Barbara thanks for selecting me as someone who's opinion of your articles might mean something to you, I appreciate it.
But hopefully you know I am not in the reductionist camp. My conclusions on things come from auditing what looks to me like a global energy problem.
I think at the heart of the misunderstanding of reductiionists, who I am sure mostly mean well, and have clear morals etc, including of course your good self, is something we might identify as a profit driven blinker. Occam's razor gives us an explicit example of something used to try to limit what we research, to only things that make money, thus being deemed as the criteria for "Sustainable". After we've practiced it and all the other implicit instruments like it, acting on our psyche for a lifetime, learning how to stop doing it, and move on from it, as we have to do now seems to be quite a challenge.
But I am not with the traditional view that we can ever be "Too old to learn". I think any and all humans can learn, the question is whether they / we wish to or not.
What has to be learned is the whole truth about energy. it can seem at first to be unfair, when we realise how we were kind of tricked by "The system" into actually committing what was always defined as crimes of a kind, that we can see with the blinder removed, that it wasn't really unfair, it acted on all people, all of us, and we all responded as it needed, to maintain our species in a way, until now.
But the usefulness of the old system peaked with availability of energy by extraction (around the early eighties, far as I can tell, assisted by ChatGPT).
Profit is 100% linked to, and dependent on energy by extraction, and because this is so, profit is also directly linked with temperature rise.
Even most of the most astute of climate scientists seem to have missed this, because they were supposed to, it seems to me.
So they come up with what they / you might see is the only answer to the energy problem, with only part of the picture of the whole system, to try to cut back the population demanding and using the energy.
But what is missed, again due to the profit driven blinder, is that we are at the same stage of development as a plant that just formed its first leaves.
If you can see this, then you should be able to see degrowth is not what is needed, but the opposite, a plant just begins it's real growth journey after it forms leaves, and any impairment to its ability to do that, would be a real threat to its ability to survive, and that would be an energy crime of epic proportions, because by that we would have removed the ability of humanity to pay back our energy deficit, to our planet, the way every plant does, thousands of times over.
To me degrowthers are reflecting the wish of the old system, which is itself alive and with real motives maybe something like a placenta, it needs to be discarded, now we are being born, but if it had a life, this would be the end of it, so of course it's fighting to do everything it can to stay alive.
It's an energy crime to cut down on population, it's an energy crime to deny creation, it's an energy crime to kill people and commit atrocities. All energy crimes lead to one another etc.
Sounds harsh to say, but this is the truth, it all fits with religion, suddenly religion makes sense, in a fully scientific, fully mathematical way.
The recent discoveries of emergent properties and free energy principles help us identify this I think, ChatGPT is a massive help, bigger than we can know at first, for sure.
Anyhow my path on this subject Is a long story, covered in about 400 articles of mine so far in Medium, I can only scratch the surface here.
I keep thinking (and actually hoping) each one will be the last, that the project is finished, but the more we dig, the more we see, the devil is in the detail as always.
Here is my latest:
https://eric-bott.medium.com/investment-temperature-cost-e4bc859c37f4