why do you think solarpunk sucks? i always thought of it as an optimistic, if naive, idea about a way of life. is it something to do with the conservative myth of self-sufficiency?
solarpunk is just an aesthetic, and that makes it vulnerable to co-opting by fascist movements who fucking loooove aesthetics. like, fascism is primarily an aesthetic politics, and its derivatives to the left (the more milquetoast conservatisms up to liberal progressivism) all traffic primarily in aesthetics and acceptability, which is why all politics in the west have to be filtered through what *looks* and *feels* nice (or what looks and feels badass in the case of fascism), rather than what actually, materially might work. so, to your point, yeah it's deeply naive and that naivete is why i think it sucks
also there's something deeply fucked about solarpunk's fixation on technology, like it's techno-fetishistic in the same way liberal democracies nowadays imagine technology and science as being able to wipe away all problems and solve all issues, we just need to get Advanced enough to solve climate change and world hunger and everything else. the eradication of capitalism can't meaningfully affect our technologically advanced lives (which we enjoy as a result of extractive hyperviolence inflicted on the global south), we can't just Lose our toys and screens, that would! suck! better to imagine we can all live lives where we can larp as neo-pastoralist farmers without having to engage in any of the backbreaking labor that sustains a lifestyle like that, like we all have fucking cloud seeders and microlight drones and mechs that snip perfectly ripe tropical fruit off the branch to enjoy whenever.
all this to say, as has been mentioned in a post ive seen floating around, solarpunk steals a lot from Afropunk and Indigenous futurist thought and just strips a lot of the Black and brown influences, or reduces it to cute little checkbox-style diversity wins. i've got a game ive been wanting to publish about my general thoughts on this for a hot minute, but thank u for ur question hehe, gave me an opportunity to distill them