Frankly, I think it would be foolish to expect any fossil fuel reserves to stay in the ground. Corporations are immortal, corporations own lots of drilling tools, and as long as there is profit to be made in mining and burning fossil fuels, corporations will do it, the Earth be damned.
A lot of solarpunk visions and ideas basically take our current culture and add more solar panels and respect for life. Which isn't bad, I appreciate it. But the world we can expect is far different from today:
- temperatures will be 14 to 20 above the current average
- Sea levels are hundreds of feet higher
- almost every one of today's major cities is underwater
- Greenland and Antarctica are ice-free and temperate
- all land masses with currently tropical climates are lifeless deserts, literally too hot for photosynthesis much of the year
So - presuming we don't trigger a runaway greenhouse effect and turn into a second Venus - what do you think the world will look like a few hundred years from now after everything's been burned? What kind of societies would form in the wake of such utter disaster?
With 10 to 20 billion climate refugees fleeing every coast and every tropical landmass on Earth, do you think a global war for land is inevitable?
How would you imagine keeping the flame of hope alive through such a war?
Or how would you change society so that the worst refugee crisis in human history - now inevitable - brings people together instead of tearing them apart?
Is the long term solarpunk strategy to build a space colony and repopulate the Earth after it burns to ash?
What does a sustainable society look like when all the fossil fuels have been burned and all the damage had been done? And how do we get there?
Sunburnt.