This is just my headcanon but I think of the punk in solarpunk as being metatextual: it's not rebelling against its own world, it's rebelling against ours, and against the pervasive pessimism of capitalist realism. I think we need something like that in a time where most fictional futures are dystopian.
Cyberpunk is nothing if not a rebellion against our own world and status quo. Liberal governments are put under the thumb of for-profit corporations, which continue to develop and unleash new technologies on the public without any thought given to the social consequences or any check from the government. At the same time, the inexorable march of technology empowers authoritarian governments and those who rebel are pushed into the sidelines to become social outcasts. Cyberpunk asks us to consider what happens if social development doesn't keep pace with technological development sprinting forward at breakneck speed. Believing social development will keep pace with technology is the essence of solarpunk. Solarpunk is a lullaby.
Solarpunk isn't about believing that social development will keep pace with technological development, it's about imagining what would happen if it did. Its politics are not a fairytale but a call to action to divert course. Cyberpunk says "the future is just gonna be awful" and explores just how awful it's going to be (which isn't rebellion, it's apathy), solarpunk says "imagine what the future could be like if we made it better". It's only a lullaby if you believe there's no hope for change.
Cyberpunk is a call to action: seek social reform before this happens. Solarpunk is the opposite, Solarpunk encourages people to believe that everything will turn out well in the end after green technology saves us from our past follies.
They're both calls to action: avoid cyberpunk, seek solarpunk. We've gotten so much "avoid this" fiction in the past decades that people are just burnt out and actual visions of a positive future have been largely absent since Star Trek, so it makes sense to say "hey, you know all these abstract political ideas that we talk about? this is what the world might look like if we implemented them". Nothing about solarpunk says that it is the default outcome. No reasonable person thinks that it is. It's an ideal to fight for.
The era of collapse fiction like cyberpunk has only really given rise to one political movement: accelerationism. Whose defining trait is "if the world's going to collapse, we should probably hurry it along so we can see if there's anything to salvage afterwards".
Punk was never about collapse, you're confusing that with post-apo.
Also I'm unconvinced about the political potential of solar utopias: they're usually centered on art, and completely avoid the how. So many of them draw nice-looking landscapes that make no sense: glass and steel have to come from somewhere, urban centers can't exist without a periphery, etc. All the issues are carefully avoided and labeled as "negative thinking, which [authors] rebel against".
Totally disagree. Solarpunk is providing an out for the future that cyberpunk warns us about. Hoplessness is endemic amongst the young people in Western socities at the moment. A hopeful vision for the future is something necessary to pervade the public consciousness and create a better future in reality. It honestly happened with cyberpunk already. The aesthetic was taken up subconsciously by designers and engineers and actualised into reality. The same could happen for solarpunk.
