I do not think “compatible with solarpunk?” has a binary answer. The present AI arms race is plainly hard to square with solarpunk: opaque infrastructure, speculative scale, and communities asked to absorb its water and energy costs.

But a tool is not redeemed or condemned by its label. A use should have to meet a high bar: transparent footprint, a bounded budget, a locally meaningful benefit, and evidence that it prevents more harm than a lower-compute alternative. Earth observation and climate modelling may sometimes meet that bar. Generating disposable content probably does not.

Solarpunk’s role could be to make those conditions non-negotiable.

I think the missing piece is a shared measurement standard. Token counts are not a footprint: they omit hardware manufacture, training and model refreshes, batching/caching, grid mix, cooling, and local water stress.
Some companies publish broad totals, and Google has now published a detailed inference methodology for one service, but we still lack consistent, independently auditable figures by model and workload. Until we have them, neither “AI is harmless” nor “every use is indefensible” is a scientific claim.

I would rather see pressure for disclosure and a practical rule: if a project uses AI, state its compute/carbon/water budget, the outcome it enabled, and the simpler non-AI alternative considered.