It’s almost a truism that to have a revolution, you need to mobilise a lot of people. Renewable energy…

It’s almost a truism that to have a revolution, you need to mobilise a lot of people. Renewable energy challenges that. Putting solar panels on your roof can to a considerable extent free you from fossil fuel dominant hierarchies. You don’t need to mobilise others. /1 https://t.co/rZtEmlEQRc

It’s an example where the objective, material reality of the world overcomes the usual treacly bog of social relations. Status and power has resided in fossil fuel energy for so long, that offering a delocalised energy source is revolutionary, even for individuals. /2

Why I still maintain that you can try all the activism to maybe mobilise people, to overcome the problems we face. But none of it will have the impact of electrifying your home, powered by your own solar. It’s not just about cheaper, cleaner energy. /3

In a world where energy has been the currency of status and power for so many decades, nothing will collapse those hierarchies faster than changing your individual energy use. And it gets even better than that. Because all hierarchies connect. /4

By freeing yourself from fossil fuel hierarchies, which you can to a large extent do with your own solar and electrifying your home and vehicles, you’re knee-capping *every* existing hierarchy in society. Not just in energy. The Covid deniers, the ‘fascists’, etc. etc. /5

All of them have an umbilical cord to fossil fuel energy, in some ways. As Rousseau said, a society has all of its habits at once. Humans are almost completely incapable of taking their focus off other humans. We’re social animals. But here material reality triumphs. /6

Because the existing status quo is so fundamentally bound to fossil fuel energy, the capacity to bypass it *individually* is a new type of revolution. You can be free in a couple of days, without storming any Bastilles. You don’t need to convince or mobilise others. /7

Humans left to themselves will just fight each other for status, every day. But when status attached itself to the material reality of the world, through adoption of fossil fuels, it also left itself wide open to *material* revolutionary upending of that status. /8

By anybody, with a material alternative. Get solar, electrify your home and vehicles. That will change the WHOLE world, very fast. Activism won’t. /end