How to Solarpunk Your Life

In 1990, 80.6 percent of the world's energy came from coal, oil and gas. In 2025 it was 80.9 percent. Between those two numbers the volume burned rose by about sixty thousand terawatt hours, and wind and solar went from almost nothing to about five thousand five hundred.

This is a handbook for what a household can do in the season it is actually in.

Water: catch it where it falls. Measure your own roof, because square feet times 0.6 gives the gallons it catches per inch of rain, and that one line of arithmetic settles what size tank you need. Energy: the light and the heat, down to the cords you will split and stack and what they cost you in a winter. Food: what the ground will give, with the planting order for the upper Ohio Valley and the arithmetic for a family's flour. Then trees, animals, waste, storage, and the neighbors you will need, because nobody gets through a bad year alone. It closes with a first year laid out month by month.

Every number in the text carries a superscript that points to an appendix with the source, the arithmetic, and the caveat the source itself makes. One chapter is about where this book could be wrong.

You do not have to accept the diagnosis to act on it. A household that grows some of its own food, heats with wood it cut, and repairs what it owns spends less and needs fewer favors, whatever arrives.