Stop Greed, Build Green: The Solarpunk Case for a Working-Class Climate Agenda

DEMAND UTOPIA, a solarpunk podcast
Season 6, Episode 3
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Not a consumer climate agenda. Not a guilt-based climate agenda. Not a “buy this expensive thing and call yourself green” agenda. Not a climate agenda that begins and ends with emissions targets and policy acronyms that never reach anyone’s kitchen, bus stop, paycheck, or grocery budget.

Today, The Guardian covered a Climate and Community Institute proposal called “Stop Greed, Build Green.” Its argument is simple: climate policy shouldn’t compete with affordability. It should be one of the ways we achieve affordability.

The proposal connects the climate crisis directly to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that decarbonization has to become tangible through lower bills, better housing, public transit, public investment, and democratic control.

One of the ongoing arguments we make at Solarpunk Magazine is that solarpunk isn’t just a visual style. Rooftop gardens, pretty transit, glowing windows, and plant-covered buildings matter because they help us imagine something other than gray austerity or techno-dystopia.

But as I talked about in our episode on aesthetics, we can’t stop at the image. Solarpunk has to ask: Who lives there? Who owns it? Who can afford the rent? Who rides the train? Who grows the food? Who controls the grid? Who benefits?

Because if the future has solar panels and a 100% carbon neutral economy, but people are still choosing between groceries and electricity, that isn’t utopia. It‘s cleaner-looking exploitation.

For years, climate politics has often been presented as sacrifice: use less, drive less, fly less, eat differently, buy better appliances, replace your car, replace your stove, replace your habits, replace your life.

Some of those changes may be necessary. But that framing makes climate action sound like one more bill ordinary people are expected to pay. It tells exhausted people that the future depends on them becoming more disciplined consumers. That’s a disastrous way to build a movement.

Most people are already rationing money, time, rest, medical care, pleasure, risk, and hope as best as they can without having a complete break in their santiy. So when climate politics arrives as another demand for individual sacrifice, it can feel less like liberation and more like scolding.

A working-class climate agenda flips the question. It doesn’t begin by asking: how can we convince people to consume less? It begins by asking: why is life so expensive, so precarious, so energy-intensive, and so dependent on extractive corporations in the first place? Why are people forced into car dependency because public transit has been underfunded? Why are people living in drafty, overheated, energy-wasting homes because landlords and markets have no incentive to provide safe housing? Why do utility bills, insurance costs, and food prices rise while fossil fuel companies, corporate landlords, and speculators continue to profit? Why is “green choice” so often available only to people who can afford an electric car, a heat pump, solar panels, or high-end organic groceries?

That’s where solarpunk becomes political in the best sense. Not partisan branding or empty ideology, but politics as the design of everyday life. A solarpunk climate agenda wouldn’t ask working people to carry the transition on their backs. It would rebuild the systems around them so that the low-carbon choice is also the cheaper choice, the easier choice, the healthier choice, and the more beautiful choice.

Imagine if decarbonization looked like your utility bill going down.

Imagine if it looked like buses that came every ten minutes and cost nothing at the point of use.

Imagine if it looked like public housing retrofits that made apartments cooler in summer, warmer in winter, and healthier year-round.

Imagine if it looked like resilience hubs where people could charge medical devices, cool down during heat waves, access food, and be cared for.

Imagine if it looked like union jobs manufacturing heat pumps, buses, trains, solar panels, and the infrastructure of repair.

That’s the difference between climate policy as austerity and climate policy as a framework of abundance. Solarpunk abundance doesn’t mean endless consumption, infinite growth, private jets, or disposable gadgets. It means enoughness. It means enough housing, food, shade, clean water, transit, healthcare, public space, safety, community, beauty, and time to be fully human.

That’s not the abundance of extraction. It’s a society deciding basic needs shouldn’t be scarce. That’s why “Stop Greed, Build Green” is such a useful phrase. It names both sides of the work. You can’t only build green while leaving greed untouched. That’s how you get luxury eco-condos, greenwashed corporate campuses, boutique sustainability, and electric SUVs marketed as global salvation.

But you also can’t stop greed without building alternatives. That’s how critique curdles into despair. It’s not enough to say the current system is bad. We have to build the public, cooperative, democratic, ecological systems that can replace it.

Stop greed means naming the forces that make life expensive: fossil fuel companies, corporate landlords, utility monopolies, private equity, insurance companies, and a political economy organized around shareholder returns instead of public well-being.

Build green means creating the material infrastructure of a better life: public power, social housing, free transit, home repairs, renewable energy, union manufacturing, care infrastructure, food systems, and climate adaptation that reaches people before disaster does.

This is also a narrative lesson. One reason climate politics has struggled is that it’s often been communicated at the wrong scale. Global temperature targets are important. But most people don’t experience the climate crisis as a graph. They experience it as smoke in the air, an electric bill, a flooded basement, a canceled shift, asthma, rising rent, the bus not coming, food prices rising, or a grandmother afraid to turn on the air conditioner.

So the politics has to meet people there. The planetary scale matters, but it becomes real through the household, neighborhood, and workplace, through the school, bus route, clinic, apartment building, grocery store, and utility bill.

A working-class climate agenda says climate is not a side issue. Climate is inside the cost of living. For decades, opponents have framed climate action as a luxury concern: higher prices, fewer jobs, less freedom, more regulation, and elite moralism. But what if the opposite is true? What if fossil fuels make life expensive? What if car dependency traps people in debt? What if private utilities raise bills? What if bad housing wastes energy? What if climate disasters make insurance unaffordable? What if the so-called cheap system is cheap only because the real costs are hidden, delayed, subsidized, or dumped onto working people?

That’s where solarpunk can speak clearly. Solarpunk says: the future should not be a luxury product. The future should be public. Public goods aren’t as glamorous as consumer technology. A bus system doesn’t have the marketing budget of an electric car company. Weatherized public housing doesn’t get the mythic treatment of a billionaire’s rocket.

But this is exactly where the future lives: in the boring, beautiful, essential systems that make ordinary life possible. A good bus line is climate policy. A rent cap after a disaster is climate policy. A public cooling center is climate policy. A heat pump in a low-income apartment is climate policy. A school kitchen serving local meals is climate policy. Tree canopy is climate policy. Public power is climate policy. A tenant union is climate policy. A library resilience hub is climate policy.

This is where solarpunk becomes touchable. The Guardian piece highlights the idea of “climate policy you can touch,” policies whose benefits people can actually feel in their lives, such as lower bills, expanded heat pump access, union-built affordable EVs, and free electric buses.

That’s exactly the kind of thing solarpunk needs to focus on. The aesthetic version of solarpunk gives us images we can look at. The political version gives us systems we can live inside. And when those systems work, people defend them. Climate policy that people can’t see, feel, or connect to survival is fragile. But climate policy that lowers your bill, fixes your apartment, gets your kid to school, keeps your elder alive in a heat wave, gives you a good job, and makes your neighborhood safer is harder to demonize. People can point to it and say, “No, this is helping me.”

This working-class climate framing asks a crucial question: how do we make the transition immediate enough that people can feel it before backlash destroys it?

That’s a strategic question, but it’s also a moral one. People need help now: lower bills, safe housing, transportation, disaster protection, food, cooling, healthcare. Climate action that asks people to wait decades for benefits while costs rise today won’t build the coalition we need. 

So what would it mean for solarpunk writers, artists, organizers, and readers to take this seriously? First, we should be suspicious of futures that are beautiful but economically vague. If a story shows us a lush green city but doesn’t ask who owns the land, how housing works, how care is provided, and how decisions are made, then it may be giving us a mood rather than a model. That doesn’t mean every solarpunk story has to be a policy paper. Fiction needs character, conflict, beauty, weirdness, surprise. But the questions matter.

Second, solarpunk should focus more on repair than novelty: existing homes, today’s bus routes, school meals, community kitchens, soil restoration, food co-ops, farmworker power, utility democracy, public maintenance, cooling centers, battery backups, tenant associations, shaded streets, repaired roofs. Those things are more valuable than shiny new tech when it comes to building a better future.

Third, we need to stop treating “working class” as a rhetorical accessory. A working-class climate agenda isn’t just climate policy with better messaging. It has to change who has power. That means unions, tenant organizations, public ownership, community governance, participatory planning, Indigenous sovereignty, disability justice, racial justice, rural communities, migrant workers, care workers, and all of the people who live in the systems being redesigned, because if climate policy is designed for people but not with people, it can still reproduce hierarchy. And solarpunk, at its best, is about people collectively remaking the conditions of life.

That’s why this story warrants particular attention today. Because “Stop Greed, Build Green” gives us a phrase for something solarpunk has always been trying to say: The climate transition shouldn’t feel like punishment. It should feel like getting your life back. It should feel like a cool home, a bus that arrives, a job that doesn’t destroy your body or the planet, public luxury instead of private escape.

And yes, there will be sacrifices. The wealthy will have to sacrifice excess. Corporations will have to sacrifice power. Fossil fuel executives will have to sacrifice profits. But ordinary people shouldn’t be asked to sacrifice survival for a livable future. They should be invited into a politics that says “You deserve more than this. You deserve systems that care whether you live or die. You deserve a future that isn’t rented back to you at a markup.”

That, to me, is the solarpunk case for a working-class climate agenda. It’s not climate as homework. It’s climate as housing, transit, food, public power, care, repair, democracy, and the right to live well without destroying the world.

So the core question for today is this: What would climate policy look like if it started not with abstract targets, but with rent, groceries, utilities, transit, and ordinary people’s daily lives?

I think it would look less like asking people to buy their way into sustainability, and more like building a world where sustainability is the default because justice is built into the infrastructure. That’s the future worth demanding. That’s the utopia worth organizing toward. And that’s why we don’t just need to build green. We need to stop greed, too.

Thanks for joining us for this episode Demand Utopia, from Solarpunk Magazine. Don’t forget to check out our website, solarpunkmagazine.com where you can get into our blog, get issues of our magazine, and more. And you can also join us on Patreon where you can subscribe to the magazine and get monthly bonus content related to both the magazine and this podcast. 

I hope you have a wonderful day. And remember, the future doesn’t have to be smaller, meaner, and more expensive. The future can be public, shared, and livable. But only if we demand it.