Yeah, for us the solar installation (5kw of panels) was around US$14k. Since electricity is quite expensive and we live in a sunny country the installation paid for itself in 4 years.
Briar is probably the best bet if we want something that works despite any governmental effort to break encrypted messaging.
I never really used it (I don’t have anyone around it interested to try it with me :'( ) but I would be interested to hear more about it if anyone has experience with it.
There is a book that describes exactly that: Ashes, Ashes by Barjavel.
It’s a classic of French science-fiction literature and I recommended everyone to read.
It was written in 1943, it describes a parisian dystopian society in 2050 where all the electricity suddenly stop overnight. Even thought the book is 80 years old it is surprisingly accurate in some aspect.
To be fair most people in a first world country don’t need to think about water since it’s just “there”, all the time.
But as soon as the electricity goes out the water supply goes out too.
No water supply means no water to drink, with no water the human body die within 3 days, so people will start to rely on any dirty water they can find.
About dirty water, no water also means no WC. I repeat: no WC so no evacuation of feces and urine. Within a few day a big city swill be covered with human excrement. Mixed with no clean water access it means that deadly waterborne diseases will spread extremely quickly.
A full SolarPunk utopia ! The climate change is there by we are adapting to it. People are now living in community that still have a relatively advanced level of technology but they are focused on being substainable. However for most of the daily life the technology used is mostly low tech.
The concept of nature died with the ancient world. Because now everything is nature, the conceptual separation between nature and civilisation collapsed. Now cities, communities and fields or forest are interlaced, rather than exploiting their environnement societies are nurturing it. The food is local, there is a few electric trucks transportation is mostly done by bike and cargo bike. Everything is repairable, most of the energy is produced locally with renewables energy.
Overall we might have lost some material comfort but gained on the quality of life.
I know it’s an utopia, I can’t be sure that it’s gonna happen but the one thing I can be sure it’s that if we don’t try it’s never gonna happen. I believe that or current thermo-industrial civilization started to collapse but I believe that we can still have some very happy lives after that.