone. It depends on a whole network of people and systems, from carers raising children to neighbors maintaining community life to public roads, schools, and health services. Public common partnerships direct resources back into this wider network so that everyone who contributes to creating social wealth can share its benefits. And this is not just some theoretical framework. There are real-world examples already out there building power and abundance under capitalism. In Barcelona, workers and community members took control of a dilapidated 13,000 square meter factory and transformed it into a solar punk vision in real life. With 30 initiatives employing around 400 workers servicing 50,000 people, Kanbat Lo has grown to have very real local impact. Through community gardens, food banks, breweries, publishing cooperatives, makerspaces intermingled with public gyms, a community-run library, and even a co-housing cooperative, the people of Barcelona have transformed the rotting husk of industrial capitalism into a communally operated, vibrant public space. Notably, each worker-owned enterprise within the space, whether that be a brewery or an urban farm, has to provide weekly instances of social return, which means wider social benefits and public services for the larger Kanbat Lo umbrella project and neighborhood in the form of assistance or other available resources. And all of this is organized through a coordination committee and a weekly general assembly open to anyone from the neighborhood. Essentially, Kanbat Lo is building cooperative and communal planning in the here and now. And in the process, they're carving out a space of joy, play, community, and ecological harmony under the oppressive forces of capitalism. Meanwhile, the authors of Half-Earth Socialism envision a more centralized linear programming approach, where broad goals like cutting emissions by 10% a year or rewilding 50% of the planet by 2050 can be decided on a national or international level, and then a planning algorithm would spit out a variety of course plans that might get the world to those goals, ranging from more lenient energy quotas but faster uptake of vegetarian or vegan production and consumption, or perhaps more aggressive rewilding and afforestation instead, or a more rapid increase in renewable production. These plans could be disseminated, tweaked, and retooled from the international to the local level to mesh with local context. But of course, this is just one vision. Ultimately, with all of these different ways of democratically planning, the goal is to bring back agency to everyday people. Put another way by the authors of Radical Abundance, the radical abundance of eco-socialism seeks a shift from a culture in which the citizens beg the state to solve their problems to a culture where citizens implement, control, and manage things by themselves. This is the core of a democratically planned eco-socialism, and one of the many strategies on the left that could bring about radical abundance. But to bring abundance to all globally, we need to embrace a politics of degrowth as well. Abundant degrowth? Surely that's an oxymoron. Well, in my eyes, it's not. Of course, my eyes could be wrong, so feel free to go and roast me in the comments. But degrowth doesn't and should never mean reverting to the stony. So if someone tells you it does, go roast them in their comments. A good way to think about this is that planning should mean a reprioritization of what we need and what we want, which ultimately implies a shift of production. An abundant solar punk world where we don't need to work just to have a roof over our head and food on the table, where a landlord or your capitalist boss no longer decides your fate requires a world where we no longer produce goods for profit. We would not need a bunch of new phone models every year or a new season of clothes every month. Overproduction for overproduction's sake would be unnecessary. Instead, production will be guided by two principles: providing the things people need to live a fulfilling life, and doing so in an ecological way. This is where the tendrils of degrowth tie in. Instead of burning hundreds of tons of carbon, manufacturing everything from guns to fast fashion, economies will shift towards building just the right amount of zero carbon housing, renewable energy farms, and public transit systems. Eco-socialist degrowth solar pump must embody a swords-to-plowshares ethic if it is ever to find abundance. Because degrowth means degrowing imperialist violence, fossil fuels, and the carceral state. This requires repairing the generations of colonial and imperial plunder of the periphery through the building out of locally appropriate technologies, knowledge sharing, and direct reparation payments. Funneling wealth that the Imperial Corps has enjoyed at the expense of the periphery back to where it belongs. This requires right sizing the lives of the people in the Imperial Corps, especially the United States, where highways, McMansions, pickup trucks, and guns flow like water, guzzling material resources and land at the cost of the planet and other humans cannot and should not exist in a world of radical abundance. But right sizing and degrowth for that matter doesn't mean living in caves. It means reorienting the economy so that dense, free, electric, and accessible public transit networks permeate every town and every city. It means ecological community living and co-housing complexes that leave no one on the street while simultaneously shrinking everyone's emissions footprint. Perhaps it means less stuff. But in lieu of that fleeting consumerist abundance comes a more meaningful abundance of play, of connection, of learning, and of leisure. I don't know about you, but I'd gladly downsize my life to have more space and time to enjoy the people and the places I love. But of course, in all seriousness, at the end of the day, abundant degrowth means letting go of what is yours, and instead, as fellow YouTuber Androism explains, embracing a library economy. Where much like a book at your library, that tool you might need, or that random piece of clothing you need once a year, or an electric van you need to transport some wood for a DIY project is all under one roof for you to borrow at your leisure. In the process, a library of everything would mean we would need to produce a lot less stuff, which means fewer emissions, less waste, and less work. Of course, this would require planning, but luckily we have supercomputers in our pockets and cloud-based spreadsheets and planning programs already at our fingertips. We don't have to start from square one. Massive multinational corporations already plan and organize hundreds of thousands of workers across the globe. Not to mention that there are historical precedents for streamlining planning processes through a computerized network, like Cybersyn in 1970s Chile under socialist leader Salvador Allende. Ultimately, building towards radical abundance necessitates not only a shift in economics, but a shift in worldview as well. A future of degrowth of eco-socialist planning will not feel the same as the world we live in right now. Those in the Imperial Corps may have to give up some of the convenience they've enjoyed. But if we understand that this convenience is always predicated on the inconvenience and the oppression of someone else, whether that be a delivery driver, an Amazon fulfillment worker, or a miner staring down death every day in a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, convenience seems like a worthy thing to have a little less of. But let me be clear, the future I hope for is not a future of misery and sacrifice. Yes, it does mean doing away with delivery drones flying shit to our door every day. But here's what's great: we will have the time and space in our lives to actually take that beautiful walk down a sunny street to the library or the corner canteen to pick up the thing we actually need. The convenience of Amazon becomes unnecessary when you're not being ground down by the precarity of work under capitalism, and instead are working 20 hours a week at a local farm or solar panel factory that's just a 10-minute walk away from your home. Ultimately, capitalism individualizes us. It silos our mind, our creativity, our environments, our economies, our households, so that the only thing we can rely on is the dollar to survive. Thirty-nine years ago, the queen of capitalist depravity, Margaret Thatcher, drove that point home in an interview when she argued, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. Of course, Maggie Thatcher was hated for her austerity politics, imperialist warmongering, and especially by this Scottish woman.

SPEAKER_05 22:38

Do you think she did any good? Not a bit of good. Not a bit. I put a stick, threw her hand, and gathered it around her neck to make sure she never come back. Isn't that a pretty horrible thing to say when her funeral is going on right now? Too bad, too bad.

SPEAKER_02 22:51

So we must break free from the ideologies of capitalism, of individualism, of scarcity, towards a new paradigm of community and a deep relationship with the natural world. Towards a relationship of reciprocity and regeneration, not plunder. This necessarily requires a cultural shift. And perhaps one of the ways in which we might shift our minds and our culture away from capitalism's ever striving to accumulate more is through art, specifically envisioning the beautiful worlds of abundance that could be if we build the power, struggle, organize, and win a beautiful future. And that art to me is epitomized in Solar Punk. In the visions of Becca Bolin or of Taylor Seamount, we can catch glimpses of a future of radical abundance. A world that is so much richer and more fulfilling than one we currently trudge through. Here, surveillance cameras and heavy traffic give way to lush parks and communal gardens. There, the onslaught of ads, billboards, and mall parking lots dissolves into urban orchards, libraries, and repair cafes. These are the imaginings that can bring warmth to us on those cold nights of the soul, on those days when capitalist exploitation and destruction feel totalizing. This is the art that can guide us out of the dark and teach us that abundance, true abundance, is out there. We just have to have the courage to band together and struggle for it.