All the back to the land decentralized survivalists solarpunk people can do just about everything except for rare earth refining. That's the part of solarpunk that can only happen in China because nobody anywhere wants that in their backyard. One of the more interesting political/economic questions is can a non-authoritarian country that values environmental protection do rare earth refining, or is the ecological harm in isolation too abhorrent to the members of the community where it is done to counterbalance the ecological good it does elsewhere? In an authoritarian country, you can just tell the people who live around the processing plant to relocate or suffer because it helps the environment elsewhere. In a non-authoritarian country, the local people will all reject it because it will degrade the quality of life and their land. This has been happening in the backlash against mining in Madagascar for example.

> All the back to the land decentralized survivalists solarpunk people can do just about everything except for rare earth refining. That's the part of solarpunk that can only happen in China because nobody anywhere wants that in their backyard.

You don't actually need rare-earths to produce solar panels, control systems and batteries - at least not in the amounts that require the scale China is operating at.

Rare earth refining isn't a specific industrial process. The cheapest possible method is a specific industrial process, and is very dirty. In a "survivalist solarpunk world" it would probably be done less cheaply.

I wonder this as well - it seems the most strategic path forward for any nation or community is to localize the supply chain as much as possible, but like oil before there's some things that are just impossible or super difficult to get locally. And unfortunately to find new ways to turn sun into electricity costs money to do and won't happen because the cost of the current method is too low to justify trying to turn sand into solar panels or whatever other thing you might try.

I dream of a solar punk future where basically any community can generate power without any horrifying pollution anywhere in the supply chain. Mirror powered smelters, sand batteries.

Conspiratorially, if all places were non-authoritarian and did not tolerate cheap refining, a regime change would have to be ordered