Araci I also remember 2008 as the year of a great turning of tide. I won't go into details, another long story probably not unusual. I've found myself writing in Medium since about 2017, after a life until then as a Systems Engineer, I started a PhD about then, and came across the energy problem that I could see would lead not only to current events, but much worse, if nothing was done.
This is pretty much all I write about, what I call research by formal multisciplinary systems Engineering techniques. This helps trace through and audit all causes and effects.
Part of the work has revealed where we are at with money, and how it is affected by energy.
These results are not generally accepted by academic communities yet, because academia has little experience with formal systems Engineering techniques, it is something normally requiring many years in industry to become skilled in.
So it's also unusual for anyone with these skills to be doing it for free. No profit driven company will fund this research because the research questions the effect of business itself, and comes up with some pretty damning results. Hence why I seem to be something of a lone voice.
Anyhow, the situation with money is that nature for the first time in history, since around 2005,, has a physical hand in our economy.
This is due to domestic and community solar, which represents the bulk majority of solar capacity in all countries.
We know that all developed countries have transferred between 20 and 30 percent of electrical energy supplied to solar.
Though utilities energy companies are reluctant to admit it, they have effectively lost that proportion of business to domestic and community solar.
In UK earlier this year, I wrote a story documenting the computation of the outstanding value of that transfer of business, since we started noticing the trend in 2005, around 457Bn. In the next 12 months this is on track to add a further 150 Bn, taking the total to around 650Bn.
At the same rates of expansion the 12 months after will add maybe another 200Bn, and the year after that, 250Bn, and so on, until the entire market is transferred to solar.
We can compute and confirm this by comparing known demographics figures, with known utilities energy supply data, and using known energy requirements per head of population, we can compute how much money has been lost by utilities energy supply companies.
That money represents creation of economic product by domestic and community producers which is very different from the economic product created by utilities energy supply companies. It represents capital which has to be added to the base capital of money.
This is because in general, when economic product is created by utilities energy supply, that supply is usually for profit as it has to be, to leverage doing the work of extraction of the energy supplied, from Earth.
In other words, the energy supplied by utilities energy companies always has a cost, including to Earth which lost the energy that we used.
This process is largely ignored by economists who are not so interested in the physics of things, they have got away with saying that the economic capital of Earth is more or less constant throughout history, ignoring that what was really happening, is that a large amount of that capital was constantly being transferred, from Earth to human commodity. Notice the price of anything extracted remains the same before and after extraction.
So the damage to Earth was being ignored, with the consequence of the temperature increasing by E=MC squared alone, before even thinking about the multiplier of CO2.
Where this leads to is the conclusion that economic product created by solar adds to Earth, whereas the same is not true of economic product created by extraction.
The truth is that there is no net economic product created by extraction at all but a transfer of economic product from poor places, or places made poor where the energy is extracted from, to the places made richer. We might see more clearly now how colonialism works, it does not actually create wealth at all, but just shifts and concentrates it into the places already wielding capital as a kind of weapon. In the end, it is all energy, because money is energy, a quantity of KWhrs for a quantity of tokens money.
Further, both profit and debt represent energy extracted from Earth, never energy received from the sun, because nothing was asked in return for the energy received from the sun, it truly is free per KWhr received, and it is added to Earth, as opposed to subtracted.
So finally we can conclude a number of things:
The base of capital is physically expanding for the first time in history.
This means that technically, any particular holding of capital is now physically being devalued.
The reason we don't see this reflected in markets yet, is that no money is being issued to enumerate the economic capital being created by domestic and community solar.
This means that money is becoming increasingly less representative of actual economic product created, whilst the latter inevitably continues to ramp up, because it is for free, like the leaves growing on a new tree, they continue to multiply.
Hence for the first time in history, the real physical driver of inflation, courtesy of nature.
So they (the money issuers), are stuck between a rock (inflation) and a hard place (devaluing capital), with the two coming rapidly together.
We might have seen recently folk already with significant capital just getting a lot richer whilst everyone else just got poorer, but their joy will be short lived, one way or another, it seems to me.
The only way out of this is to issue the funds outstanding for creation of economic product by domestic and community solar to all people as a solar indexed UBI.
That will instantly devalue capital, but will repair the value of money, by it at least representing the new product being created.
Obviously they will try to prolong and perpetuate extraction for as long as possible, to put off the issue of money for free, but it will have to come sometime, removing much of the inequality whilst empowering people who were never previously rich, but the longer they leave it, the more painful it will be for everyone.
And the there is the global temperature rise which we now see is not time dependent at all, but actually profit and debt dependent, adding yet more pressure.
And a global, possibly nuclear war looming....
All of it can be instantly defused by issue of the required free money.
So we have to conclude, it isn't just the US that can run protection rackets, nature does it too.
The price of protection is the free money owed to the people.
Exciting times, but the question is how long will they hold out, and what disaster might hit first.
Sorry long rambling reply to your post, but I hope it helps you a little, like it helps me to keep things fresh, I need to go back through this economic analysis often, to keep it fresh in my own mind, thanks for your prompt.